The truth of the matter is that before any CFD trader can sustain a practice, there is always a period of being forced to face a hard truth of the market, and a specific way for each trader that they have to come to terms. In markets where retail investors are in a stronger financial position, the hard truth is likely to hit less hard, but in markets where the motivation for supplementary income is likely more real and pressing, Mexico included, the hard truth can be more brutal. The reality is this: how well a trader is prepared, how much analysis has been done, and whether the need for the money exists have nothing to do with the market. It assigns outcomes based on its very own logic, which contains a considerable degree of randomness in the short term, and which always punishes a certain combination of undercapitalization and overconfidence that the majority of novice retail traders carry into the first trading account, no matter how thoroughly they prepared.
The Mexican CFD trader who has been studying the instruments, working on a demo trading account, and attending trading forums to learn from others for months before finally launching a live CFD account is not the typical failed trader that shows up without proper preparation. But that preparation does not address the issue of whether the trader has the discipline to follow a risk management plan in the psychological environment that real capital at risk brings. Unfortunately, the only way to answer this question is to answer it with actual trading experience and not through preparation, because the answer this question gives in the first few months sets the rest of the trader’s development.
The hard truth is most often faced by Mexican retail traders during the period of live trading in position sizing. The mathematical risk framework that preparation sets, whereby a trader maintains a maximum percentage risk per trade and calculates the position size based on that, causes the position size to feel too small when the first real setup occurs, and the desire to profit from that setup is met by the constraint of conservative size. This sense of disproportion is especially notable for those Mexican traders whose motivation for trading is rooted in hard economics and not mere superficial gambling. The resolution that is needed to get the trader closer to sustainability is to fully recognize that return adequacy is not the metric of the value of the sizing framework, but rather the ability to survive the practice over time and compound returns.
When the hard truth finally arrives, it exposes how much a trader really grasped and accepted it or merely acknowledged it intellectually. A trader who has cognitively acknowledged that losing periods are a fact of any trading strategy but reacts to seeing the first losing period by abandoning the approach, drastically changing strategy, and increasing trades as a remedy for those losses has proven that the losing periods were not truly accepted. Acceptance of sustainable trading is warranted by actions during trying times, not by statements of trading risk philosophy during profitable times. Social infrastructure for acceptance of isolated individual trading practice does not provide the same culture of stating the facts about losing periods and providing support for the experience of losing instead of implying that continued losses are a sign of a fundamental trading flaw.
The hard truth dimension that is at once most practical and most emotionally challenging is capitalization adequacy. The math requirements of sound position sizing result in minimum effective account sizes that many Mexican retail traders starting out do not have, making either the return too small to maintain motivation or the account too modest to reasonably generate decent returns. The only alternative is to be honest about this and either accept a longer preparation period during which more capital is invested into starting position sizes that can be comfortably sustained, or accept a lower return for a longer period of preparation. Both of these resolutions are more honest than the typical response to the need: contributing less capital and attempting to compensate through increased trading activity.
The first thing a committed trader realizes is that the market demands learning on its own terms, not on the terms the trader would prefer. When this realization has come to them, the Mexican traders who have developed lasting practices describe it as a moment of clarity, a moment when the distinction between wanting to trade well and being willing to do what is required to trade well became apparent in a way that prior training had hinted at but had not yet made evident. When it arrives, it is uncomfortable, and sustainable practice depends on it, so it is not the challenge to becoming a dedicated CFD trader, it is the starting point.