9.1 The honest bit first
This is the hardest way to make money in this book. So many people lose. That’s not me being modest — it’s the plain numbers, and the brokers themselves are legally required to publish them.
The good news is fellow Bogans do make money here. Our group chats and live broadcasts share what we’re watching, what we’re doing, and why. It’s not financial advice — it’s an ongoing conversation between people putting their own money on the line.
That is the fastest way to lose the lot. The overwhelming majority of day traders lose money, and the ones selling day-trading courses make theirs from the course, not the trading.
We take careful, calculated positions with a tight stop loss and room to run. Fewer trades, better trades, and no need to sit in front of a screen all day.
9.2 Before you open an account
The gate you have to pass
- Is your high-interest debt cleared? A credit card at 20% is a guaranteed 20% return when you pay it off. No trade beats guaranteed.
- Have you got an emergency fund? Three months of expenses, in cash, boring, untouched.
- Is this money you can genuinely afford to lose? Not “would rather not”. Actually lose, entirely, without changing how you live.
- Have you paper-traded for three months? Every broker offers a demo account. If you can’t make it work with fake money, real money won’t fix it.
Four yeses or don’t start. There’s no rush — the market will still be there.
9.3 Choosing a broker
Use an ASIC-licensed broker holding an Australian Financial Services Licence. Check the licence number on ASIC Connect yourself — offshore brokers advertising huge leverage are outside Australian protections, and when something goes wrong you have no recourse at all.
Contracts for difference are heavily marketed to beginners because they’re profitable for the broker. ASIC caps retail leverage precisely because so many people were being wiped out. Brokers must publish the percentage of retail clients who lose money — go and look at that number on any CFD broker’s site before you sign up. It is routinely somewhere around 70–80%.
Leverage doesn’t make you a better trader. It makes the same decisions bigger, in both directions, and it turns a bad week into a closed account.
9.4 Risk management is the whole job
Everyone wants to talk about entries. Entries are the least important part.
| Rule | Why |
|---|---|
| Risk 1–2% of your account per trade | You can be wrong ten times in a row and still be trading. That’s the entire point |
| Set the stop loss before you enter | Decide while you’re calm. You will not be calm later |
| Know your exit before your entry | Both exits — the one where you’re right and the one where you’re wrong |
| Aim for at least 2:1 reward to risk | Lets you be wrong more often than right and still finish ahead |
| Never average down a loser | This is how small losses become account-ending losses |
| Never move a stop loss further away | That’s not a plan, that’s hope with a spreadsheet |
| Write down every trade | Entry, exit, size, and why. Your journal will show you the leak |
The trade that kills you is never the one you planned. It’s the one you took because you were bored on a Tuesday, or angry about the last one, or because someone on the internet was very confident.
No plan, no trade. Say it out loud before you click.
9.5 What we actually trade
- Shares — the slowest and the most forgiving. Australian shares also come with franking credits, which matter more than beginners realise.
- Index funds and ETFs — deeply boring and they quietly beat most active traders over a decade. If you only ever do one thing from this chapter, this is the one with the best odds.
- Commodities — gold, oil, ags. Big moves, driven by news and weather.
- FX — the biggest market on earth, open 24/5, and the one where beginners lose fastest because leverage is so easy to reach for.
For most people, a regular monthly amount into a low-cost diversified index fund, left alone for twenty years, will beat what they’d achieve trading actively. It’s dull, it doesn’t make a good story, and it works.
If you want to trade actively as well, do it with a small slice — the part you can genuinely afford to lose — and keep the boring engine running underneath.
9.6 Learning without paying for it
- ASIC’s Moneysmart — free, independent, no product to sell you. Start here.
- Your broker’s education section — usually decent, and free.
- A demo account — three months minimum before real money.
- A trading journal — a spreadsheet is fine. This teaches you more than any course.
If someone can reliably pick winners, they don’t need your $99 a month. Be particularly wary of: guaranteed returns, screenshots of profits, rented Lamborghinis, “copy my trades” services, and anyone who found you via DM.
A genuine trading community shares reasoning and shows its losses. A scam shows only wins.
That’s the difference between what we do at the School of Bogans and what gets sold to you on Instagram. We show the losers too, because that’s where the lessons are.