What is it like in your first year of trading forex?

What actually happened during Eli Taueki's first year of forex trading?

On the BWE Podcast, Eli Taueki says his first year of forex trading included months of chart study, two failed funded-account attempts, a single gold trade that turned a $2,000 demo account into $1,800 of profit, and a return to demo trading after deciding his psychology needed more work.

Eli says he came into trading from a full-time graphic design job, discovering the space through social media before finding Rihari and joining what became the Ambitious Investing community. He says he was one of Rihari's first four or five students, joining before the education platform existed, when Rihari says he was mentoring around ten people directly. The podcast host frames Eli's account progress as going from $2,000 to $5,000 over the year, a figure stated by the host rather than broken down by Eli into individual trades or dates.

Eli says his early months were spent building what he and Rihari both call "foundations": marking up market structure (higher highs, higher lows) on TradingView, backtesting setups on FX Replay, and doing homework between mentoring sessions rather than only consuming theory. He says the biggest early lesson was that watching content is not the same as applying it on a chart, a point Rihari echoes when describing how he tests new students by asking them to mark up structure live before teaching anything else.

What did Eli's biggest single-session win look like, and what happened next?

Eli says he was once up 10% in a single session on a funded 100k account, then lost the entire gain in the same session on a few trades he describes as "way too greedy."

He says this happened late at night, with him still awake near 5:00 a.m. chasing more profit rather than stopping once he was ahead. One losing trade wiped out the day's gain, and he says the disrupted sleep affected him for two to three days afterward. Eli frames this as a turning point for setting boundaries around New York session hours, which start around midnight in New Zealand time, saying he prioritized his mental health over chasing every session once he saw the pattern repeat.

Rihari, reflecting on his own trading that same week on the podcast, describes a comparable moment: talking himself out of trading for a day because he felt mentally "not there," then fighting the urge to place trades anyway before ending the week up around 10%, by his own account. Both frame the underlying issue as emotional control rather than strategy.

Why did Eli lose two funded trading accounts?

Eli lost his first funded account, about $200,000 with Nova Funding, after breaking a rule against holding a trade open over the weekend, despite a consistent run of wins up to that point. The second funded account was lost after he drifted from his daily routine into greed trading with poor psychology.

On the first account, Eli says the pressure of having paid for the funded evaluation pushed him into a drawdown of roughly $2,000 to $3,000, after which he spent an extended period trying to trade his way back to break-even rather than resetting. He says this period involved forcing trades that were not really there and getting fixated on lower timeframes (the 1-minute and 5-minute charts) without stepping back to check higher timeframes that told a different story.

On the second account, Eli says the losses tracked directly with disruptions to his personal routine: skipped sleep, irregular meals, and time spent on his phone in bed rather than at a prepared trading setup. He says he noticed a pattern in his own journal that his worst trades clustered around nights he was out of routine, not around any particular market condition.

| Phase (as Eli describes it) | What happened | Stated outcome | |---|---|---| | Mentorship start, pre-platform | Learned market structure and backtesting under Rihari as one of his first students | Foundation built before any live trading | | First funded account (~$200k, Nova Funding) | Up 10% in one session, then lost it to greedy trades; later held a trade over a weekend | Account closed for a rule breach | | Second funded account | Fell out of routine into greed trading and poor psychology | Account lost | | Demo account (since April) | One gold signal turned a $2,000 balance into $1,800 of profit via what Eli calls overleveraging | Rihari says the result reflected luck and oversized risk, not a repeatable plan |

What tools and routines does Rihari say separate a struggling trader from a consistent one?

Rihari and Eli both describe a fixed morning routine, a written trade journal, and sticking to a tested strategy as the tools that matter more than any indicator, chat room, or signal. Eli says losing his discipline around these basics, not his market analysis, caused both of his funded-account losses.

Eli describes his journal as a Google Doc where he screenshots each trade after it closes, whether it hit a stop loss or a take-profit target, and writes short notes on what he saw going in and what he would do differently. He says he reviews the previous week's journal entries before starting a new trading week, specifically looking for repeated mistakes rather than one-off bad trades. He also says he now journals using a chat AI tool that retains context between entries, which he uses to track recurring patterns in his own behavior, not to generate trade ideas.

Rihari separately describes discipline, patience, risk management, adaptability, and emotional control as the qualities he associates with profitable trading, a list he says matched almost point for point when he asked an AI chatbot the same question on the podcast. Eli says patience is his own weakest area, tracing it to a habit formed growing up with less money and, he says, less need for patience now that money is not the constraint it once was.

How does a full-time job fit around a first year of forex trading?

Eli says he kept his full-time graphic design job throughout his first year, trading Asia and London session hours around work and treating the New York session, which opens around midnight in New Zealand, as optional once it started costing him sleep.

He says he would check charts during work breaks and mark up setups during quieter periods of the day, without letting it cut into paid work hours. He says London session lined up conveniently with his dinner time in New Zealand, making it easier to trade consistently than New York, which he says he has mostly stepped back from since deciding his sleep and mental health mattered more than catching every session's volume. Eli describes trading as a backup plan and a form of self-investment rather than his primary income at this stage, since his full-time job continues to cover his living costs.

How does Eli's first year compare to the benchmark Rihari says he sets for mentees going live?

Rihari says he required one mentee, Slade, to clear a specific bar on FX Replay before offering him paid work sending live trading signals, a bar Eli says he has not yet measured his own demo performance against.

As Rihari describes it on the podcast, the steps he set for that mentee were:

1. Lock in the core strategy and structure-marking process on the charts before anything else.
2. Backtest that process on FX Replay to build a track record, rather than trading live first.
3. Sustain at least two consecutive weeks of tracked backtested trades.
4. Hit roughly a 65% win rate with an average risk-to-reward ratio near 1 to 3 across that period.
5. Serve a paid trial period trading live before receiving a full month's pay.

Rihari says that mentee actually posted a 68% win rate with a slightly better than 1-to-3 average during the two-week test, and was moved to full pay after three strong trial weeks. Eli says he does not currently track his own win rate or risk-to-reward average in this structured way, and Rihari suggests on the podcast that doing so would give Eli a clearer signal for when to return to a live account.

What do the numbers say about retail forex and CFD trading generally?

Two independently published figures give scale and risk context that sit outside Eli's personal account: the global foreign-exchange market turns over an average of US$9.6 trillion a day, while a majority of Australian retail CFD investors lose money within a given financial year.

The BIS 2025 Triennial Survey reported that average daily OTC foreign-exchange turnover reached US$9.6 trillion in April 2025, a measure of the market's total size and liquidity, not of any individual trader's odds of success within it.

Separately, ASIC Report 828: Risky business records that 68% of Australian retail CFD investors lost money in the 2024 financial year. CFDs and spot forex are not identical products, but ASIC's figure is the clearest independently verified data point available on how retail traders in a closely related leveraged product actually fared, and it sits in tension with any single trader's personal story, including Eli's. Eli's $2,000-to-$5,000 account progress and his $1,800 one-signal win are statements he and the podcast host make about one individual's experience under one mentoring relationship; they are not evidence of typical outcomes, and neither Eli nor Rihari states a win rate, drawdown figure, or return percentage for Eli's full first year on the podcast.

What should someone weigh up before starting their own first year in forex?

Eli's advice on the podcast is to research thoroughly before committing money, vet any mentor carefully given how many scam-style courses exist in the space, and expect the first months to cost sleep, routine, and possibly a funded-account fee before any consistent result appears.

He frames the money he spent on mentorship and on two failed funded-account evaluations as an investment in his own education rather than a loss, saying that even if trading itself does not work out for him, the skills and self-discipline built along the way still count as a win in his framing. He is explicit, though, that this is his own way of looking at it, not a claim that the money is recoverable or that losses do not matter financially.

Both Eli and Rihari stress on the podcast that trading looked easy from the outside, through short highlight clips of single winning days, but that the actual first year involved repeated account losses, disrupted sleep, and a slow rebuild of discipline through journaling and routine. Neither states a timeline for when a new trader should expect to be consistently profitable, and Rihari explicitly declines to give Eli a fixed date for returning to a live account, saying that decision depends on Eli building his own tracked win-rate and risk-reward data first.