My goal is to make at least 30% per month

My goal is to make at least 30% profit per month.
I started this adventure 2016-07-05 with an IB Paper Account that is funded with $1 million USD.
It uses realtime data, and is very realistic. The orders sent thru that account go somehow directly to the orderbook (!).
I don't know how the IB folks have done it, but it's very realistic; kudos to the IB team!

I'm trading primarily options, mostly short spreads. And timeframe is just 1 to 3 weeks.

In the following postings I'll post all my trades so far.

I have still a week to go for finishing the 1st month.
I've not yet achieved my set monthly goal, but I'm hopefully that before the month ends I'll be over the 30%.

Besides TWS and API, I'm also using some additional programs of mine for analysis etc.

I'm using only limit orders.

Wish me luck!

 

"It's very realistic" .... I'd be careful with that assumption. I'm not sure how IB Paper models fills, but I doubt it is very high fidelity. In all likelihood, it just grants limit order fills when the price hits your limit. That is NOT realistic.

 

Hmm. what's wrong with that?
How else should it be according to you?

 

Because there are market dynamics that go beyond the BID and ASK. There is an order book. Say the book is a couple hundred contracts deep at the price you are trying to buy at. If someone sells 20 contracts at that point, than the underlying price takes off... the simple simulation would tell you that you just made a killing on the trade, but in reality you would have missed it. The opposite could happen too. The sim could tell you that you successfully closed a position, but in reality you just took a huge loss. There are obviously other considerations too. The level of fidelity required depends on your style of trading. If you are doing long term trend trading, you don't need as high of fidelity. If you are doing intra-day work, fill modelling becomes more important.

 

Hmm. dunno, I don't trade deep Level-2, I rather trade only the top of the book, ie. Level-1 only. That's sufficient for my strategy.
Btw, I'm of course not doing any daytrading, nor any HFT.
I'm usually holding the positions till expiration...

 

Here's the latest account summary:

 

30% per month? There is no such thing. You would rather set more realistic goals.

 

What is realistic for you?

 

70-100% annually would be good. Maybe even 50%. There is something wrong with your math.

 

There is nothing wrong with my maths.
Just take a look at the account. If I don't do any trades next week and the currently open short positions expire worthless on Friday then I'll have made 26.8% profit.
But since there is still a week to go, I'm sure I can fill the gap by doing some new trades next week...

Regarding your annual perpective of 50 to 100%: let's take the middle value of it, 75%. That means about 4.77% profit per month compounded. That's for me peanuts. I can make more than that in only a week...