This much is certain: If that's good enough to be second in this years World Cup Championship, that is the creme de le creme of as much as you can ever possibly expect to make as a professional top trader.
Even though the World Cup Trading Championships are for forex and futures trading, you can't ever expect to make much more than that unless you have a very solid plan, models with multi-thousand percent returns, and backtested drawdowns less than 35%.
Well, I highly respect the Robbins family = WCA team and consider them all very good friends. That said, the WCA itself is far from an ultimate measure of the top echelon traders in our profession.
Kudos to everyone in that contest regardless of standing, but only once in its history has the winner there ever been nearly creme de of the individual trader's world. That would have been Larry Williams for one year in 1987 alone.
P.S. - If they offered $500 or even $1,000 per contract daytrade margin as part of the WCA parameters, the annual winner would probably break +1,000% or more consistently.
Well, I highly respect the Robbins family = WCA team and consider them all very good friends. That said, the WCA itself is far from an ultimate measure of the top echelon traders in our profession.
Kudos to everyone in that contest regardless of standing, but only once in its history has the winner there ever been nearly creme de of the individual trader's world. That would have been Larry Williams for one year in 1987 alone.
P.S. - If they offered $500 or even $1,000 per contract daytrade margin as part of the WCA parameters, the annual winner would probably break +1,000% or more consistently.
Larry Williams performed like a winner among the winners with over 11,000 % return while most winners averaged around 300% in the futures category.
So, do you mean to say that there is no margin given in the futures account in the competition (which is usually the case for typical futures trader in real life; many highly lever a futures account).
Well, I highly respect the Robbins family = WCA team and consider them all very good friends. That said, the WCA itself is far from an ultimate measure of the top echelon traders in our profession.
Kudos to everyone in that contest regardless of standing, but only once in its history has the winner there ever been nearly creme de of the individual trader's world. That would have been Larry Williams for one year in 1987 alone.
P.S. - If they offered $500 or even $1,000 per contract daytrade margin as part of the WCA parameters, the annual winner would probably break +1,000% or more consistently.
They had someone up 2200% last week, then went down to 570%, and two days later they weren't up there.
No one should need daytrading margins that low to make a good return.
Kevin Schmit doesn't have $20 to find out how well I've done as an advisor for them.
It depends on how you diversify risk. You can postpone it in time, for example by selling options or doing martingale trading. That way some have made, even relatively new to trading, around 20% per month only to blow it all up in one or two very short trades. The characteristics of the market aren't just price, you can trade volatility, time decay, correlations, all sorts of things. Some of these will work for a long time and then just crash (ie correlations/hedging) and some will have minor crashes all along (price direction). There's no straight answer to your question because many of the "top" traders probably had luck on their side, however, nobody can quantify what was luck and what was skill. Even those that are consistent for years, statistically there's a good chance they are still lucky (ie 1 in 100k but it happens).
PS - my first question on ET was very similar to yours. I came along thinking that whatever the top dogs are making, i can make, since thus far in life i was successful in almost everything and top of my rank blabla. Trading will make you humble real quick, and it will take effort to reach anything close to a comfortable pro level. Your quantitative finance, math, physics, economics or whatever other knowledge you're proud of, won't help without experience. It's much like a sport, trust me.
also trading is different in that you can't leverage skill because of time constraints. For example a higher degree instead of doing 4 hours study a day you can leverage it to 8 hours and get better results. With trading you have 100% capital, you have an edge(s), you trade the edge(s) with your capital, then all you do is wait for the setups. you can't leverage time like you can do with other endeavours i.e. spending more time on trading doesn't guarantee more success. the only thing that guarantees more success is more capital which is the only form of leverage available. That's why hedge funds are so successfull (for the guys at the top), they leverage money as they realize leverage time is not possible.
