Trading conditions are difficult at the moment. There is still some money to be made but it does not allow for many mistakes. Lets hope conditions improve. Neke needs to hang in there and preserve capital. When conditions do change then there be a lot of easier money to be made. However as always there is uncertainty as to when this will be. Next week? Next month? Next year? Even longer than that? Nobody knows. Trading is full of uncertainty, even when you have a profitable method and the discipline to execute it there is no guarantee of profits over extended periods of time . This is why trading is so difficult
The trader can't wait for the market to adapt to his methods, he must adapt to the market instead. Neke is trying to do that but perhaps his effort is not enough.
"The trader can't wait for the market to adapt to his methods, he must adapt to the market instead." That is certainly correct, but is a lot easier to be said than done. In some period of time, it is just too difficult for most traders to make money. So maybe some oldies will die, and new breed with new mindset and techniques will prevail. I personally feel it is very hard to pull money out of market now. It has been like this for couple of years. I used to be a very successful trader. Luckily, I have not given my money back to the market. I just trade much much less.
I think out of every 10 years, roughly 5 will be really good, 3 will provide moderate profits and 2 will be a real struggle to turn a profit. There is no year in year out consistency in trading. At least not for retail traders. It is a myth. Find a method that prints money when markets are good (when the market is making lots of follow through moves), and doesn't lose too much when markets are chopping. Ensure you cut back size quickly when you are losing. Even have a counter trend method in there to smooth the equity curve a bit, but still remember most of your profits are going to come from catching big moves that follow through. Also, Neke has a full time job, he had the luxury of waiting for better market conditions. This is massive advantage for him. However he has squandered this advantage by putting himself under pressure to make 5K a month, to support a life style beyond his current means.
Actually after you watch the screen for 10,000 hours most days, you should make money. Almost every week you will make money. At the very least 9 out of 12 months, you will make money. Statistically this is proven on most tracking sites that keep over 1 year of trade data for winning systems. For large company like Goldman, most days their prop desk make over $ 100 million in profit per day. Many of these are done by automated programs that reside on computer servers. If you graduate from a good school, the average salary many of these companies are paying for Quants is $ 350,000 per year. That is for you to not risk any of your own money but help them build better computer programs. They are not paying this much money for losing years. For the last 3 days, I made more money trading for less than 1 hour per day than I made for working 8 hours per day at a good paying job doing computer work. For those that trade all day, they are making over $ 1,000 per day min.
Aren't dollar sums relative to the account size? Goldman has the luxury of being incredibly diversified, a single retail trader couldn't trade 100+ systems simply because our attention span has limits and automating all of it requires a gargantuan effort (margin management etc.). I suspect most of GS stuff is off-limits to retail guys as well. For an analogy, GS is like an WRC rally team with full crew, all the possible tech and the best drivers; us retail guys are like hobbyist rally drivers.
I specifically mentioned retail trading in my last post, so i don't know why oracle wizard started going on about GS. Retail traders will always have large variance in trading results. The market can hand out money like candy some years or it can be really stingy in others. There is no getting around this. Fortunately most years have an enough opportunity to make good money. The bad outlier years don't happen often.
A proficient DAY trader should make money every month or at least 11 months out of 12. REASON: Assume a day trader does ONLY 10 trades a day -- that amounts to 220 trades a month. If after every 220 trades, he is still in Drawdown, his edge is shit. Now the fact is many of the day traders do > 10 trades per day.