It was not obvious to me, considering that almost 20% ETers think than they can double or more than double every month: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=207544 Even more revealing, less than 5% think it's realistic to lose any money at all. To the OP: if you make 2% monthly profit consistently for an extended period of time, you will be a superstar. I promise that your face will be on the Time & People magazine covers. The richest people on the planet will beg you to manage their money.
The term "consistently" refers to the variability of returns over time, and not to the time itself. The less variability, the better. How long before they put you on the Time cover magazine? About 10 years. Can be sooner if you pull 3% monthly, instead of 2% monthly.
from the poll http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=207544 , it seems that many ETers have been put on Time cover already?
ETers are universally known to exaggerate their gains by a multiple of 20, and to never have a single losing trade. The elite traders don't hang out in the ET forums, as they are too busy trading or relaxing. Once in a while, you do see them making a "bullish/bearish" opinion polls here in ET and trading in the direction opposite of what the polls indicate, which, by default, pays off. In regards to your original question, your return would depend on how much "edge" you have over other traders, be it your trading strategy, the speed of execution, your position sizing, and your discipline. The return does not depend on the size of your account, as long as the account is large enough for transactions where the cost of trading is small enough relative to the account size. In your case, $50K is large enough. The research on the hundreds of thousands of trading accounts shows that 90 to 95 percent of all traders lose money. As it's well known, trading is a negative sum game. The money is simply transferred from the 95% of losing accounts to the 5% of the winning accounts. Keep that in mind when you are ready to put your $50K on the line.
Do you refer here to a static situations in which the losing and winning accounts are fixed? Losing acc. --------> winning acc. Or, Losing acc-----> winning acc(lose)----->losing acc.-----> winning account ---->? So, if you have a winning strategy at certain period(s), it will come other periods on which these strategies will lose to others. ??
By irrelevant I mean that every single trader will give you a different amount of profit you "should" be making on 50K. Some will say 2%, 5%, double every month, etc. etc. There is no correct amount of profit to make on any account size. Some will tell you if you aren't making 3% or if you aren't making 10K a month on 50K capital then you are underperforming, etc. etc. but it's not true. If your returns are larger than market returns, consider yourself to be doing well.