People who begin with $50,000 in their accounts have a survival chance of 50%. You can't get much better than those odds in this business.
i think certain styles of trading make for different percentages. I'm at a prop shop where our commissions are absurdly low (by the order),and you basically learn to flip large size. Before I got here, every place I interviewed with (sig, smw, altea, assent, echotrade, ghco, even citigroup) told me the same sad story...it will take 1 year to become profitable....fastest would be 3 months. And by profitable, they basically meant take home a check at the end of the month. (except the folks that paid a salary obviously...) Now when I got to the shop I'm at, I talked to these folks about getting anther job to support myself because of the learning curve, ect....and the were like, "uh....welll...why?" Going over things, they just explained that if you just DO WHAT YOU ARE TOLD, (which by the way is fairly boring...scalping/rebating stocks like LU), then you'll make money. And its true. Folks are making money...right from the get go. (within 1 month, sometimes sooner) Its brainless stuff really. Its just that i'd bet 99 percent of traders can't do it. Either commish isn't low enough, they don't have the patience, or something else. Now the shop has mentioned that you can move on to do other kinds of trading....trade other stocks, or do whatever the hell you want. But they simply warn that it would be difficult to do so headfirst. Most folks that tried to scalp nasdaq or something that moves fast/hard to read had serious problems /lost money. They idea is to just do the thing that even a monkey could do, learn about other kinds of trading, and then try it out later. It might sound stupid flipping around 10k lots of NT....but thats 100 bucks....and you have to be a moron if you can't route your order to take a flat on a stock that moves in a 1 cent range outside of the open. some styles, some places help a trader more than others. It would be ridiculous to say that 90 percent of traders here fail WHO DO WHAT THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO DO....and omg...you would be shocked at how many people just run off and break rules....its silly. I think as a newb, your success rate is determined largely by what kind of style you learn and how that style is supported (your commish, peers/other traders, payout....ect...) I can't imagine a shop where a newb is told nothing...and just decides on swinging around 1 lot of GS....theres so much bs that could happen in a trade like that...could just hold on to it forever....now you might see how different styles/support determine a newbs ability to win....where the hell is NT going to go in the next 30 min outside of the open?....it moves against you? ...take a flat...big deal....commish is a non issue. And even after seeing folks blotters during training, showing other newbs trying to play with GOOG or YHOO, losing 200 bucks a trade, folks still try and do that shit....its amazing. Especially when you see a blotter for 10 different traders pulling in 400-2000 bucks...only trading a volume stock. i would say that most traders trade to be right, or for excitement...and not to simply make money. Its no wonder that so many traders don't make it.
Out of curiosity, where are daytraders getting the 25-50k startup $$. I assume that those who go into daytrading do so because they need money.
Ripley where do you come up with this shit? Most traders I know started with at least that, where does the 90% number come from? What is the survival rate for people that use an advance from their credit cards to get their trading capital?
i guess if you're retail you need that much. going to an arcade/prop for the leverage...you need a lot less. thats a funny point...because just thinking about it, you need an absurd amount of money to trade like a monkey/flip volume and make good money 90-500 bucks a trade NET. Which also makes me think, anybody trading like a monkey is screwed once their edge goes away (commish structure)....that is unless they haven't learned other ways of trading at the mean time.
The guy has no idea. If you start with $50k, and don't get at least 10:1 leverage, even when you learn to trade I would venture that the failure rate is more like 99% for the trader that makes his living from trading and pays bills from trading profits. The biggest reason by far for failure in this business, after not knowing what the heck you are doing, is being undercapitlized. nitro
I was talking about futures, or when it transferred to equities, people with a lot of buying power. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=4524024586&category=378 Wasendorf discusses the starting equity and survival chances in detail in this video.
In futures the leverage is so high that you can easily trade with say $10K per contract. However, there is no faster way to get taken apart limb by limb than by trading futures. nitro
Funny thread. For trading the ES I think $10,000 is a good account size for someone starting out and learning. Trading the minimum (1 contract), a person shouldn't fear losing any limbs while learning as someone puts forth, even figuratively speaking. Of course, this is all contingent on being shown the ropes by someone who has skills. Unfortunately most beginners do not have access to such a resource. Cash is the easiest thing to come up with and the lack thereof is not the reason for lack of success. Undercapitalization as an obstacle to success seems like a red herring to me. Once a person acquires skills, he or she can do quite well trading 5 contracts. It doesn't take $50,000 to trade 5 contracts. Get to 10 contracts and now we're getting to a place where most people's beliefs about what's a decent living gets challenged. It's usually best to keep quiet and not upset people.