So the $400k you had went to living in the past 8 years, not trading? Did you find out what you did right in bringing 7k to 400k in the first place? I wish I had answer for your situation.
On Linkedin under "Equity Trading Professionals Group" a guy who claims to have started 2 hedge funds and his business partner who is supposedly is a fund raising superstar are looking for a trader for their new fund and for traders who needs funds. Hope this helps...
try here or any other place. If you have working stuff, you will find capital for sure. www.go4funding.com
There is a market for male prostitution too. Your main clients will probably be other men or large women . Good luck .
You joined here 8 years too late.... You should have known you would need capital when you found the grail, or else you are a gambler....
Your experience is common in that most traders cant beat living expenses. 50K a year to support a family is not uncommon, although your partner could have gone out to work, while you stayed home with the kids doing your research, so your 400K might have lasted much longer Alarm bells should have been ringing many years ago as you watched you capital depleted at an ever faster rate percentage wise due to living expenses. Even if you get funding for trading your system that still doesn't guarantee a profit in the next six or twelve months. So you still need money coming in to pay expenses. Get a job before you get into debt. Also markets change and systems stop working, you really need 3 non correlated systems all making about 30% a year, that will make your results more robust. You also need to be constantly researching for better edges.
I'm about 85% sure that the OP is probably a troll, but in case not: No offense, but I think you were off your rocker not to quit pursuing this full-time after 6 months, not to mention 8 years, given that you claim to have a very high-powered degree that is in demand, and that you supposedly have a family. (I'm not making this statement to make you feel bad, but rather as a warning to future viewers of this forum.) You must have an incredibly supportive spouse if they supported you this whole time, and that is much greater than anything you could get from trading success. If I were you at this point, I would focus on data mining (the "hot" field profiled in many recent news articles recently for which you would seem to have the perfect background, aside from the 8-year gap). There is probably more potential in other fields outside of trading now for your background, anyway; volume is shrinking, markets are far more efficient, lots of people have thrown a lot of intellectual firepower at this problem already, and that drives efficiency almost relentlessly (with notable exceptions such as the 2008 crisis). I would continue to work on my system, part-time; if it worked out, it'd be obvious after running it work a while on real $, which you could earn from your great data mining job. There is no substitute for real trading when it comes to automated systems; it sooooo easy to accidentally snoop or fit to errors in the data and wind up with a system that looks great on paper but is worthless in the real world.
On Linkedin, SF based Cerebellum Capital is looking for an equity trader with software development experience.
Thanks for the replies, kind or not kind. This is NOT a troll. What do I gain by faking some painful experience like this ? I posted because some other people may learn some lessons, and some people with more experiences would tell me something I didn't know. Yes, I have a very supportive spouse, who is more valuable to me than all the money in the world combined. Yes, I traded for 8 years. Yes, I do have a system that doesn't just have one trick, it's adaptive, machine learning, data mining, pattern recognition etc. etc., I tried them all, nothing will do magic. The true insight was gained by the experiences and knowledge, and testing. Yes, I join this forum 8 years too late. But even if I had joined 8 years ago, I would still probably have done the same thing. But for the time being, I'll put my system aside. After several weeks relentless working in a trial period, I am hired by a start up to solve a seemingly impossible problem. I signed NDA and can't disclose what they do, it's not trading, but data related. I'll help them success and they will give me some equities. A problem that would take an army of PhD's to solve in a few years and worth probably $20 mil, they wanted me to find an approach within several weeks. Can you find a more challenging job ? But I had no choice, being out of the job market for 8 years. So I was writing programs, thinking and reading, and writing more programs. Finally the CEO said, I am pleased ..., And I can take a break and come here... Maybe I'll say goodbye to trading, the rest of the software development will require my full attention and energy, but it will be interesting because it's a brand new area. But I'll keep my eye on the market and come here when I am not so busy.