I see no reason to doubt your words and congrats on the hard work paying off and keeping your relative modesty about it. Ignore the majority of disbelievers who refuse to acknowledge another person's success due to their own issues.
I dont know anyone who has turned say 1000 USD into a million just by trading but I know people who have taken out loans of ca. 100,000 USD to invest in times of panic 2008/9 etc and turned them into half a million by doing very little. That seems a much smarter and viable route to me. If you want to make money trading I wouldnt recommend starting with just 1000 USD. Even if you put in the effort and double, triple, quadruple etc is it really worth your time and effort since the per hour earning rate is so small ? If back in that situation I'd save up the cash from a job until I had a reasonable amount say 50,000 USD or take out a loan given todays low interest rates.
It depends on what and how you're trading. For me, it wouldn't make much of a difference if I traded with 300k or 3m as the liquidity doesn't allow for it. I also do not get why using the leverage is a negative thing as long as you stay within risk norms.
Maybe hes just better than you at this game or using a very different strategy? Not saying I could do it or would want to do it but you can hold a lot of underlying with 150k. e.g. leverage of 3.33 would give you 500k and 20% return on that is 100K per year. Looks reasonable living to me even neglecting the long term investment income.
you know when your trading futures, it doesnt matter as much how much capital you have sufficient amount to cover the initial margin and be profitable of course.
And you nailed it .... hard work. Like anything in life nothing typically comes easy, it takes effort, mistakes, learning from them and persevering. Same with any professional athlete. Many aspire to make it but most don't get there. Similarly many want to trade but a lot of people fail for lots of different reasons .. undercapitalized, taking excessive risk, hanging on to losing trades, etc.
Right. Some of very serious fortunes in Russia were made by investing in early 1999 and holding well into mid-2000's. Same principle applies everywhere. Those with higher risk tolerance even employ some averaging up in the process.
I believe every word you say. Not because I think it is possible but because I know it is possible. When I started to trade I went from 50k to 75k net in my first month in forex. Later I made 90% net within 3 months in a six figures account. About 30 people were witness of this event. I was member of an investment club so we showed each other our trades. Later they asked me to trade their accounts, which I did some time. But I also managed to do -100% in 2 days. Hard learning school. It is clear that some people here cannot read or understand plain English. Second problem is that they don't have any clue what the effect of compounding can be, especially combined with frequency. So if they even cannot understand that, which is in fact basic knowledge, how on earth can they become successful traders? You can say that the odds are against them, but to me it looks like suicidal if they try to trade.