Trader's don't get a salary. Just a draw against anticipated profits. Support staff get salaries. Is that what you meant?
A trader gets paid a salary on an IB desk. Usually $100K for someone with a few years experience plus a few hundred bonus. If you are a top trader you might make 7 figures. It all depends. Times are a bit leaner these days compared to the 90's.
If you're a risk bearing trader the total comp. is negotiated between the Sr. MD for the desk and the trader. A dollar allocation will be made for the trader with a expected return net of all expenses. Based on the amount of the allocation, the trader can be paid peanuts 100-300k or serious money 15-25 mill. But as usual...no performance...no pay. The non-risk bearing positions have salary and bonus pools but never really make the serious money. Here's some of those: http://www.careerjournal.com/salaryhiring/industries/banking/20050509-investment-tab.html
This article gives a little bit of an idea of the wide discrepency in payouts. I left a IB shortly after bonuses were paid for 2000 so things may have changed some since then. I don't believe the process has changed, however. We had FX arbitrage traders that made about 165k total comp. and Fixed Income traders that made 20mill.+ in the year that I left. The programmer/analyst that worked with our Derivatives desk got over 400k total comp. http://www.gothamgazette.com/article//20050128/5/1306
hi, alan hopefully you can see this msg. just trying to get something to start with. I am reading up all your posts over the past years and find they are the most valuable infomation i can find anywhere on the internet. i came across two of your old posts on the traderclub forum(sadly it is died now) but the associated links to the tradestation code/test results are not longer working. would you mind do a bit of digging for me and send me the files via pm or email? I'll be very grateful if you can help me out. my email is tradewiz@gmail.com. here are the quote of the original post: "Here's another freebie from my early days of daytrade development. It was tested from 1/96 through 8/2001. It made 400k with max. drawdown of 40k. More than 50% winners. Winners are larger than losers. It's up about 5k so far this month, and I doubt it will blow up anytime soon. It was profitable every year since 1996 (when the market character started shifting to increased volatility). It's based on observations of the high,low, and volume in the first hour of trading. Here's the Tradestation excel report: http://home.neb.rr.com/futuresstuff/getem4.xls and here's the Tradestation code used with 5 min. futures data: http://home.neb.rr.com/futuresstuff/getem4.txt Obviously, this isn't what I'm trading, however if you don't have a clue, then this is a pretty good place to start. I think it beats all the daytrade stuff at Futures Truth pretty easily. " "Since Mark used a non-traditional trigger, here's one of my daytrading discards using the OEX put/call ratio for a trigger. The system was tested from 1984 - present using daily data. Entry is tomorrow on open and exit on close. No stops. Data1 is the daily back adjusted continuous futures data from Pinnacle Data. Data2 is the put/call ratio (close) also from Pinnacle Data. The testing results are from Tradestation. The Excel results are here: http://home.neb.rr.com/futuresstuff/putcall.xls The Tradestation code is here: http://home.neb.rr.com/futuresstuff/putcall.txt It doesn't have that many trades, so it's hard to tell if it will continue to do as well as in the past. Alan" good luck and good trading Jason
I know a trader who has a base around $50k/yr. In 2004, he received a bonus over 1 mil, and in 2005, he received no bonus. Do the math.
Jason, here's something you can get started with (assuming you have 2000i) I've used it as a test to find out if someone has any trading ability. The idea is to beat the system by cutting the losses short. It's been profitable every year from 2001 to the present using 5 min. data and wins about 70% of the time. If you can figure out why it works you'll be ahead of 95% of the traders in the ES market (lol). Good luck with your trading as well. I'm done for the week. Alan