Building a live account 3 - $10,000 to more than $10,000,000 in 30 years

Performance for the week ended 19 October 2012: <font color="red">-1.58%</font>

Opening VAMI: $10988
Gains/(Losses): <font color="red">($174)</font>
Closing VAMI: $10814

 

Performance for the week ended 26 October 2012: <font color="red">-0.81%</font>

Opening VAMI: $10814
Gains/(Losses): <font color="red">($87)</font>
Closing VAMI: $10727

 

Hey JF, how did you perform your backtesting? What platform?

 

I use excel.

 

Performance for the week ended 2 November 2012: <font color="red">-0.48%</font>

Opening VAMI: $10727
Gains/(Losses): <font color="red">($51)</font>
Closing VAMI: $10676

 

Performance for the week ended 9 November 2012: <font color="red">-2.61</font>
Opening VAMI: $10676
Gains/(Losses): <font color="red">($279)</font>
Closing VAMI: $10397

 

At this rate, after 30 years, you are looking at closing your account with about $175k. After inflation, (assuming no hyperinflation, but the same inflation we have had for the last 30 years) then that $175k will have about $73k worth of buying power in 2042. If you want $10 million of buying power, at the rate you are at now, you need to trade for another 82 years.

(how's that for demotivation?)

 

However, to provide motivation, that is still better than he would do investing passively in your average mutual fund.

 

$ 10,000,000 is too low. You should be aiming for that in a couple of years- if you are serious about trading. Pragmatically, you can make $ 10 million in 5 years if you are an average trader.

This isn't the plumbing enterprise. Some "traders" talk about trading their 2 ES lots with a pretty MACD on their little 19 " one screen PC like it's baseball. They are just dumb poor people- ignore them. Becoming a terrific day trader is not hard, you just should spend less time looking for holy grails and more time on the hunt for knowledge from good textbooks and help from pros.

Mike

 

Comparing apples to oranges. If you choose a mutual fund manager that has been at their fund for 10 years, you are looking at returns of about 7 to 8% on "average". When you say "average" mutual fund I know you are talking about joe average that picks a mutual fund like he picks a stock. Those people generally get the same results, but if the OP picked a mutual fund like he picks his stocks, he could make nearly the same, but without wasting 6 to 10 hours per day and have a side income doing something else which he could then use to add to his capital and get to his goal quicker.