Sorry I don't get it. OP said he trades "stock indexes" Unless his system has tremendous draw downs, one would think he needs at most 4k. Trade 1 lots, profitable system gets him to 6k in a few months, then he can trade 2 lots -so forth and so on. Sky's the limit.
Here's some honest advice. Drop all your tools. Get all the backdata that you can. Go back in time and study every high and low you find. Become a detective and try to determine why price reacted there. Do this for thousands of swings highs and lows. Forget the random charts, use 60 minute charts or higher. Eventually, you will find a few clues as to why price does what it does. After many years of repeating the above, the detective work will pay off. The answer lies in the technicals not in the news, pay zero attention to news. In the end if the charts got anything but a bar or lines you got too much. Here's your start, the rest is up to you. ESD
You all make it look a lot simpler than it is. Look, I need food on the table and pay rent. I make about 20% (futures) on my very small (5K) account per month, which is 1K, which barely covers my expenses. Had I been able to compound this year, I would be much further ahead and not looking around forums for advice. The harsh reality is that ionly big money makes big money
The biggest problem with under capitalized traders once they start seeing profitable setups is they can't accept the fact that using conservative risk management with a profitable system will make less per year than working at McDonalds. To many that is completely unacceptable so they set higher goals and make the attempt to "trade themselves out of the hole" which in turn creates a larger amount of risk and commissions. The best thing to do is to be patient and grow your account slowly through out years while acquiring and saving capital through other means. The bottom line is that if a trader thinks they can solely live on an account that has less than 100k they are dreaming. With an account less than 30k I am surprised they are still trading and not focused on building a rocket to go to the moon, becoming the next American Idol or jumping out of buildings convinced they are superman.
The harsh reality is that what you are trying to do is nearly impossible. If what you really want is success trading then you'll make the changes necessary to improve your odds of achieving it.
What's the minimum amount of capital then? When I said the minimum is at the least a 100k account I meant 100k total. It doesn't all have to be in the account.
I cant agree more. I constantly have to suppress the urge to go larger, which would overtrade and mess things up. This is one of the reason under-capitalized trader turn to have higher failure rate.
tho a system that produce a positive expectation will make "sky the limit", you need to realize that only happens in a perfect world. The fact is that you can suffer a string a losing trades before you hit a string of winning trades. The order can be reversed, of course. But I dont have "luck" incorporated into my system.
I agree, you "don't get it" This rosy scenario is not how it works in reality. Maybe on a sim trader, ignoring a lot of runs that have blown up.