Nitro - I've enjoyed your probing remarks and optimisim. However, I personally think that you're over estimating how easy making $500k a year is. And I don't believe that most business owners make that much, unless they are super successful....and most businesses do not reach success of that calibre. Just like you have raised interest in (and thoroughly analyzed) Don's possible annual income, you have raised my interest in knowing how much *you* make. So, will you be a good sport and break it down for us? Is it close to the 500k? If not, why not? Maybe you can run a "Maximize your Earning Potential" seminar for us and make your $500k that way. I'll join in the venture if you decide to start. Haha. Take care!
I am not overstating it at all. Want to make $300,000 a year? Go open a real good breakfast place, on a good corner - cooking eggs and potatoes. How about a Dry Cleaners in a major city? I know both business owners that do this - all without a degree. Want to make $500,000? How about go become a Dentist, and open up your own practice. How about a Pediatrician? I know those too making that much (tell me about it with a five year old.) I know a "Headache Doctor" that makes $750,000/Year. F__k, I just take an aspirin! I walk into my wifes real estate office. There are more $100K+ Mercedes there than I can count! I can go on and on. Of course, the key is to be good at those things _AND_BE_A_GOOD_BUSINESS_PERSON_. This is my last post on this - it's like the Star Trek episode where the people were living on a comet, sorrounded by a sphere - no one would ever convince them that they were on a comet and the "sky" they saw was a piece of man made "sky" - it was beyond them. It is no where near $500K. Why not ? - sizeing and amount of my account risked. Come June/July, my size will double. Or, if I end up at Bright or Echo, it will triple or quadruple to start with. At that point, extrapolating from my winning percentage now, I would be at $500,000/Year. If I hung out with Don/Bob/Earl, I would probably get to a million/year (plus whatever I could make playing Bridge, Blackjack and Omaha.) I will not talk about the way I trade - so don't go there. Have a great day! nitro
You know me somewhat, and you see what I go through here...and I try to keep a smile on my face....and yet some people only see the negatives...perhaps it's because they surround themselves with negative people. We're (Bright Traders) a pretty happy bunch, we make some money, and enjoy our lives....hope to see you join the ranks sometime soon. I wish Hitman would keep the same frame of mind on these threads as he does on his journals...he really has some good things to say, and a young, fresh perspective is welcomed...but when it becomes so jaded, it can be upsetting to all who read them. Anyway, it is much more fun to discuss how much money people are making rather than how long they have to wait for get their weekly stipend from some silly job or whatever....
reading a statement like this on a thread where much of the focus has been on whether it's better to go institutional or trade at a prop broker makes you wonder if that was said in the heat of the moment or if this is marketing gone wild... go trade at a prop broker and i would presume that over 90% of those that start there will never manage to earn a living, ie earn more than they lose after all costs... of the remaining 10% maybe 1% will manage to consistently earn more than 6 figures a year... and if somebody claims sthg else they should be able to back that up, as long as it's the truth there won't be any legal issues, why should there? go work in an institutional sell side setting and you've got your "meagre" earnings of 100K+ and can at least pay your bills and not have lost your initial stake that you may or may not have had to invest to be able to trade at a prop broker... plus have at least the *potential* to land a proprietary trading slot where you can adopt trading styles that allow you to use longer time frames where you can start thinking about geometric growth of your capital as opposed to the linear growth that goes hand in hand with intraday time frames... i'm sure that bright and worldco and all the others have a useful place in the industry for those that want to trade stocks intraday, but there are other leveraged instruments to be traded and other time frames rather than just scalping, so let's not exaggerate the advantages that prop brokers do possess. less is sometimes more. cheers
candle, time frame as in compounding for achieving geometric growth... you cannot compound on an ongoing basis when trading in very short time frames due to eventual liquidity limitations. cheers
I see, point taken... one remedy to this is to have several intraday positions open in size (say at a manageable 3000 shares each), thereby mitigating liquidity considerations....
agreed, but even then at some point you'll run into a physical barrier of how much you can handle alone. a way around that, and if you want to stay in the intraday time frame, is having others trade your money. and so on.
i'm sure that bright and worldco and all the others have a useful place in the industry for those that want to trade stocks intraday, let's not exaggerate the advantages that prop brokers do possess. this sounds like a good idea......many of the ''answers" to the original question posted, 'how much do equities traders make at street firms' (paraphrase), seems to have opened the floodgates to wild speculation without foundation and a healthy dose of slights for wall st firms and employees while pushing the phenomenal, though wholly unsupported with figures, world of daytrading. an admission from daytrading firms that the lion's share of their earnings are from brokerage, not successful traders, would be a breath of fresh air. establishing a truthful baseline is elemental to comparing the relative merits of either side of the debate. mbs