I would be impressed if a trader could consistently suck 20 pts per contract on a daily basis. This would be an outstanding feat. 50 pts per would be rare, and in my wildest dreams cannot picture attaining this consistently.
to average 50 ticks for only intra-day trading is highly unlikely. this is an average number that I understand you are quoting as the going rate which you believe some people are doing, which raises the question of what are the extremely good and bad days to get that number? For ex. you would have a neg day of -50 ticks, another bad day of -20 ticks etc... you see where I'm going, are these guys you know of now making 100++ tick days trading it intra-day? Thats 25+ handles on a good day? Unless they're swinging it and holding for multiple days I would say that is an unreasonable figure to try and attain. A more reasonable estimate would be to average 4-8 ticks and even that is very hard. People sometimes look to try and swing too hard for the big score when piling up little wins can work quite well. At 8 ticks per day for 5 days per week at 50 weeks per year (assuming only 2 weeks of vaca) and 10 contracts in the mini ES you're at $250k per year. If you talk to traders who are in this market (independent traders) you'll know plenty who don't make this much, this can only mean that its NOT as easy as you may think it is to make this kind of money of 'only' 8 ticks per day. If 8 is hard, 50 is many times harder.