Doesn't have to be that way. Also like life, and like the entrepreneurial approach to business, it only gets boring if you let it. My specialty is top down / global macro. Every day is different, and there is always the opportunity for the next killing, the next huge score. No end of interesting markets, industries, themes, strategies to analyze. No limit to personal and professional growth. George Soros started Quantum at 39. He didn't gain notoriety as "the man who broke the Bank of England" until his early sixties. If you're good enough to be bored, you're good enough to expand your strategic repertoire... or to raise OPM... or to make a project out of investing surplus capital in other managers, other trading strategies... or to find a sharp young turk and teach them your bread and butter methodology, so they can run it under your supervision, while you find new mountains to climb, new ways to get bigger, stronger, more capable. I can respect the desire to move on from trading after certain goals are achieved... to devote a life to other things, other pleasurable or moral pursuits, once an amount of money that represents "enough" has been made. But boredom, that's something else. Boredom is not inevitable in trading. Boredom is a choice, plain and simple. To say otherwise speaks to lack of imagination, lack of ambition, or both.
Am I mistaken or don't you run a chatroom and sell education? I can't imagine wasting time dealing with knuckleheads for a few measly bucks. Instead of dreaming, why not just trade in the morning and go play golf or fish or do other "fun-filled things other than sitting in a chair, pushing buttons" all day? On most days, I'm up out of my seat by 9 a.m. Pacific Time. I don't play golf or fish but I go to the beach as often as I want and I take frequent trips to the other coast and travel abroad once a year. There was a time when extracting $100,000+ in a day literally gave me a high and losing that much in a day put me in the dumps. That was many years ago and before I had to drop everything to focus on the health of a family member which put trading in its rightful place for me - fun and not so important. I used to think that I had to trade bigger and bigger in order to "grow" but really I was addicted to the stress of trading a size that kept me on edge. Nowadays it's all about the use of time and I almost never put in a full day in front of the screens and much of that is spent on the accounts of family members. Trading is not for everyone and one way to know that is it's not enjoyable for the person. No shame in moving on.
99.8% of all aspiring traders enter this field as a means to various ends. They want money and free time to pursue life's true passions. A majority of successful traders are content to treat it as a business profession, as an income producing vehicle to afford living life's other pursuits. A tiny minority of successful traders make it their all encompassing obsession. They amass huge fortunes, but in reality don't spend much time doing anything else but obsessing over trading and markets. What good is having $billions if all one does is spend their entire day and night in an office pouring over market data? They have mansions and vacation homes and vast wealth that sits idle and unused. ** Neither camp is wrong, both get what they seek from the markets. To most, it is merely a means to provide free time and disposable income for enjoying life. To a scant few, it is their every thought and complete obsession. But by far the vast majority of "market obsessed" traders wash out and fail because of that very reason... whereas if they merely traded for money alone and nothing else, they'd probably discover how simple that process really is in the end.
At this point in my career, I'm content to pull +50 cents per CL contract and/or +5pts per ES contract asap, and call it a day. In the past year following that schedule I've enjoyed more actual living than prior ten years combined. There are others who run trading rooms and pull six figures per month, so I guess that depends on what one opts to do with their day. Sure beats posting frenetically in a public message board with no compensation at all like too many aspiring traders actually do. In my case, I've evolved to part-time day trader spring thru fall, full-time swing trader fall thru spring. A work schedule I find perfect for myself
Though I would also argue one can find a balance between the two, e.g., have a deep-seated passion for markets, but also an ability to step away, have a life etcetera. Macro and deep value are two strategies particularly well suited to this. At a certain point in one's career, the ability to "step back" or "dial it down" is fairly accessible, given long stretches of market calm / quietude, with the ability to then "step back in" in a major way when significant opportunity sets develop (as they tend to do two or three times a year, and / or once every few years for the grand slam opportunities, from a macro / deep value perspective). The admission cost to such approaches, though, is a very long apprenticeship (on the order of 10-15 years or more) to gain the requisite capitalization and experience. But this also serves to give a wider palate of late-in-life options: If you get serious at, say, age 35 (if not earlier), by age 55 you have the opportunity to be 1) chillin' like a villain, 2) getting more out of your trading and investing than ever before, or 3) some happy combination of the two. p.s. And let's not forget Julian Robertson, who started Tiger at 48
Nice -- if you have found happiness, peace of mind and general fulfillment in both work and life, I'd count that as true success regardless of what the formula looks like.
Now that I'm 12 years into my trading career, I can look back and see that it really does take 10ish years to become a true polished veteran. Before that time I would disagree, because I did not know the difference and quite frankly couldn't see the difference. This trading career path like any other takes a long time to perfect, because one needs to master both the task at hand and master one's own self-management, too. No different than any master craftsman, a musician, a pro athlete, a top chef or any other performance based profession. It takes a long time to get real good and handle every situation that comes your way. Some guys who make it to the finish line of consistently profitable want to keep pressing forward. Others look back down the long & winding road from where they came, are content to idle back and create a very comfortable living for themselves with least possible stress involved. I've said this many times before and often get poo-pooed for it... but here goes: if/when a trader reaches a point where they can regularly book +50 cents CL daily ten sessions out of twenty, when they can regularly book +5pts ES ten sessions out of twenty and trade a handful of contracts respectively, we're talking a very solid six-figure annual income. Most traders who hear that are not even profitable now to begin with, yet they dismiss such talk as "underperformance". Instead they think, "heck with that, Joe Schmoe in this or that message board thread nails every turn in the ES or 6E or whatever... he NEVER has a losing day. I wanna be like that guy... a real rock star trader" So the self-imposed pressure to perform is ridiculously high, set by false premises that aren't even real to begin with. That imo is a real and tragic disservice to countless fledgling traders. Instead, if a guy merely focused on catching one or two textbook trades that profit and quit for the day, they would purposely avoid the give-take-give-take-give emotional roller coaster which claims so many trader lives. Most people out there ready to trade tomorrow could live like royalty on $120,000 per year. Heck, they've lived on half that or way less from their jobs and careers already. Yet most aspiring traders think they have to be the next Paul Rotter or they failed miserably.
what do you mean by that are you saying average 2.5 pts a day over time? or make 5 pts 10 out of 20 days? what exactly do you mean by +5 10 out of 20?? and what are you doing the other 10 days? im confused.
if ten days out of twenty you could book +5pts on average, while the other ten days per month washed each other out, you'd have roughly +50pts ES per month Now compare that to an email add I have in my inbox right now from some outfit that claims if you ain't booking +20pts ES every DAY, you are missing out. Seriously? +400 ES points per month? They claim that +20pts daily and more is available, just sign up for xyz... I'm calling b.s. on that one, with all due respect <lol> Meanwhile, if a serious trader just gets good enough to pick off +4 this day, +6 that day, +8 another day and -2 the next, by month's end they will be far ahead of most everyone else on earth.
ok so we'll call it average 2 pts per day. thats actaully really really hard to do but yes doable. but you're a 1% er if you can do that. I think a more realistic target is like 4 pts per week net.