Those of you trading the ES contract, when do you add leverage? And buy this I mean only 'day trading' this contract. Starting with a single contract....... is it dollar amount, level of comfortability, win percentage? Just for some numbers, if you picked a set number of ES points you could attain, per contract, per week, I have a few numbers. Theoretically, If you started with a 2500 account, could make $450 per week/per contract, at the end of this year, your account size would be approx 30K. That account would be over 100K by April of next year. This is all assuming you didn't remove any money from that account, and you made an average of 9ES ponts per week. And added 1 contract for every thousand dollars made/per contract. Opinions?
The numbers I posted of course assume everything goes perfect which will never happen. But just wondering what a good rule of thumb is for adding leverage?
When I first started trading the ES I had the same kind of logic. 5k to 10k, then to 20k, then to 40k, and it worked for a while. Then it stopped working and I decided to take a different route that went something along the lines of, "The slower you go the faster you'll get there."
First of all, if your not profitable... Don't spend your time thinking about when to add leverage. Next, when you become consistently profitable... Don't add to your size until your profit curve begans to flatten. Next, when you've reached that level... Come back and ask your question again. Mark
LOL. On a serious note, I think you should focus on trading 1 contract and doing about $500 per week for a full year. If you can achieve that goal then you have roughly $2000 per month, or 24k by the end of the year. Take 4k out to pay your taxes and increase your goal to 4000 per month by trading 2 contracts the second year. At that end you'll have 48 more thousand dollars. If you can do that you'll get more attention than you can handle. Commit two years to trading very slowly and you'll come away with one heck of an education and an incredible amount of patience; and patience by the way, is absolutely key. "The slower you go the faster you'll get there." Good luck and let us know how it goes.
ProfitTakingFool has some excellent points, I very much like that approach. I would focus on trading WELL, and by that I mean being disciplined. As a rule of thumb, *I* would maybe add a contract every $5K or so, but that's pretty subjective, as I'm not sure on your approach. P.S. Love the hypothetical math $4.5 trillion by the time you're 40, for sure