your profit can be deceiving track records of 4 months is not enough to measure someone's trading skill and dont use it to calculate your annual returns your i-can-double-my-account-every-year mindset is dangerous be careful buddy
Smart Money. This is just MY o-p-i-n-i-o-n, O-N-E opinion, so do not take this personnally. * first it is great you did not blow out. Very well done. * Now generate less than 300$ with a 7k account: seriously? and how long did it take you: 4 months? Now, you could shop around brokers, to get a 200% welcome bonus, thus getting your account to 21k. That would get you to 1200$ in 4 months. After 4 months, make sure you keep in regular "contacts" with the broker's people. And 4 months after, just explain to them you are a VERY conservative trader, and would like to know if they could loan you 300% of the amount in your actual account. Thus bringing your account to around 80k. If you are indeed very consistent, you're in for 4800$ profits every 4 months. 4 months after, start pestering them again because you are extremely CONSISTENT. Just know that some brokers have very deep pockets. During the CHF drama, some retail brokers lost 60million$, and they did not go bust. So if you are on the winning side : it is really up to you to ask them for more capital. What brokers fear most is the people on hot "streaks" who out of nowhere blow up their accounts. You talked about working the method over this decade: what have you done regarding the psychology?
Actually instead of wasting your time with under 100k accounts, why not check the prop shops. If you bring in 7k, there is no reason you can't start with an account with at least 70k-150k. Then, after proving to them your consistency, there is no reasons why they would not multiply it even by 10 within one year. What you have to understand, is that good traders are extremely rare commodities. Then good traders with capital problems are even rarer. And good traders with capital problems who can't "attract" the capital is very unusual. In the first world, capital is not an issue. May I ask also : the 300$ returns: what was the maximum "heat"? I am asking because one trader once posted 140$ profits, with a heat of 4000$.
Here's is the problem, trading daily charts you need 15-20years of history, a generation. The mid-timeframes most are not too interested in these days except retail, too much push/pull from the higher and lower timeframes meaning negative return on time vs capital. The lower timeframes such as 10s and 1mn you are getting in to HFT but your track record can be months. The issue is that most cannot process the amount of information quick enough at low timeframes to make rational decisions on the trade, part of the reason algos took over from floor traders. The advantage is intraday compounding leads to 300-500%+ returns per year in the short term. Trading follows a simple method: -4σ summary (the entry); +/-0σ detail (the whipsaws); +4σ conclusion (the exit). The summary and conclusion should match, you have stops if they don't, but 95% of the effort is put in to the detail following the trade at -2σ to +2σ. It's exactly the same process as fishing, golf, et al. You either need to find the extra capital from another source, or you need to lower your timeframes. Can put you in contact with some people who license institutional grade technology to eradicate the -2σ to +2σ, but you would need a compelling case as the access cost would be too high for you, otherwise you will need either time or capital to offset your situation.
I don't know...never tried one. I've always bought stocks outright, and the only leverage I ever take on is an occasional 2X ETF. It's like playing Blackjack. I can go to a casino and play for hours and not really make any progress. No need to papertrade in the game of Blackjack because the odds are almost dead even. But after playing Blackjack for more than a decade, I think I'd know when I had an edge....like if I went to a casino and they paid out triple on some types of hands (for example). I'd see the difference in the flow of money. For the last few months, I've been winning 3 out of 4...and the 1 out of 4 loss is minimized.
Interesting advice. I can't take offense at any feedback if it is well intentioned...even if it is blunt. I don't know if there are any prop shops in this area, and my question is whether there are any that will let me trade on-line. I'm a swing trader, so the time spent trading is negiligible...I average maybe 1 trade a day. I'm ashamed to say I don't know what you mean "heat", but I'm guessing from your context that you mean the size of each position? I was mostly just working with one account that was $6600 3 months ago. I split the money into halves, and at any given time I would buy about $3300 worth of stock, hold it for 1 to 3 days, then sell it and wait 3 days until I could trade it again. I almost never use leverage. I turned that $6600 into $7200+ as of today (3 months and 7 days). So I guess I made an average of about 10% with each $3300 position after fees in 3 months. This month, I found a new secondary screening method which seems to make my trades much more accurate. It backtests well too. My backtest was to look at my losers over the past month or so, and run them through the secondary screening. The secondary screening catches all of them, but lets my winners work. I am not currently in any position right now, seems dangerous to be long right now. Edit: Forgot to point out that my gains have been consistent. $30 here, $50 there, lose $20, make another $40, etc. If I didn't have to contend with the T+3 rule, I'd have made at least 20% in the last few months. No position was held very long and I didn't have one sky rocket, though I did stubbornly hold onto one position where I lost about $150 early on...then I implemented a new rule to protect myself from my own stupidity.
Thanks. I understand bell curves. Doesn't seem like much of what you're posting here is relevant to me. I just make sure the percentage of winners times the number of wins exceeds the percentage of losers time the number of losses. Further, I'm not looking for a holy grail that works all of the time based on 20 years of past history. I am just using what works today. I'd argue that trading today is so different than it was 20 years ago that putting older data into any kind of holy grail number cruncher would make it less accurate. I just "tune" my method to fit the stock I'm working with and look at the last year of data or so.
he is not stuck, the man is just looking for someone to take the risk of the system that he thinks works nothing special - regular, normal Wall Street approach they have tons of people in Wall Street who are looking for OPM for their system that they thing work, at least for now...