I do agree with #3. Which is why he should avoid the MES micro.... those commissions relative to payout are highly disproportionate.. my advice is to skip the Micros and jump to ES .. micro commish will eat your profit margins for lunch
Per contract, he extracts anywhere from 62 to 82 percent of the daily linear H/L range (depending if he trades 24 hours or RTH). Oh wait... he explicitly states his figures are NET.... His actual "take" per contract is 76 to 107 percent of the daily linear H/L range!! (using .40c per side/.80c per round-trip as an estimate) He is a natural, a natural novice!
Some of it will be. Every technology addition will add to it, like better data etc. I very much doubt OP will even scratch his goal as a one man band, it takes a team of experts to be able to pull off consistent spectacular gains.
better to aim for the stars and fall short, but it still needs to be grounded in reality. the guy's doing on avg MES 50 trades/day with around $3 profit/trade which means he's scalping around 3 ticks on avg. 1. he's doing this with the micros which means the % of his profits sacrificed to commissions is going to be very high already. doing this while scalping for 3 ticks avg is even more inefficient. his trading style is already conducive to negative alpha. 2. he's scalping for a 3 tick avg during a time when index futures volume is dominated by hft + algos. you're literally competing against machines developed by some of the smartest minds with phds from caltech and mit that eroded much of the edge that existed previously with manual scalpers. ever wondered why the cme index futures (esp. nq/es) are so prone to fakeouts, liquidity sweeps, fades, etc.? b/c among all cme products, the es and esp the nq have the highest % of retail volume. from the perspective of the hft algos, it's the best market for extracting and absorbing all that retail liquidity during low timeframes. 3. not to mention, we're in a relatively high volatility period which means a) he's forsaking taking advantage of profiting off of volatile swings and b) he's much more liable to getting run over and his stops triggered. 4. your 3%/day goal is equal to a 176800% annual return (calculated from assuming 253 trading days per year). it's not impossible, but it's pretty much impossible. the way you achieve 176800% returns is by going yo-fucking-lo and going long gamma on a highly otm and short-dated individual stock options. not by scalping 3 ticks on highly leveraged index futures. 5. lastly, you seem desperate for money. you mentioned here that $4k/month would be "life-changing money." i've followed your previous threads where you'd suddenly quit mid-journal b/c you had to withdraw funds from your brokerage account to put bread on the family table. you've written before about how the real-estate market was sluggish and you weren't getting as many real estate deals as before. i hope i'm wrong but the impression i got after following you for a long time now was that you were in a financial crunch. maybe that's why you've wasted so much time and money on those funding companies b/c you were desperately clinging on to hope to make it big and that's exactly what those funding companies provide: false hope. you thought that since you can make $100+/day with the micros, $1000+/day with the eminis through these funding companies should be no big deal right? i'm glad your funding evaluation bubble has popped but you've substituted that with an even greater pipedream. i don't know your personal situation but if you're being overly hopeful to overcome an adverse financial situation, i commend you for persevering. but latching onto hope when that hope amounts to a mere pipedream is no way to dig yourself out of your financial hole. you realize instead of a 3%/day pipedream, a 3%/week target will take your $6000 to over $2.8 million after only 4 years right? there's no magic in the financial world but the closest thing to it would be compound growth. you'll soon realize even 3%/week consistently over many years is incredibly difficult. on a sidenote, there was another guy on some earn2trade journal here recently (https://www.elitetrader.com/et/thre...funded-account-with-earn2trade.347506/page-25) where he was close to going homeless but he had spent years and tens of thousands of dollars on these funding evaluations, all driven by some insane hope that he'd be able to make it all back and become the best trader ever. goes to show how misplaced some people's priorities can be when they're driven against the wall by financial difficulties. hope is great and all but you can see how it can also serve as a vector through which certain entities (in this case, funding companies) can influence people to make extremely irrational decisions.
@sstheo Congratulations on the Explosive Launch of your New Journal Steve. And to all you naysayers, rest assured that sstheo is a 100% honest in all that he does. I have traded along side him for more than 18 months now and I can attest to the fact that the numbers and stats that he posts are actual. Maybe a lot of you have a hard time believing him because of your own inability to trade? I, like Steve, know more than a few retail traders that do make money almost every single day they are in the markets. And some of them make a "ton" of money. You can be positive and choose to listen and learn here, or you can choose a negative attitude and continue to repeat a cycle of failure. The greatest gift of God given to man is his freedom to choose. The question is; how will you choose?
So based on his journals here, that would be maybe about 6 months. It's your first post. It's OK, ET at large will understand.
Most people would not believe that no matter what, even some have traded for years or decades and have quite impressive success; but those making money almost every single day don't have the slight incentive to show the proof, why bother? Endless argument is futile.
Then why isnt this guy rich already, why he is he a piker with 6K. You can get rich trading pretty quick if you can average just 10 pts a week with the ES. Just 10 ES pts a week is all you need to make to get rich! Thats $10,000 a week when trading 20 lots, or $25,000 a week with 50 lots. Not many traders can come close to even this 'modest' amount, (10 pts per week in the ES). Yet the OP claims he can make 15 times that per week.
sstheo, Swifty Lazar's people called. They want you to take a lunch with Swifty to discuss representation opportunities. "Call Us" she said.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Paul_Lazar