Gary, great to have you here. I bought your book a while back - and found it depressing as hell. Simply because it made it rather clear just how hard it is to succeed - and at that time I wasn't prepared to pay my dues. Anyway I'm still here and have a more realistic- and still developing - view of trading. Honest accounts like yours have been helpful in that regard. BTW below is a thread on a notorious vendor and his cozy relationship with trading magazine. Any comments you have on it would be of interest. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=26634
"If". Perhaps I should better shut up, before I uspet anymore of the great trading experts here. By the way, you clearly haven't read my anti-trolling disclaimer. Please read, and save your words. Thank you.
Scientist , good luck on the London move. I really hope it works. To go back to this thread and the post you cited. he seems sincere and I have no reason to doubt what he says; conversely before I believe it I would like some documentation. Last year I was on the Matrix emini chatroom and one guy came on going on about how he had seen Steve matrix's broker accounts and how staggering they were. That was only a few weeks after Matrix had been convicted of fraud because he didn't even trade- his income came from his chatroom and other ventures...It really surprised me when I found out.. I honestly hope we do hear more from this UK scalper and his friends who are raking it in...
This is a good example: http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/cbu...e=gp_line2:Line+Graph&Submit.x=50&Submit.y=13 - the tight rising channel is from April/May to mid October.
Gary great post, thanks for joining in. I now see the real context of your original post, and it is a drastically different light than it was cast here prior to your comments. I definitely agree with you that people selling systems have to be viewed with a huge amount of skepticism. It makes alot of sense in context now regarding your challenge. I hope you stick around and please understand that my comments, as I'm sure alot of others prior to your post, were working from what appears to be less than complete hearsay/information. Good trading to you!
I have been trying for years to figure out a way to thank you your book - How I Trade For a Living - really helped give me confidence in following my plan in 2000 ... that yr I had results that I since have not been able to duplicate , but were quite outstanding.
Hey roberk! Many thanks for your words - I'm really considering the London move, but it also means burning a lot of bridges here (family, girlfriend, friends, my other business etc), besides the fact that I'm in a 1 year contract for a very expensive apartment here, so it'll be an absolute min of 10 months until anything could happen. But that's fine. Dreams... That said, London's a cool place to live. Many of my best (smartest) friends here have moved there. This is symptomatic for Australia, we call it the "brain drain" - all the smart Aussies go overseas, to London, Hong Kong or the US. So, I'd be reunited with quite a few friends there, too... As for your point on documentation; Actually, I give a rat's patootie as to the validity of his fellows' "performance" claims - I really only quoted this as an example. Do they make that much? Who gives a damn? As long as I know how much I can make, that's all that counts. Their performance has nothing to do with your own anyway - so why even bother discussing it? As to the point of "evidence"; I think I need to clarify this once again. If you think you can bring "evidence" for something like performance so easily - then you clearly don't understand finance. Why do you think hedge funds and companies get away with $100M+ frauds and why do you think regulatory departments pay 10X that or more every year to prevent this from happening? And you think us little players here in piker land can prove things to each other? LOL! Somebody else just recently said to me on one of Ramoutar's threads that "he is the real deal" because he posted a brokerage statement. I told him that that's no proof, because anybody can fake it. He just didn't believe it. Well, I attached for him a genuine IB statement that showed my daily profits of $300K trading the ES and my IB account balance of over $10M. Oh, I forgot to mention this was the statement from April 1st, 2004. I even attached a 5-step-5-minute manual "DIY guide to brokerage statements" on how to do it. Bro, any 9-year-old can edit HTML in a WYSIWYG editor. This guy and I made peace and come to terms after that, and the discussion is over. But if you want to see the fake IB stmt which I did in about 5 minutes, then you can do a search on it, you'll find it. Point proven, any idiot can fake statements. So for those here who bring "proof" for their trading with P&L attachments on ET can get a big "pre-emptive laugh" from me. For those who want one, please raise your hand. But please, roberk, tell me you aren't one of them. Point being, if you want to really "prove" your performance, it can actually get very costly and complicated. You need to do a complex audit, preferably with one of the top-5 accounting firms, like Effron, and have the statements sitting on the Effron-server, then post a link here. If you want to do this to prove a point - fine. But if you've actually got a life, I wonder what's the point. All just little things you learn as you get more familiar with finance. Hope this helps. Scientist
how much has this mutual fund late late trading cost you ? I remember doing this almost 10 yrs ago ( fund timing ) before the early redemption fees kicked in ... Most of your fund trades do have a longer timeframe than mine for sure
I saw that, very eye-opening. For me if someone uses their real names like Mark of VF and Don Bright and consistently shows how they trade along with a few statements I am pretty convinced - as my initial post on this thread shows. Threei also got a letter from his broker: showing his gains. Now he could have faked it but I think that is unlikely as with a forum of 20,000 members someone might call him. So while there are no ways to be absolutely sure there is some evidence that 'weighs heavily'. It would settle a lot of doubts if brokers like IB give out stats saying what percentge of their customers are making money....And this reminds me of the book 'Where are the customers yachts?" Anyway I agree with your comments about proving it to ourselves, it is finally the only way. It sounds like you have a nice set-up in Auss, so take your time before crossing the oceans..