Last year, my goal was from $127k to $200k (or +57%) which I did by generating +64%. This year, my goal is to go from $92k to $150k (or +63%). My capital decreased as I was funding my several start-ups in peer to peer lending, pawnshop, and finance blogsite. The below is the snapshot of my account at FundSeeder:
What were you trading? your style, risk tolerance, time frame, etc misc random details... Just posting results does no good, and is kind of boring.
Not yet. My guess is that my performance has a high volatility that may be unattractive to their investors, but I will let you know if I get some attraction from them.
I had a different thread for last year with some details in positions, but I generally traded equity options and high yield stocks. I plan to do the same for this year since this approach happened to be the best fit for me. I tried fundamental approach (low valuation at unattractive industry), commodity trading, but they didn't work out. From time to time, I look through all the trades I made to figure out where I did the best. Given the fact that I have several startups in cancer research / fintech and on the road all the time, I limit myself from daytrading or market timing.
Base on the above table, everyone wins between 12 and 14, since Dow and SnP increase a llot for the last three years. From Jan 2012 with Dow 12000 (roughly) to Dec 2014 with Dow 18000, most of the traders made roughly 50%(=6000/12000) profit in average. Of course, you record shows outperformance over the average Dow / But be sure to calculate exact portion of overperformance. Please note that Buffet has a record of ONLY 12% outperformance over Dow(SnP500), OVER 45 years. Therefore, if you keep this record over 45 years as Buffet did, you initial seed will grow up 4000 times as Buffet did. In short, if you have seed of $10K (or $100K), keeping 12% outperformance for 45 years should give you $40000(or $400000). You can print your record as Buffet did. http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2013ltr.pdf
For January, I'm still making mistakes on oil which I am long since November. I kept thinking about a relative value between oil and fiat currency, but this shouldn't be the approach on short term trading. The loss was offset by gains on dividends/covered call positions. The below is the snapshot of my account at FundSeeder: