lescor's returns are not only plausible, but highly likely, given the contents of his posts. he's been a valuable poster to the ET community. come back when you learn about slippage, illiquidity / becoming the market, and other problems that crop up with actual traders once they've crossed the point of having SOME system that works. here's a quick example: i can buy 100 shares of CSGS or KTCC and not move the market. now try and buy 10,000 without BECOMING the market. or in KTCC, as few as 2500. or you can ask sykes - after all, that's one of the reasons he stopped actively "trading" his system (paraphrase: i (sykes) can only make 250-300k with my system, or i can make a lot more teaching others how to use it) and why he trades small size. and checking on his trades last month (scrub myself off after going there), 40% of his trades were OTC, pink sheet stocks! yeah, good luck getting out of your positions in OTC stocks, where no quotes have to be honored. but real traders know that already. if i were concerned about selling myself to others, i'd care about return on equity. here's a clue: my return on equity was considerably higher 3, 4, 5 years ago than it was over the last couple years. however, i've had significantly better years those past 2 than i had before. lescor, keep up the good work. it's great to see a successful trader willing to give back much to the community. i don't post much, nor have the impetus to do likewise...but it's nice that you're willing to do so. ah, let tim's comments speak for themselves: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1660599&highlight=scalable#post1660599 "it's not very scalable and for all my gains, I could never handle its volatility...I was working with right around $1mil so $200-$500k/year is pretty good" (my comment: 20-50% return) http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1626372&highlight=scalable#post1626372 "Usually there's only a few thousand shares to short" http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1632012&highlight=scalable#post1632012 "Also, I don't look at this in percentage terms since it's not a scalable strategy. If you were playing around with $5mm, then <b>yes, a 10% return/year would be probable</B>" (note: i've corrected it, sykes originally said 1%, i believe he meant 10%) and that's one small part of my many trading strategies. difference is i've been doing it before sykes knew what a short-sell was, and i don't try to market it out to people while knowing its limitations.
Thank you very much for your answer. A few more questions: When you trade RTM, do you try to catch the turn and enter close to high/low of the day and exit hours later at the "mean" of the day, or you try to follow the day trend and enter say at 50% retracement and exit at the "mean" of the shorter "minutes or hour" time frame. Also, do you pay attention to the relative strength of the stocks you are trading to the overall market's strength (futures, breadth, ticks, etc.), and if you do, how do you apply the RS to your RTM strategies? Thank you in advance. PS: Please ignore these few clowns. For each one of them, there are hundreds of people like me who greatly appreciates your insights and learning .
Dear Lord, Deliver us from all these retarded trolls that pollute this site so regularly. Amen. He's not making 30% a month. He's using many times his equity in (I'll slow down so you get it) LEV-ER-AGE. He's probably making 3% a month on his BUY-ING POW-ER. What is so incredible or hard to believe about that? You expect Lescor to share his strategies with you and everyone else for that matter? What exactly are you bringing to the table in exchange? When I started out no one gave me a winning strat. I had to toil for years. How about you Lescor, or Dustin, anyone hand you guys a cash making machine or did it take years of your blood, sweat and tears?
It's been a long time since I posted on this site or visited regularly, for that matter. Here's a classic reason why. billyjoerob, or should I say blowjob alias for short is merely sykes stirring up the pot in true trolling fashion. He aint stupid. Sykes = BJ is simply ignoring the catcalls of clear grade-school logic while interjecting his name wherever possible. Why else would he focus on mentioning sykes? One quick glance at the covestar site shows a number of traders outperforming that boy based on statistical returns. Small-cap bangers are not serious traders, and no one with a smattering of trader savvy would take that seriously. To the lescor defenders here that are adding to the hits counter in retort, you let yourselves get sucked into mud wrestling with a pig. The pig enjoys it... do you? ** lescor, kudos for a journal that profiles the weekly lifeline of a trader in the trenches. Continual tweaking and evolution of your core approach to follow evolving markets? Four par or even net-loss days and one profitable day to make the whole week? Net-loss week? Net-loss month? Solid to huge overall net gains most months and yearly? Yup, that's all part of trading. Welcome to reality, folks. Embrace it. imo this is the only journal worth reading for serious traders. The other forums in here offer plenty of entertainment if you have idle time. Some do, some don't. Ignore the easily-outed troll, keep up your excellent work thru 2010
We could talk in terms of percentage returns on the unlevered, notional amount of the trades, but it is irrelevant. The OP doesn't have to prove anything here. It's his thread.
Nah, BillyBob isn't a front for Tim Sykes. Read his other posts. He's a long-only guy who doesn't even know what a futures contract is. He dabbles in the markets and thinks that qualifies him to argue against a bunch of experienced traders about how things actually work. I like discussing trading with anyone, but after you've shown that you are so completely clueless that you're wasting everyone's time, well... come back after you do some self-educating and we'll carry on.
I did most of the things you suggested, however it's so hard to not care about money. How long did it take you to get there and what helped the most?
You are completely clueless, do you know that? Have you ever tried trading oh, say 3000 share positions intraday in stocks like MA, GS, IBM? These stocks have 30, 80, 160 billion market caps respectively. But trust me, 3K shares will NOT yield 10x the profit that you had made with 300 shares. Market cap and liquidity are two completely different issues --stop polluting this thread with your idiocy. And of course a 2k loss means nothing to him (being down 2k is a warmup on a typical earnings season day for me), he's confident in his abilities to make any loss back on the very next trade -- the mark of a seasoned pro.
Now you look clueless AND you're grasping at straws. I'd politely ask you to stop, but I think your entertainment value is starting to surpass your annoyance factor. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2703577 How do you combine Excel with trading? Could you provide us with a bit of detail? I use excel to calculate a lot of my entry points, exit targets if I'm using them and I stream real time quotes to track pl. Not something I do but an example would be: I want to enter a stock when it has moved two standard deviations from a 20 bar moving average. I'd stream in data and record it to calculate the average. I'd write formulas to calculate the deviation from the mean. I'd use a conditional format to flash a color when a target is hit. And I'd probably have a formula to calculate share size and track pl and profit targets once I'm in. Again, pretty basic stuff .