Trading live for an audience would be like going all in at the other players' whim. No matter how good you are, no one's success rate is perfect, and even the likes of Pimco would have soiled their reputatin had they met a challenge to show the market how they do so well in early 2011. Unless your reputation is already in tatters, you have very little to gain.
Whether anyone likes it or not, the truth is the truth regardless. Most "traders" who post on public message boards, on twitter, on stocktwits, etc are not profitable. There are not (yet) successful if ever. A good rule of thumb is, the more they post & boast in public with no monetary reason or motivation to do so, the more probable they are to be flailing or failures. If not for monetary gain, the posters are here & there for self-serving ego boost reasons. They need ego boosting, because of inward uncertainty and fear. So right off the bat, all the same old rehashed rehash on public message boards is generally loser talk from losers. Like it or not, that's the way it is. As for live trading efforts, track records, etc... what motivates any successful trader to demonstrate such? Other than the P&L threads of years ago where whole blotters were shown (versus snippets of sim domes) there has been nothing in here since. Nothing. Lescor's thread awaits to be updated, but in his latest posts he suggested the second half of 2011 was a struggle. Don Miller, self-annointed king of the ES day traders pretty much tossed in the towel on his day-trade efforts from what he said in his blog. Now let's face reality: if this was circa 2008 - 2009 and Don was knocking down $100k month over month, would he and could he afford to stop frenetic ES trading for ANY reasons? Many, many former stock traders who were high-flyers in years past saw their edges dry & die with volume and volatility gone, with algos changing the way price action behaves. ** Trading is a profession of evolution and change. You either adapt or you perish. In my case, trading ER2 used to be where the money was at. TF trading is still ok, but not with real size due to liquidity drains. CL trading is good if you are capitalized and capable of managing yourself inside of wild & unruly price action more than not. Stock markets have become quasi-euro markets. Grain futures, oil futures have become quasi-currency markets. Currency markets are currency markets. Nobody trades off earnings reports, mergers & acquisitions, sector upgrades and downgrades. Everyone trades off what happens in Italy, what happens in Greece, what the Euro fed heads have to blather, etc. All world markets are now globalized, all shrunken, all highly correlated. ES traders are FX traders. Crude oil traders are FX traders. Bond traders are FX traders. FX traders are FX traders. Everything is the euro = usd, and little else. So what you saw on camera two years ago, three years ago, five years ago means nothing to you today. The real question is, can YOU take today's trading information and can YOU trade today's financial markets? Because if YOU can't... nothing else in this world matters. Now does it?
Whred, why do you want to see live videos of profitable day trading? You'd have to see someone pull it off every day for a long enough period of time to encompass varying market conditions (bull, bear, strong trend, wide channeling trend, wide and narrow chop/range) to draw the conclusion that the trader is consistently profitable, so seeing a video of someone trading one or even several sessions net profitably shouldn't serve as "inspiration" to others that it can be done. My true belief that it could be done came from a couple sources here on ET: 1) The 2005 P/L thread where Szeven gets his feet wet and Red_Ink is "only" making 3-4 figures a day http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=768843#post768843 and 2) following the live calls of a couple traders (Robert Weinstein and Geez) every day for the better part of a year (BTW, there could not have been two more different traders, but both proved themselves net profitable over a long period of time despite each of them taking devastating hits, one due to an order entry error and the other due to blatant fraud.) Also, I'm definitely NOT the twittering NoDoji
I followed Geez from day 1 till the date he made 50% on the bet account. For folks who don't know - his original bet was to make 50% on a 70K account @ scotttrade. And he did it in about 6 months. Excellent!!! He is the only one "with live call" I know. RW was great but his risk management (or absence of it) was causing him huge drawdowns. I don't know if he was over all profitable or not. My story is also similar to RW - still can't take loss until it is too big. Continuously trying to re-wire the brain but no major success so far.
You are correct. I thought I remembered you asking these people for "help", but you were actually asking them for "proof." These are the passages I remembered wrong: This section where you were asking for proof: (~pg 213) "I've been on a soapbox for years against the peddlers of these S&P day trade courses. I have begged, pleaded, and cajoled any teacher or former student of these courses to provide documentation that what is taught is a viable trading strategy off the exchange floor. All I've asked for were 18 months of recent trading statements. You would think at least one trader would have come forward to shut me up since I began my crusade in 1992." And this section where you mentioned they never picked up the phone: (~pg 214) "One common tactic used by those who peddle S&P day trade courses is to invite you to watch them trade. Sitting in front of their computer screens, they dazzle you with near perfect buy and sell signals. Yet all the while, they never pick up the phone to call in any orders. Translating price action on the screen into real-money trades with real fills is an entirely different ballgame." Sorry!
Simple brain teaser: what if you watched someone dazzle you with perfect buy & sell signals consistently, full explanation and disclosure of every signal called. You learned said information, took all those trades with x-number ES contracts in your own live account for net profit results in the end. The signal caller took no live trades at all. Were you taught how to profitably trade, or not? ** Teaser II: a different signal caller demonstrated exactly the same process, taking all trades live with 100-lot ES orders every time. Everyone in the audience but you learned to take similar trades, and made money. You could not bring yourself to trade like that, and you continued following your previous losing ways out of emotional weakness = comfort. Were you taught how to profitably trade, or not?
I traded with a trader i knew in las vegas - futures - we traded with a small group for 3 months while backtesting systems and he only had two or three losing days - I watched him make about 87k in that three month time. That was some of the most calm and consistent trading I have ever seen - a good learning experience for me. I know about a dozen consistent traders that I have traded with live over the years - it takes a while to get consistent but it is worth it in my opinion.
The longer you are consistently profitable, the more likely you were taught a method that made room for realistic fills. So you either did your due diligence to determine if the fills were realistic or were just fortunate that you were dealing with an ethical teacher. This all begs the question of why the teacher didn't take any live trades. ** You were taught, but failed to learn.