clearly, I havent been trying hard enough either... something to consider and think about changing... I would be curious to know what those traits that you are...
must be a california/west coast thing... NYC is more cut-throat... even when we are networking we are measuring the "competition" and I've never seen the sales/desk traders vacation together... when they hang out at the lounges some of us IT geeks who trade go there as well and it is more about them showing off spending than anything else... which is complete total contrast from the PB side, those are more about making sure they can expense the drinks on the company dime so there is always a client in the mix... but vacation together? not even within my own IT team we do that, well, with the exception of one of my buddies that I have know for over 15 years and we frequently spent time hanging out at each others house letting the kids play together.. and we went to brazil together for a friends wedding... that was a fun time out there... anyhow, I digress...
notional amount of bond futures: 100,000 margin: 500 so with a $5000 account you have 1 million so with $5000 you should make 100,000 a year, since that is only 10% on 1 million. LOL
I assume the $1K a day then is not actively trading (intraday) those contracts but rather structuring a position that can last days to weeks... I presume now the $1K daily is the average per day, which would make a lot of sense.. and if that $25K margin in use is for spreading, then you are certainly carrying a bit of size... (then again, depends on what you are doing spreads wise...) my only concern with less liquid spreads is hedging for fat-tails...
doubtful... 10% on notional on bonds and you are a rock star... more like 2-3% bud... and trading 10 bonds on $5K is ... hmmm... suicidal? (not to mention retarded)... anyhow... I gather you don't get the point, so there is no point to try to argue over it...
Thanks garachen and ofthomas. I believe every word of what you say. Your success is truly astounding. I am not sure if other accomplished successful traders also achieve this kind of success. Maybe they do, I don't know.
It all varies. But is definitely intraday. As I look over. My three new guys have traded so far today on average 70 contracts. All three are positive. Average $400. The more experienced guys, same products averaging 300 contracts (slow day) about $3000 average so far. Another manual trader (different products) 16,000 contracts - up about 10K. Another guy 700 contracts(different products). Neg 5K.
there seems to be some confusion on margin and account size at 10%, 25k margin implies a 250k account so being 25k margin committed doesn't mean you are 100% margined, it means you are 10% margin committed and yes, 25k margin will get you a 1k swing everyday, or every hour, whether you want it or not
How to grow your account size is a really good question...! FXCM used to have (I don't know if they still do) a King of the Micro contest and they published results... These are the results for July 2012... http://forexforums.dailyfx.com/king...-contest-results-winner-returns-956-51-a.html A person from the Ukraine won by turning $500 into $4801.51 a 956.51% return... REPORT http://media.dailyfx.com/sales/micro/kom_docs/JUL2012/julytradereport1st.pdf Looking over the trades this person traded gold exclusively. You quickly notice the massive increase in size from 15 lots to 60 lots in XAU/USD... And then a decrease in size to just 1 lot with further trades despite the fact that he/she wasn't losing. So to answer the question... You grow your account by betting big on sure things and then just churning along for everything else. If anyone ever read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Jesse Livermore he pretty much says the same thing. He used to go really big when he was sure of something. Obviously, if you get it wrong you're going to lose a huge portion of your account but this is really the only way to go about it if you want to make huge gains. You can also grow your account steadily with the same size and gradually increasing your size as you win steadily. However, this implies a very high amount of consistency which is next to impossible to achieve in trading.
so, if I put a trader on and authorize 25k in margin, hopefully, I have 1mm to back that up. And yes, I expect about 1k a day. that's .1% a day 2%/mo 24%/yr otherwise, the bullshit detector is on high alert