I could show you how to make money 99 % of the time (and no the 1% is not meaningful) , just about every day. 1) I Won't 2) It's freakin hard, sometimes boring work , and a good plumber might make more money than me. I'm working on that part. The best traders don't brag about it. They just make money, and hope the 'edge' doesn't go away before they can retire. The big mouths that brag all the time are mostly frauds, or doomed to eventual failure by their own hand.
We can only judge others by our own standards. When you are so paranoid that you think others lie all the time......it says a lot about you. For myself, my life it too interesting to lie about it.
How do we Know? Nice subject title for the thread... Anyone who has no other income and is making enough money to have a good living (as he perceives it) is a successful trader... and that can mean anything from $100 a day to $50,000 a day... as long as the trader is happy with his gains and can have what he perceives to be a good living off the gains, then that is what I would classify as a successful trader... We exist...
That is kind of the point - I have met a lot of profitable traders and the good majority of them had some type of house edge. Don't get me wrong - you can make money trading on the outside - it is just harder with a much larger burn rate. I am just stating the obvious. Good card counters consistantly beat the Casinos - outside traders can beat the house. And yes - guys are still kicking in the pits after a decade and making consistant money. Of course most of them are relatively new blood in the long term sense.
Well vendors wise, the % of losers is prolly about the same as in non-vendor traders... 90%. I bet if CFTC and SEC didn't give fraudulent vendors slap-on-the-wrists but some prison time instead, probably the % of losers among vendors would drop to 60-50% or something. It's an "interesting" business to say the least... Personally, I'm more likely to believe the success of a non-vendor trader because the incentive to lie for money is much more common than the incentive to lie for ego (but as we can see on ET the latter one is pretty strong too
I personally agree with Metooxx. It doesn't matter how much more successful others are. I personally am successful enough that I can afford all my personal living expenses and also continue to grow my own account on almost a monthly basis. That's all that matters to me really. My account is still smaller than most people, so my % return is often larger. I am not competing on a dollar basis. I'm competing on a % basis. My only bogey is last year's performance for me. I just want to constantly improve my own personal trading. As per people not willing to share, I think that's absolutely not true. Lots of very successful traders have shared a lot on these boards. I personally have outlined my entire strategy which I have used to achieve my returns. If you have read someone else's strategy and been unsuccessful at it, maybe you need to analyze yourself and find out why you didn't succeed. Maybe it is you, and not the strategy that is the problem?