No I noticed no approaches were set forth... it was just interesting to me how well you stated what you do to solve a problem. Doesn't happen often here... But to answer would I consider 500 pips a week killing it? Yes the way you are stating it as being something you could capitalize on average gain on a currency basket in 7 trading days. But then again it all depends on what you possibly use to trade with. It's just I've bared witness to creative tactics that arent' the standard way others might trade. Like modeling your own baskets unrelated to standard currency pairs. But if you were to just be depending on yourself sitting there using one pair I'd agree that you would be "lucky" to cacth even 100 pips a week on average consistentley over time.
Those poll numbers seem to be missing a decimal. 500 should read 50.0 and 50 should read 5.0, and maybe go from "PER WEEK" to "PER MONTH".
The group of guys I trade with and our Mentor try to average 100 pips per week...sometimes we do better sometimes not...this week has just been so far out of wack...I'm up +1132 pips ....this is extremely RARE however with most of my weeks 100-150 pips..... with trade size growing as bankroll permits... Aloha
Care to start an EliteTrader (ET) live trading journal to prove your claim? Each trade would require 2 posts (open and close) within a minute of actual trade, ET time stamps all posts making confirmation easy. I posted Live Forex Trades on ET so I'm sure you can too.
My partner is trading the Euro and only pulling in on avg about 30 to 40 pips a day using what I believe is cutting edge tools that few others have available to them. He's scalping 6 to 15 pips a couple times a day and usually trades for less than 2.5 hours a day. Here are the tools he uses. The top one is a Level II like tool for Forex. It shows all the major banks and forex dealers with the tightest spread ones on the right. When a bank raises its offer we color code it green and when it lowers it we code it red. Many times the forex chops around and this tool is very useful for showing REAL moves vs the chop. The middle chart shows a 5 min chart with a 60 min statistical high/low plotted. As you can see most of the time the forex bounces off the high/low and is a low risk place to enter trades. We also have two other unique indicators on there which we call squat bar (green and red) and trend reversal (yellow). As you can see all of the indicators worked today except for one, about 92% successful. The bottom chart is one of the most powerful tools as it shows REAL support/resistance. As far as I know its the only volume profile forex chart in existence and shows where the trades happened. The lines are the pivots which many packages have and the yellow line is our balance point line which shows avg price. If below yesterday's closing balance point you should look for shorts, above go long. Same with today's balance. If inbetween today's balance and yesterdays trade cautiously and look for potential reversal at yesterday's. It's usually good for at least one profitable trade the first time it touches as people who have positions on avg are at this price and there is natural support/resistance here.
Probably the whole confusion when many times discussing the same issue has been that there are always two possible bases/ methods for the calculation. 1st, measuring the movement captured per contract. In this case, the contract size is not relevant, basically. All we need to know is how many pips on average our systems are able capture for a period, say per week. This calculation can be easily done by trading one (mini size) lot of 10,000 units. This captured movement could exclude the leverage factor easily. Using EUR/USD as reference by converting other pairs to equivalent of EUR/USD might be a good start. 2nd, measuring the pips earned per a standard lot which conventionally is one (full size) lot of 100,000 units. Simple and straightforward calculation. The leverage factor may or may not be included. However, there can be minimum 10 times, or much higher when including leverage, difference between these two methods/ bases. Please correct me if anything wrong for the above.
imo, selling any trading software claiming to capture movement of more than (say) 20 pips a day would be simply a joke in forex trading. With small initial capital, earning 20 pips a day everday will make many millions dollars within a very short time, that could be only a portion of development and marketing time of any software with similar complexity/ scale.