Most day traders lose money. As for those who make money, the amount varies with time, market, and person. i have made 400% ROI on one trade. I have lost 100% on trades. Last year, I made about 16% return on my account for the year. The year before that, I made about 25%. Mostly, I trade automated systems that I wrote, and I dabble with discretionary trades, too. BTW, if you make 170-200K, you are no ordinary dude.
Good luck man, all i can say is make sure your edge is big enough, not marginal. You are probably going to have to be very selective in your trades to get a big edge/high expectancy. Maybe not even get a signal to trade every day.
stick with your job, most who try to trade fail. on the other hand, few that are very determined and accept to do the work that is necessary to reach profitability may get there. Also I could (tray to) explain my trading method in details and it would be of no use to anybody as you need to figure out for yourself the way (to trade) that best suit you. returns for very few consistent and profitable day trader is anything between 500% and 2000% a year, but only for a small minority, the rest lose or at best make a few bucks...
I am doing something like this, so it is definitely possible. My system has a 1:1 RR and on average around 65% succes rate. I have 2 of these systems, i both trade them on ZB and ZN only, backtest shows that i should get around 100 ticks a month on ZB and 50 on ZN. So far my live results are matching the backtest results. Lets say i get 50 ticks on ZB and 25 on ZN each month and i scale it up to lets say 60 contracts then i would be making +100K/month. It almost seems to good to be true but so far the live trading shows the same results as the back testing so i am very exited and i hope it works out as it should
I'm not trying to suggest that scaling it up won't work, of course, but I strongly suspect that the pro rata returns may diminish, to some extent, as you do so, because of slippage gradually becoming more of an issue? The theoretical 100k per month may well turn out to be less than that, but I think this is probably a problem that you can live with? Well done on finding something that works reliably enough, and especially on finding that it works in a funded account in the same way that it does on backtesting/demo.
There is something to be said about following your passion. A good life to some means having a wife, family, stable job, etc. To others, its chasing a dream and having tried. I don't doubt that most will probably not be happy with having failed after 5 years, but trading isn't like trying to make it in Hollywood where so little is in your control and hence it is almost like winning the lottery to get discovered, no matter if you are talented or not. Since with trading so much is in your control, continuing to struggle is worthwhile. You don't want to be on your death bed and wonder how awesome life could have been if you just stuck with it a little longer. If he does choose to move on, it has to be a decision that he made from within, no matter how much the outside sources, like our opinions, meddle and try and convince him that we know what is better for him. I think when you see a person struggling at something worthwhile, the worst thing you can do is tell him to move on as your advice. Help him with the dream. He will know when its time to move on after having failed, but if all your help does is convince him to move on prematurely, there might be a deep regret.
I think scaling it up will not cause that much slippage, ZN is very liquid and almost always has anywhere from 1000 up to 3000 (or even more) contracts in pending orders each tick on both the buy and sell side. ZB 300-600. A trade of 60 contracts in ZB or ZN is not really abnormal, however i will be unable to tell until i experience it If i ever get a trade account that is large enough to trade this amount
Fucking A! I'd like this 10X if I could. I am living with deep regrets in my life with no chance to repair them, and it is awful. It's like from the intro to a song, the artist of which I can't recall at the moment... "It's better to regret a thing you have done, than to regret a thing you haven't done."