and what kind of capital are you using to make it? how long does it take you to make it? what do you trade? Can you realistically make $200 - $400 a trade on $10,000 starting capital trading the s&p emini (a active trader told me this is how he started out). Assuming 20 trades a month this translates into $4,000 to $8,000 in profit which also adds up to 40% and 80% returns for the month. It does not sound realistic to me but you guys are the experts and I am thinking about reading a lot more about futures trading. I was wondering if I should bother.
Motion: It's probably possible, but as you no doubt know, it takes alot of talent and practice. If you are serious about it, keep doing the homework, and work, work, at it. Prepare as much as you can, keep learning. I say this not knowing where you are on the learning curve, as we are all learning everyday. Make sure that you have plenty of ammo, $$ and knowledge. Good trading to you. Gordo Forgot to mention, patience. The numbers that you are looking at, would suggest good trades, with a good risk/reward. Be careful of overtrading. Watch for the good setups, and know what you want to do when they present themselves. Hope I helped somehow.
HELLLL yeah its worth it!!!!! 4K / month x 12 months = $48,000.00 ...... thats 480% on $10,000...... why the heck wouldn't it be worth it?? ...oh yeah.... it has never been done
I don't think you can daytrade with only 10,000. Some can do it but if you are new I would not quit my day job. It takes time to gain the experience to be able to be consistent. With only 10K you will be trading with a great deal of fear, and that ain't good. What type of broker are you using or plan to use? The odds of a newer daytrader making money are very much against it. Check it out. What type of experience do you have? Give some more info about yourself, and you may get better answers. Do you have a mentor etc? don
Thanks for your replies guys. I am at the level where I am at about $50 a day using PFGBest simulated futures trading platform. Although I am relatively new to this, I have done a little bit of homework and use Pivots, candlestick, Fibonnicci and a few other tools that I learned from a book I have been reading. I do not plan to start until I can get this as close to a science as possible and my simulated trading account shows this. Right now the performance is spread with much more winning days than losing days which I guess is a good sign. I am thinking simulated and real deal are completely different things from a trader psychology perspective. As for my background I was an investment banking analyst in New York and San Francisco for three years, then I moved on to an operating business development role for a technology company where I currently work. Any help would be greatly appreciated. This is about learning and I appreciate the cynicism as I belive it is indicative of experience.
Paper trading profits are meaningless. Open an account with Interactive Brokers and try swing trading 100 shares of SPY, a good proxy for ES, and see if you can consistently make money.
I don't think they're necessarily meaningless when trading liquid futures, buying at the offer and selling at the bid. Assuming you're trading one ES contract, one point per day is really slim, so you need to look carefully at your entries and exits and make sure that you could have actually been filled at that price. That is, use a tick chart or T&S to see that the offer didn't uptick immediately after your buy. Even still, your edge is so slight that I'd be worried that pretty much any type of system failure or other unexpected move could set you back months.
If you can do the above why do yo need $10,000? About $2500 should do for a typical Emini. You are rather conservative: only 20 such trades a month? Roughly 4 a day (80 a month) would sound somewhat more on the mark. You figure out yourself what this all means. nononsense