Your question is flawed to begin with. If you don`t even realize how or why so, you are not smart enough to be a successful proprietary trader.
I was talking to a guy who runs a major FCM a few weeks ago. He told me that me that currently he was finding no difference in the success rates between the automated/ algo traders and the old school point and click traders. The only difference I can see is that the costs of funding an algo are substantially higher, so failure is more costly. Programmers have enjoyed their day in the sun. To say they are next generation is bullshit.
I am not so sure I would buy that - given the amount of testing you can put in, pklus simulators, strats should ehave better than normal OR not be on real money. THat said - I am not sure how many of the algo developers are real programmers Do not get me wrong, but buying a strat is like buying a training course, and clicking some stuff together and running it through backtesting is not proper programming. You can easily run into edge cases, over optimize for curve fitting etc. I would say a lot of lower end programmers likely try to give traing a try (pays better than scripting websites) and they approach is in a very unprofessional manner. Just a thought. Out of project experience You would be surprised how incompetent programmers can be. And once emiotions step in...
Not everyone who plays Highschool football becomes a Superbowl star quarterback. Trading is just like Sports. 98% don't make the cut.
dude, do you ever have anything else to say? sorry you only know losers, i guess winners don't want to associate with you!
From a $295,000 profit of a variety of contracts over two years of data the average $180,000 sounds like I'd be with 10 traders, but what those 10 traders do not realize is that if you scale up, you can turn a $290,000 profit in a 2 year backtest to many billions. If you are the guy making the model, and have built it for scale, I would afraidly say that $180,000 is not unreasonable if you're willing to do just 1 unit of whatever methods you have, but as you earn more, the scale from the base $300k backtest assumption over a two year period averages out exponentially if you add more, so at that stage, hoorah.
nope this is not true. most strategies can not be scaled up. This is why most blackboxes fail too. A lot of strategies work on a small scale but can't be scaled up. I've seen my fair share of blackboxes blow out of the account because they tried to scale up a strategy without taking everything into consideration.
True, so much cannot be simply "scaled up" with shares or even capital. Market impact, diminishing returns and all that. Actually it takes more diversification to keep making more money in the equities game. Options too, lesser in Futures IMO. Our top people are in the $low to mid $6 figures for Three Months in 2012, top at $555K for March YTD. I can't really go into any detail here. Wish I could. Don
Well, mine can. You can do 4 same signal entries, 20 different entries, 50 different entries, and up to 200 entries if you had large capital requirements. The question was not about that. I think the ranges between $150,000 to $200,000 are a good target to shoot for with $25k or $50k in annual profit.