Its not just about money, but time and the belief you took something away from the experience. You just spent 3 years sitting at monitors, looking at charts, reading books and spending precious time that could have been spent on a career, building a business, hanging out with friends, chasing women, hanging out with your family, etc...did you spend your time wisely? Was it worth it? There are people out there who built a failed business and will say to you sincerely that they enjoyed it even though they failed. Failed traders will rarely tell you they enjoyed it or took anything away from the experience. 9 out of 10 people would be best served focusing on their jobs, families and friends then getting into trading.
I'm thinking that it's not the money you lost but what one does with the experience. I used my losses as an education in perfecting my training methods and learning to manage my emotions. I consider it a good investment as I haven't lost money in any one month for a long time.
This is beyond true. About to throw in the towel on a nearly 2 year day trading career at a prop firm in Chicago. I'm up money 150 of the last 200 trading days but the down days and the cost of trading just destroy my P&L. Factor in the firm taking another 10%, holding 25% for 18 months, and taxes and it's just not worth the time or effort. I wouldn't say I regret giving it a shot, who knows what could have been in a different market, and I think my experience will help me be a better longer term investor in the future, but it has taken an emotional toll and likely done almost nothing in terms of helping me get another job. Also burned through a good deal of savings (by my standards) just getting by. I don't feel too bad seeing as the floor I'm on went from ~90 people to ~40 or so in two years and not one other person I started with that's still here is making what I'd consider "a decent living." For the record, some of the guys who have been around a while still seem to be doing well for themselves, but have been mostly disappointed since the end of 2008.
Wow... what an entertaining thread! First big loss was when the tech bubble burst and my account of about $20k with it. After that I've had a number of large losses up until about 2 years ago. That was when I stopped trying to pick a direction. I realized I would always be at risk if I tried to predict te market. So now I go with the flow and let the market tell me what it wants to do. I change strategies when one quits working. I still get some big losses but good money management keeps me in the black overall. It is human nature to happily take a small win, but hang on tooth and nail not wanting to "give up" on that massive loss that just "has to" turn around! Once I got over that and I'm now more than happyto say "oops!" ad quickly get out of a bad trade and patiently wait while a running profit continues to grow. The numbers don't mean a lot, since I may take a 10 or 20k loss in a trade and still turn out to the good overall for the day. It's all percentages and managing risk. You upside target should always be a minimum of 3 times your downside stop! If that isn't realistic, don't get into the trade. This way even if only 40% of your trades are winners, you'll still walk away from the table with coin in your pocket!
I have been trading on a spread betting platform for over 5 years. In my first experience, I blew a 2k (sterling) account after a few months. Then within a year I blew another 5K, for the last 3 years all i seem to do is go around in circles. I started another 5K account around 3 years ago and then took a big hit, the account fell to 2.2K and I just shut down stop trading for months. Went back to it and then lifted it to 3k, then months of again, then last year took 3 K to 12K in a just a few months! I new in percentage terms that was excessive...I then took hit back down to 2K and then as of now lifted it back to 7K....this over hundreds of trades....for over 2 years i have been growing the account, not convinced I know what i am doing! Wish I could just get beyond the wild see-saw!
I am about 6 months into trading, just went to a live account last month, and am starting to make small profits...very small...however it is my new found passion and I spend every spare minute devouring all the info I can to improve my skills! Society is full of people (especially men) who spend countless hours a week on hobbies (fantasy football, golf, watching ESPN etc.....Anyway my point is, many people waste more time watching mindless tv shows than I spend learning to trade so from my point of view it is a hobby I may one day actually get paid to do, unlikely but possibly.
Worst case you learn how to manage your investments better. Even if I were to quit trading, I would still look after my investments / retirement funds myself. Maybe you never figure it out?? I've had a fabulous year so far with profits increasing every month just to get my ass handed to me this week with an 80K bath in GOOG. You have to make rules, but more importantly you have to live by them! I was starting to feel I had found a printing press until this happened... fortuantely, I'll survive. But it is a very humbling experience. Not to mention frustrating that it would have so easily have been avoided if I hadn't gotten greedy and pushed it just a bit further... There are great resources out there on risk and money management. Read them and once you have a system worked out, use them. Never, never, never break the rules!
It is so much more than the money - it's about a smart, well-thought out game plan and a strategy with a very good risk/reward skew. Then, you have to execute and manage the game plan properly. I started trading in 1992 with $10K and a six-month Full Membership Seat Lease on the floor of the CBOT scalping Bond futures. In a year I switched over to a GIM lease and started spread trading between the Note and Bond pits. I was fortunate enough to get one of the earliest Project-A screens, and by 1994 I made more money spread trading electronically in the afternoon and overnights than I could on the floor - it was so cool to have access to multiple markets at once, and if I was early in the order queue I got early fills. My point being, I had a very good plan and executed it well so it was relatively economical for me. In an electronic environment you can piss away alot of money in a hurry just playing around with one-lot futures. Without the floor environment or arcade office setting traders are isolated. Bad habits and self-sabotage can destroy a trader's confidence in a hurry. Now that I've traded for a large commercial and a few private funds, I can report that there are major misconceptions in general about how the really successful traders actually make money consistently in markets.
Yeah, I can understand why you and most people would think it seem like luck. So here's my story on what happened: Yes, I'm aware that it could be seen as just pure luck. If you're a day trader, then you would know that there's more to trading then just having a good system. That psychology and discipline makes a huge difference in success or failure. You can have a great system, but if you're a crappy trader than you can still lose despite that great system. What I will tell is that in late July I discovered two indicators that was able to time reversals with pretty good accuracy. I've then back-tested it with data from the past few weeks and found that it was consistent. At this point in time, I was still a crappy trader who was consistently losing money each week. But when I started applying these two indicators the following week, I was able to make those huge gains. Being a crappy trader was what eventually led me to losing as I didn't know how to handle making a lot of money really fast. The fact that I was a crappy trader that just happened to start making those gains using these two indicators, when in the weeks prior I was consistently losing money, shows how strong the system is.