Wouldn't annualized return on capital be a more relevant metric given the wide disparity in people's trading capital?
It depends on your initial trading capital. If one started with $10 million, $50k would seem lame. However, if one started with $25k, $50k would be pretty good. Questions like that are too subjective. Honestly, the more the better. I would say that if you are making as much trading as you were with your previous job, you are doing decent, since you can only go up from there.
Dependent on account size and how "greedy" one is. I'm not drive by $$$ but by balancing trading with the rest of my life. As long as I achieve a certain percentage (that I set at the begining of the year) I'm happy.
Dunno.. considering 50-90% of traders lose money, gaining 50k on 10 mil is not so bad. Green is good..........
I just wanted to avoid the inevitable "100% return...on a $5k account" problems. But obviously for multi-million account traders, a six figure % return could be fairly mediocre in terms of ROI. Since the former is more common, I biased the poll that way. You could start a "what is a good % return" poll to compare
Well, if you always talked about return than most people I know would be in the thousands percent. If you start with 10K in a prop account, most decent traders make at least 15-20k/month.
I want to throw this out to see how realistic this sounds. $50,000 account Assume living expense are taken out of a separate account. Would you expect to be able to generate $75,000 of income before taxes each year?
You have to compare your annual trading profit with an average you can do in most general type of business, and not compare with top performing traders. An average business makes a return of 10-15% after tax. If you can return 100% on your capital, then you are succussfull.