And then you get the pleasure of blowing up the HF that hired you which allows non idiot savants like ourselves to make a lot of money.
One of the guys on the cover of "Top 30 Under 30" trades prop at FNYS and said in an interview he is 25 years old and made mid 7 figures
Original asker of the question, if you are still reading the replies, go to collective2.com and look at hundreds and thousands of "hypothetical performance records" of people's trading. This will give you a very good idea how many people make money. When it is real money as opposed to play money, the performance becomes even poorer because the real emotions start playing into the trading decisions.
He is talking about prop traders that are ALL intraday. People that post trading systems on collective2 are just masturbaters.
those are exceptional returns for the above traders due to unusual market. the above exceptional returns are probably 100X more than their returns on an average day.
i guess i'm just a small fry compared to most of the ET posters, but i made about 2.3 mil for my firm at a 75% cut since jan 1. all bond futures