Good trading is a marathon, not a sprint. A trader is inclined to suffer their largest losses after their largest winning spree, until they get their black belt in risk mgmt - capital preservation. Highly tuned traders become a lot more concerned on how good they play defense, the profits will always take care of itself if you can stop the big losses. "A well-played stop-loss is just about the most beautiful trade there is." Cy, Japanese retail trader that made $34M on his big Nikkei short.
alright, this is an anecdotal story only - obv take it w/ grain of salt: i was having drinks w/ some friends & their colleagues some time ago, this was last year, around the time of the crypto bubble's parabolic rise up, & ppl were commiserating how they thought bitcoin was going to pop, ethereum wasn't worth it, etc, how they missed out on enormous gains which everyone seemed to be cashing in on then someone brought up 2 names, and everyone around the table fell silent for a moment. i asked one of my friends what was the deal & was told that 2 guys in their office -- who sounded not that senior, by the sound of it -- made $$$ on the day of Brexit apparently they bet the farm (or close to it) on Brexit, & didn't show up for work the next day, and then not long after, they both left the firm word is they each made serious money, but for obvious reasons no one knew exactly how much. the craziest thing is that the more senior, 'savvier' guys in the office were openly disparaging the brexiters, citing all the opinion polls, etc, so somehow they must have found a better channel of info, and a way to bet their own money w tremendous leverage to generate those kind of results
Brings back a few memories. Didn’t make as much as those guys but you didn’t need inside info. Towards the end of European trading day their stock markets rallied very strongly, ‘remain’ was being priced in and some hedge fund had their own exit polls as voters left the polling stations. By almost end of trading day there wasn’t much upside left but public polls were close so made sense to go short. Not much to lose and plenty to gain
1 million dollars, but my biggest one day loss was 3 million dollars, on a 1 billion bucks account. Astute readers might have noticed I made 2 relevant points in the above sentence.
Found them!!! Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose Elite Traders should be Paper Traders What did I win?
The trade went on to about 140k over the next 2 days but for the gain in one day with biggest realized + unrealized is on this day. As others have said one day doesn't mean much overall, just makes conversational fun. I was fluctuating around break even for Feb before this trade.
I know people who are experienced already trade for Propex off-site that do well. As for the trainee training by the firm I don't really think any are great.