Why? Traders with a better chance of succeeding either ARE succeeding or working at a respectable prop shop. I don't think there is anything wrong with serving this sector of the market. That's like saying maybe Oanda should raise their account minimums from $1 to $1 million because too many of their accounts are underfunded and over leveraged and prone to failure. The fact is, there are plenty of banks serving those accounts already, but no one was serving the market that Oanda was. So they plugged the hole. No reason to hate Oanda for doing that or blaming them for traders who fail. All guys want is an opportunity. America was built on long odds.
Has Patak considered if things will be better if he could extend the combine to +1million $ combines - even at some grands the test ?
You are still struggling with reality and buying power of leverage. No one is giving you 30 50 or 150k to trade. You are only given the buying power intraday for max lots which takes minimum margin and a fixed total stop loss.
Buying power is irrelevant. No one in the professional world talks about buying power. If I invested 50k in your fund, I care about the variability of your returns, your actual returns on my notional investment and what your daily risk is. Nobody looks at return on buying power. So if I buy a call option for .10 and sell it for a dollar I don't tell people I made a 1000% return as it has no context. Was that ten dollars 100% of my account value or did I buy that call in a 100k account which makes the trade worthless. So the way to go about this is to use deductive reasoning and work backwards from risk and solve for account equity. Most professional traders risk somewhere between 1% and 2% a day of their capital. How they do that is irrelevant. So if our daily risk is 1000 and we use a 1% threshold, that would solve for 100k in account value. If we use 2% it would solve for 50k. I have no idea why this is so hard for you to understand. Shit by your definition I make 20,000% a year trading options. Do you think I could market my track record that way? LOL. Of course not. What an investor wants to know is what is their expected return on notional investment as well as the risk that is taken to earn that return. This normalizes the data so that you don't have 10 different traders who trade different products with different margin and over different time frames. By normalizing the data you can make a straight line comparison between different traders. Otherwise how could I accurately differentiate you from an option trader who bets 100% of his equity on selling premium?
Sounds like Mav is talking about ROC, Return on Capital. This is what I would look at also. Return on buying power is hard to use b/c leverage is not uniform.
What they say about imitation? It is the the sincerest form of flattery? Here we go: http://tradingadvantage.com/how-to-trade/index.php/tap Step 1: A 30 days education. Step 2: A sim account to pass the test. Step 3: A 10K backed account with 60% profit share. For pricing, Just call Saul. One of the educators at this firm made 1.9 million and wrote a book about it, so that answers Volente's question, although at a different firm: http://tradingadvantage.com/how-to-trade/index.php/online-trading-education-store
Are you going to be an "investigative journalist" and determine all of the flaws, real or imaginary, about that program and criticize it when anyone else mentions it? :eek:
Is this a business offer? Look dude. In Capitalism 101 they teach that competition is a good thing. So you should embrace more firms offering similar services. Now obviously if you want to choose between them, you do have to compare what they offer. So if you are too lazy, for a fee I might be able to help you out and tell you which one to go with. As a first, quick look, they seem to have less rules, more products to be traded and a honest (although small) account size. Also, they don't bullshit about you being a trading wunderkind, but tell you that they will train you.
It seems to me that the reason you look at return on capital is that it is one of the few metrics anyone should care about. I want to know if it fits with risk that works for me and than i want to know what my return on capital was. Why do I give a damn about anything else? If I start with 50K and a year later I have 100K and at no point was the level of risk unacceptable to me what more do I need to know? Why use what passes for a more sophisticated set of metrics when these two simple ones get the job done. WTF am I missing?
Here's what you're missing, and this has nothing at all to do with TST in particular... Trader #1 has $100,000 account balance, trading 2 contracts of xyz futures symbol. He makes +$3,000 net gain the last calendar month for +3% month or +36% annualized return on capital. Trader #2 has $100,000 account balance, trading 2 contracts of xyz futures symbol. He makes +$2,000 net gain the last calendar month for +20% month or +240% annualized return on capital. Now what does that math tell you about skills, ability and profit potential for either/both of those traders when it comes to leveraged capital?