No offense intended, but you might do better with your trading if you spent more time focusing on it, and less time posting on ET. I have to agree with Dustin and some of the others => for me and most of the traders I know, this has been the best start for a trading year in the last 10+ years of trading. I hope it continues this way, through year end and beyond.
eric p you obviously weren't trading in 2002 . This is nothing compared to 2002. The futures were gyrating 30 pts like candy. Unlike today you had stocks like brcm,pmcs and xlnx that would literally move 2-4 pts every morning in a vertical fashion. If i wasn't up 10-20k by 11 am it was a bad day.Go look at the charts from july 2002-august 2002.I had a string of 34 straight days with never making under 15k in a day and having many 50-100k days.I think the difference between 2000-2002 and now is even though the futures move 30 pts they move in a very choppy longer drawn out fashion that allows for more shakeouts.
I had never seen you before on ET so I was reading over some posts. Sounds like you do 1-3M shares a month. Eric does that every day...and he was trading well before 2002. Not that he needs my defense anyway.
You are not alone. I am with you. Had a stellar 2007 made 112% returns using option strategies and Hedge Fund style trading. This year starting with the same base capital we are down 35%. Nothing has changed but the markets have become volatile and you can barely scalp nickles and dimes.
You are doing better than Hedge Funds? Sure... you donot even stand a chance with guys like that. They trade billions of dollars and yet they are losing money....and here our ET posters are beating Hedge funds ? Publicly traded Hegdge Funds ? LOL! I smell lies, lies, lies, some more lies.
Dustin please tell me what somebodys vol has to do with there profitability? If somebody trades more do they make more?Are you telling me there has been more volatility the past 60 days than in 2002?We've basically been in a 5% s@p range for 6 weeks now.We had several 80 pt ranges in 2-3 day periods in 2002. The reason i only trade a few million shares a month is because i avg 1000-1500 es contracts a day in 50-100 car size.I'm now in the process of testing big block 10-20k orders in the spy to compare returns to my es trading. so my vol should be a min of 10 mil a month so i'm interviewing brokers now.I'm still racking up big days but nothing compared to 2002.
Congrats on your success. Sounds like you know what you're doing. Regarding volume, I agree. I happen to know Eric. His gains are really impressive, one of the best traders on ET no doubt. Regarding 2002, I don't remember it being nearly as volatile as 98-00. I wish I knew then what I know now.