Hahahaha, I knew your nickname was familiar but I couldn't tell why, now I know. No I don't trade stocks anymore, no leverage.
I am talking about trading with the use of leverage of course. A good trader ought to use leverage. Let me put it this way, the minimum to trade at the firm was $50,000. This was before the PDT rule. A tick was 1/8th and we traded 1000 shares usually. When we discussed performance we weren’t talking percentage return. When a trader started telling you about his annualized return, you knew he was having a bad run.
Don't be discouraged, one of these days in the not too distant future, you will cut the cord, join our rank, and never look back.
Of course, most "hotshot" traders just love to say that they made $50K in two hours last week, but they conveniently hide the fact that their total return this year (as of December 31) is 8%, and their maximum drawdown is 48%. Real traders talk only about return on investment and drawdown (in %), all the others just love to throw big numbers (in $$) to impress the naive.
I use to work in an investment bank until I couldn't deal with the hours anymore. I was just an analyst so they treated me like crap.. yea..