i only trade es nothing else and i am all by myself, the last thing i need is a team to deal with. i love hft and big money firms cause i know what they do and exploit that edge. however i did have multiple mentors along the way and was blessed they needed my talents as a automation programmer. some say they paid me to steal their edges, i kinda think of myself as a edge collector.
That is true. Before trading on my own I was at some pretty successful places and had a good handle on both stat arb and capital structure arb. Didn’t use either one at first but it is important to understand what to try to look for and what alpha is supposed to look like. Now I employ lots of traders and I’m constantly interviewing so I have a pretty good idea of what every other firm is doing. This is more to say if you hit me with a trading question I’ll probably have a good idea of what things have potential.
I guess you probably shouldn’t start until you know what you are doing. But I’ll stand by the 6 month test. After you have a pretty clear idea of what path to follow, that’s a reasonable time to get there. Getting ‘mentored’ shouldn’t be more than a 1-2 hour conversation with someone who knows what they are doing.
This is too general. The answer is product and accounting method specific. Stocks mark to market. No tax Stocks specific identification - negative 0 positive tax all possible. Futures no tax Crypto - very complicated because you can do LIFO or fifo so can be anything. deposit has nothing to do with it. Tax will be the same with it without deposit.
I agree completely. I’m usually working on taxes for 10 months each year. It’s truly terrible. Getting massively taxed in CA and threatened with a wealth tax too to fund a bunch of programs which clearly don’t work just adds to the excitement. I grew up here so I love CA weather but I’m looking to move. I’ll tell you the general idea of a trick I read about a long time ago and use currently. (Using round numbers). For charitable giving say I buy $1m total of 20 different sticks. Pretend half go up 500k-> 750k. Half go down 500k -> 250k so I make 0. At year + 1 day you donate (not sell) the winners. At year - day you sell the losers and collect short term capital loss. So with $0 earned you’ve created 250k in valuable short term losses and a tax deduction of 750k.
A question concerning equity options, Those making it big trading options, do they tend to place more one way directional bets...example long calls OR long puts, to capitalize on big moves...or do they tend to use multi leg strategies/safer more conservative approaches? This is a cool thread man don't let the haters run you off.
By BIG on options I’m not sure if you mean citadel / optiver / SIG crowd or some more hedge fund focused group. low risk market broad market making on options is extremely competitive and very low latency and high volume dependent. That gives a core income and sense of market in order to start to take actual market risk and be consistently very profitable. the hedge fund approach without access to that continual market making flow usually involves a decent amount of chatter (actual talking) and looking for vol dislocations. I’m sure there are other approaches but that’s what I’ve seen predominate. I’m not qualified to say what is not possible in options.
I guess I know a few ES traders who started early enough that they can still make it trading on their own. But the career path has been. 5-10m solo 20ish years ago. 100+ m with team of 8-12. 2-3 million solo again after retiring with way more capital than they had before. so I’m not bullish on the trajectory and I don’t think it’s a viable starting point for people nowadays.
Thanks for the post Garachen, I have a couple of questions. 1. I assume you are trading manually and not automated. And probably you are running a scanner to obtain trade signals. Am I correct? 2. Do you use indicators, price action or fundamental analysis? Mind to give a rough idea without revealing your 'secret sauce'? Thanks again.