If average for passive investment in index fund is 8% , then for trading should be at least 15% i guess
here is my rule, for a "full time" commitment, you need to make a salary and bonus commensurated with your peers, that's the costs. over this amount then you calculate your alpha, needs to exceed the index or tracker baskets by 20% or more. if not, you are not a professional trader.
So if i have 100k to trade i need to make my job pay of 50k and 30% of 100k which is 30k . Which comes down to 80k .80k is 80%. So if i have 100k and quit my job going full time trading i need to make 80% profit per year
do not get on that road. it will lead you to wrong place. what you said is for a investor NOT a trader. Once you start thinking about profits and not focus on what the market is doing, on reading the market, then you are dead in the water. A traders' job is the most challenging in the world. it is like climbing Mount Everest. You want to get up there because of the view. but you need to train for years or a decade to be fit to even try and then something inexplicable and unpredictable like a blizzard can kill you. markets are master of deception, and it took me twenty years, just to recognize a trend. You and a lot of people will laugh. Here they have been mocking me for a decade.it reflects on them not me. A trend is something that you think will end in the next bar, and the market will give you all the evidence you need to support that hypothesis, but it does not. You think what is going on? that was a perfect reversal that is what sustains the trend. disbelievers. it bores impatient traders.it makes them take action and, give anybody a choice they will usually, choose the wrong one once everyone believes the trend is in force, it ends. a trader should answer one question and one only.NO! it is not what the market is doing. on very tick, up or down, a trader has to answer this question: should i buy or should i sell/fade. it is, literally, a million usd question. best of luck to you but, i hope, by focused hard work, that you do not need it.
if you have less than 1m: 50% p.a. with sharpe of at least 2. Everything below that is a waste of time
If you use high bet fractions like 3% to 5% or above, then >100% returns are quite possible. You just have to be accept the drawdowns.
The best edges are ones that let you easily bet 3% and above. No point having a really good edge and only betting 1% or less. If your edge is just ok, you can still bet 3% and above to get 100% returns if you can handle the drawdowns. In reality your edge, especially is if you think it is over Sharpe 2.0, is never as good as you think in real world trading over the long run.
I come across many cautions against overzealous setting specific target or making the market pay for things. Here is an except from chapter 12 of Reminiscences of A Stock Operator. Work hard and just let the profit flows. ____________________________ Just think of it! If you know much about the average customer of the average commission house you will agree with me that the hope of making the stock market pay your bill is one of the most prolific sources of loss in Wall Street. You will chip out all you have if you adhere to your determination. Why, in Harding's office one winter a little bunch of high flyers spent thirty or forty thousand dollars for an overcoat- and not one of them lived to wear it. It so happened that a prominent floor trader-who since has become world-famous as one of the dollar-a-year men-came down to the Exchange wearing a fur overcoat lined with sea otter. In those days, before furs went up sky high, that coat was valued at only ten thousand dollars. Well, one of the chaps in Harding's office, Bob Keown, decided to get a coat lined with Russian sable. He priced one uptown. The cost was about the same, ten thousand dollars. "That's the devil of a lot of money," objected one of the fellows. "Oh, fair! Fair!" admitted Bob Keown amiably. "About a week's wages-unless you guys promise to present it to me as a slight but sincere token of the esteem in which you hold the nicest man in the office. Do I hear the presentation speech? No? Very well. I shall let the stock market buy it for me!" "Why do you want a sable coat?" asked Ed Harding. "It would look particularly well on a man of my inches," replied Bob, drawing himself up. "And how did you say you were going to pay for it?" asked Jim Murphy, who was the star tip-chaser of the office. "By a judicious investment of a temporary character, James. That's how," answered Bob, who knew that Murphy merely wanted a tip. Sure enough, Jimmy asked, "What stock are you going to buy?" "Wrong as usual, friend. This is no time to buy anything. I propose to sell five thousand Steel. It ought to go down ten points at the least. I'll just take two and a half points net. That is conservative, isn't it?" "What do you hear about it?" asked Murphy eagerly. He was a tall thin man with black hair and a hungry look, due to his never going out to lunch for fear of missing something on the tape. "I hear that coat's the most becoming I ever planned to get." He turned to Harding and said, "Ed, sell five thousand U. S. Steel common at the market. Today darling!" He was a plunger, Bob was, and liked to indulge in humorous talk. It was his way of letting the world know that he had an iron nerve. He sold five thousand Steel, and the stock promptly went up. Not being half as big an ass as he seemed when he talked, Bob stopped his loss at one and a half points and confided to the office that the New York climate was too benign for fur coats. They were unhealthy and ostentatious. The rest of the fellows jeered. But it was not long before one of them bought some Union Pacific to pay for the coat. He lost eighteen hundred dollars and said sables were all right for the outside of a woman's wrap, but not for the inside of a garment intended to be worn by a modest and intelligent man. After that, one after another of the fellows tried to coax the market to pay for that coat. One day I said I would buy it to keep the office from going broke. But they all said that it wasn't a sporting thing to do; that if I wanted the coat for myself I ought to let the market give it to me. But Ed Harding strongly approved of my intention and that same afternoon I went to the furrier's to buy it. I found out that a man from Chicago had bought it the week before. That was only one case. There isn't a man in Wall Street who has not lost money trying to make the market pay for an automobile or a bracelet or a motor boat or a painting. I could build a huge hospital with the birthday presents that the tight-fisted stock market has refused to pay for. In fact, of all hoodoos in Wall Street I think the resolve to induce the stock market to act as a fairy godmother is the busiest and most persistent. Like all well-authenticated hoodoos this has its reason for being. What does a man do when he sets out to make the stock market pay for a sudden need? Why, he merely hopes. He gambles. He therefore runs much greater risks than he would if he were speculating intelligently, in accordance with opinions or beliefs logically arrived at after a dispassionate study of underlying conditions. To begin with, he is after an immediate profit. He cannot afford to wait. The market must be nice to him at once if at all. He flatters himself that he is not asking more than to place an even-money bet. Because he is prepared to run quick-say, stop his loss at two points when all he hopes to make is two points-he hugs the fallacy that he is merely taking a fifty-fifty chance. Why, I've known men to lose thousands of dollars on such trades, particularly on purchases made at the height of a bull market just before a moderate reaction. It certainly is no way to trade. Well, that crowning folly of my career as a stock operator was the last straw. It beat me. I lost what little my cotton deal had left me. It did even more harm, for I kept on trading-and losing. I persisted in thinking that the stock market must perforce make money for me in the end. But the only end in sight was the end of my resources. I went into debt, not only to my principal brokers but to other houses that accepted business from me without my putting up an adequate margin. I not only got in debt but I stayed in debt from then on.