"Like assault weapons and market derivatives, the technologies that allow us to alter the global environment that sustains us should mandate caution and prudence." - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World Slow and steady wins the race.
No, I'm just a retail guy with a full time business that trades off daily charts on the side, but I am profitable and my performance has been steadily getting better, to the point where I may look at Fundseeder or something similar down the road if my performance stays like it has been.
If you want to manage money, you got to hit the pavement. Become an RIA. If you want to be a protrader without the education, you gotta make it thru the the bucket shops. Anybody can run highly correlated strategies in multiple accounts and only present the winning strategies. You can do that and perhaps somebody will bite.
Another top guy I can think of that runs his own hedge fund...with basically just his own money in play is Dan Zanger of ChartPattern.com Westwood Capital. $40mil of his money. http://www.chartpattern.com/cf/images/new/articles/traders-mag-aug2010.pdf
In order to show that you are really something you should show : 1-at least 3 years of history 2- Have done many trades. Just having a position that skyrocketed is not accepted. You should show that you traded a lot and most of the time you were successful and how you handled the losing trades. 3- Trading with gambling money like 1K , 5k, or 20K does not count. For example when you sell your house or put a sizeable amount of your cash into your trading account and start to trade, you get wet palms when you hit the keyboard. Many people can keep their calmness and when trading only 1K and get 500% return on that. 4- Asking to get hired for trading when you are that successful is like saying I can make a million in a year but let me use your money and make you a millionaire as I don't trust myself in trading my own money.
If you have reached this result over a large sample of trades say 1k+ and your risk is tightly controlled this will be seen very favorably by prop firms because it is a live account . If you can consistently make money you dont need a prop firm anyway. Environment could be helpful, maybe you want to learn more. Cheaper commissions never hurts.
"I do believe I was in the right place at the right time." Wow, now that is some insight... that statement alone says a lot. Well done for acknowledging this insight. My advice is to firewall all of your profit to date, except for $10,000. Take it out of the market, and now it never goes back in.... it's firewalled. Then take the $10,000 remainder and keep trading your strategy, keep doing everything the same, and see how that turns out. If you get to roughly $100,000 then firewall half of it... and repeat with $50,000 starting. Now you can approach some prop firms for backing. You will show a few things. 1) You weren't just in the right place at the right time. 2) You had the discipline to withdraw funds from the market, AND build it all back up again. Repeatable trading behavior. 3) At this point you would have about two years of trading history in a variety of market conditions. Good Trades, YK