A little bit more info on my performance- From Jul2008 todate I have cleared about $1.04M of actual money. This is less than as calculated per monthly returns, but I have been withdrawing regularly for expenses and taxes. I have recorded every trade I have made in excel, so I can manage to do all kinds of analysis on my trades I usually divide my trades in 3 categories - Stocks and Equity Options, Futures(including stock index futures and fx futures) and fx otc. I didnt start trading fx otc till Sep 2009. My total P&L by category is as follows - Stocks, Futures, FX Otc 2008JulF - -$17,000 $130,000 $0 2009 -$1,000 $314,000 $280,000 2010 $37,000 $122,000 $51,000 2011Jan-Apr -$3,000 $136,000 -$12,000 TOTAL $16,000 $702,000 $319,000 On the stocks side, despite of making some excellent calls, I have hardly made any money. I am just a lot more comfortable with markets which are open overnight and I am confident of my stop losses holding. As a result, I have been reluctant to hold stocks overnight and too much in and out has resulted in much frustration and no income. I feel as I get more confident in holding my stock positions, my results should improve. For all the futures trades, here is the breakdown - Ag commod, Bonds , Metals, Energy, FX, Stock Index 2008 -$1,000 $8,000 $32,000 $49,000 $43,000 $0 2009 -$8,900 $96,000 $124,000 $7,000 $94,000 $2,600 2010 $11,000 -$9,000 $90,000 $5,000 $29,000 -$4,700 2011 -$11,000 -$4,600 $71,000 -$14,000 $72,000 $22,000 The good thing is I have made money in all types of commodities except ags, but the bad part is despite a major bull market in equities, I have hardly made any money.
your returns show nothing to investors unless they can see the numbers surrounding them.. you may have made 214% or whatever but how profitable are you as someone managing my money I dont want you out of the money to long.. I dont want you to take excessive risk.. I wanna know how you build your positions and how you plan to pay back the risk... I wanna know what the average return is per risk and full line of statistics without that ... might as well work for publix who cares.
The big question I run into is regarding the scalability of the system. Will it work the same way with a lot of money as opposed to what you are trading now? If the system is not scalable, then that will be a serious stumbling block. Best of luck to you!
why do you say this? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A start up fund now has virtually no chance of attracting any real institutional money at all.
I statistical test for randomness in your returns produced a p-value of 0.4828, actually a terrible number that indicates that there is virtually no evidence against the hypothesis that your returns are simply due to pure luck (null hypothesis). You have some huge outliers there, like a 56.82 return followed by a 37.54 return. Thus, a good chunk of the performance was distributed in a small region and the statistical algorithm catches that as potential luck. If these two returns are set to 0, the p-value is improved to 0.1692, a drastic improvement but still not close to desired 0.05. I also noticed that the number 13.88% can be found twice in your series. This is very peculiar also because it is for the last month of two consecutive years. Is this an error? Since I am considered an expert in analyzing numbers for randomness and also fraud, I conclude that these are actual returns but the element of luck cannot be removed. There is no evidence of an edge at this point. I suggest you continue for this and next year. IMO 5 years is a good sample for reaching rigid conclusions.
the1: The accredited investors that I traded for would not tolerate more than 15% DD. newtraderg: do not trade for friends and family, would be my only advice. You can get a gig, but it might not pay as good of a percentage...Get your 5Y track record and put out some seeds now as an upcoming trader preparing to go commercial.. Good luck to you...are you really sure you want to trade OPM? You seem to have the capital to build yourself by yourself...You will only get 1 or 2 million in the beginning to trade with...maybe 10 million. ES
Intradaybill - Thanks for your analysis and the results. I double checked for dec 2009 and dec 2010 and the returns were indeed 13.88% You are right I wonder myself if I just got lucky over the last 3 years. The main reason for that is I trade based on basic chart patterns and then I see all these people on TV or write articles with all kinds of big numbers and major analysis. Here are a few of the trades I did recently 1. Went short Coffee on 03/29/11 at 26000, reading the chart as a H&S Top Reversal Pattern - Got Stopped out the next day at 26425 2. Went short Coffee again on 04/04/11 at 25760 and got stopped out again on the next day at 26125 After at most 2 attempts at the same trade, I just move on 3. Went short Euro on 05/05/11 at 147200 reading the chart as a broadening top. The broadening pattern was much smaller in length compared to the up move so wasnt expecting a big move down and was able to bank only a 200 pip gain 4. Went long Nasdaq on 04/20/11 at 2337 reading the chart as a diamond continuation pattern and got stopped out on a pullback on 05/03/11 at 2387 . This was the first time I banked so many points on an equity trade.