That would not be hard..and God help the people you work for..are they related to Mr Madoff by any chance
You wouldn't appreciate it, I use 30-50 pip stops, you take profit before I even look again at my trade. Shall we just stick to the numbers and leave the personal stuff aside for a bit? Is there anything wrong with the numbers I provided? You said 5 trades a day. Please, by all means, give me a different win rate and R:R. It had nothing to do with Tharp, he gets undue credit for what is a long known fact. To profit in trading you need an edge. An edge can be demonstrated mathematically by win rate, average win size, loss rate, average loss size. That is all I demonstrated. If you object to my assumptions, please provide me with alternatives. As long as you are profitable, there are certain metrics that must apply. If you are losing, comms would be the least of your concerns. Losing $50 a point for the cost of a round trip that is less than 10% of the cost of that point?
The point I made was..Mr markeraddict is foolish to say you need not worry about commissions..this statement in itself..shows how little he really knows about making money. From the word go..with a $10k account as per my example..the trader will be down over 1/3 of his account value in one year..this is by no means anything to not worry about..and if you do 10 round trip trades a day on ES..which is still not a large amount..then you double the figures..still nothing to worry about You say..theoretical profits will make things right..but as we all know..theory is just that..you show me any trader here that can successfully daytrade the ES on a consistent basis..I think I will be waiting a long time. I doubt if you will find any trader here that can get a consistent 1:4 win rate..but as I keep saying..feel free to prove me wrong..I will be the first to say "sorry, I was wrong"
Sorry, I'm clearly mistaken as to the nature of this discussion. Your premise is there are no profitable traders here, that profits are theoretical at best, but commissions on trades that deliver those theoretical profits are very real and kill your profitability. Also, this discussion is about profitably day trading the ES. My mistake, I thought it was about trading in general. And I can't possibly argue the point that traders who lose do so because they can't make 1 point in profit that is about 10 times the round trip cost. I mean, if you can't make that sorry 1 point, you richly deserve to lose the comms. Bye, been fun.
If a trader is down 1/3 of a 10k account because of commissions, this means he has spent 3k on commissions. I figure $4 round trip, so this works out to 750 trades. If after 750 trades, he is break even on the numbers of points he has made and lost, but is down 3k for the commissions, then the clear problem is the edge. If you average just 1 tick profit over one trade, meaning on one trade you make 6 ticks, and then you lose 4 ticks, or any combination like this, this means that after 750 trades, you're 750 ticks ahead. Perhaps even say you win 8, then lose 6, etc. $12.50 per tick times 750 trades is $9375. This is what you win, minus the 3k in commissions, and you're still sitting on 6k profits. Conclusion: Yes, commissions will easily cost a trader who is always in and out many hundreds of dollars every month. But if the trader isn't profitable during that month, it isn't because of commissions but because of his trades. Even if the commissions were free, in the long run, the losing trader will still lose money and the winning trader just gets to pocket a bit more.
Gotcha, man, it's the weekend. Stop muddying up the fantasies by posting realism with commissions. *rolls eyes* After all, being down 1/3rd of an account means there are 2/3rd left to play with! Party-pooper!
I couldn't disagree with you more. If you don't risk more than 1% of your account per trade, then taking 2 or 3 trades per week on a small account is not financially viable. Even if you are batting a very respectable average of 0.5R per trade trading a small account is not financially viable. This leads the trader to doing 2 things: (i) overleveraging and risking more than 1% of their account (which is already huge by the way) (ii) overtrading to increase the number of spins. The overall result is increased psychological pressure which you are trying to minimise. Even with $250k batting at 0.5R, 2 trades per week only nets you $2500 per week on average if you risk 1% per trade, ok it's more than the average worker makes but that's a fairly low professional salary. You don't think people with large accounts are happy with so called small % returns? HNW & UHNW people are very happy if they can make 20% a year on a riskier portion of their capital via a venture / business (trading is a business) on top of their standard 5-7% tracker portfolios.
Again..for those who can not read..any so called trader who says commissions can be ignored..well..is clueless about making money. Hypothetical trader results mean nothing! Commissions and spread costs are real..as soon as you enter an ES trade you can add another $12.50 cost of doing business per trade. I really doubt if any of you stooges can make consistent profits..and as I keep saying..feel free to prove me wrong anytime you like ! In case you don't realize it..the nick is always a give away
Sure, you may not "work a 9-5" but instead of having a human boss at some job you're now a slave to the market. The problem here is you're not qualifying the real world costs of being chained to a computer every day trading away. There is a huge life benefit to trading on higher timeframes or trading *less*.