I disagree. I said a "good" trader, which means those who have succeeded --- and not the 90% or so who wash out. Consistently profitable traders can beat, sometimes easily, the bigger guys on a regular basis.
Yes - I think that's definitely true. Smaller size makes individual traders much more nimble - the flip side is that they can't bully the market like institutions can. The thing that I think destroys many good traders is the brush with illiquidity or "fat fingers" especially in the futures market there is always a chance of losing -100 points vs. standard -10 in certain situations. The winners are able to just shake it off and rebuild one trade at a time. The rest never recover from the shock.
Tiny, TINY minority. I've probably made more money in the markets than everybody on ET combined, except maybe the Bright Brothers, and I'm not consistent. It's a fact and dose of reality.... just throwing this out to all of you "Wannabe Trading Millionaires". There are a GAZILLION hopefuls... but only a relatively few successes.
True but they exit one trader in the book has only two losing days in the year to date that I interviewed him.
This is what successfully trading should be about, consistency and stability. That is what I am aiming for and so far just did it once for 1 month, 1 losing day and averaged 2% per day. BTW, it was publicly done and witnessed by many traders. It remains my ultimate goal and wish to do a whole year with max 12 losing days!
Put Jack out of his misery Gnome and let him know what it's like to be a winner, he gets cleaned up in trading contests
This book looks interesting--I hope these guys lay it all on the line like I do in my book, although I doubt they will. Advantage Sykes!
As I said the key difference is that they guys trade their own money - in a few cases much more than $2M - which they earned in the markets and they put on teh line every day. Give it a read you'll enjoy it.
The next idea I want to explore is the necessity of testing your method. One guy who was very successful trading equity made the transition into day-trading futures. But before he ever bought or sold a contract he paper traded for 3 months day in and day out until he could show a profit. Another guy who trades FX sets an incredibly difficult bar of tripling his demo twice before he lets any strategy go live. How many of us have the discipline to do that? That point was made very clear to me today. I am testing a scalping strategy in GBPJPY and of course I arrogantly thought I understood all there was to understand about it and of course got caught today and chopped a bit. But I am testing it on a tiny account so the damage was minuscule. If had been stupid enough to bring it live into a full account, it would have hurt a lot - and all completely unnecessarily. On Elite we've had millions of paper trading threads. YES paper trading is totally different from live trading. But while demo trading will not assure you make money when you go live, if you can't make money demo trading you almost certainly fail when you go live. BTW I consider the best form of paper trading to be done with a small real account. Kind of like playing poker for nickels and quarters. In FX where you can trade mini lots for dime or dollar pips its very easy to do. It gives you the thrill and agony of real execution without wasting a lot money as you experiment with your ideas.