as dealmaker had said, the GOOD props will offer some sort of training and/or mentorship program to get you going AND you have access to intraday with infinite amounts of leverage. with that, if you truly are a whiz at the game but only have $5k in your retail 4X leverage intraday account, making 30% per month, it will be a while before you have the capital to trade half a million Apple shares per day. for me, i would rather not be paying the extra coin for the data feeds of a "professional trader" BUT the intraday leverage makes it well worth it.
and of course, if you can't trade, the extra leverage will just drain your account that much faster. retail firms are bound by regulations that allow them only to give you 4 X leverage as a PTD and min. $25k in account or in the case of the new Portfolio Margin accounts (since 2006, i think), maybe 6X dependent upon the risk of your portfolio but they require more money in your account, from $100k (IB) to $500k (lightspeed).
NO prop trader is burning through 500K AAPL a day. FEW prop firms have sufficient mentoring to maintain a consistent pool of profitable traders. i think the ratio of HOME to OFFICE is like 100:1 for assent backed offices. maybe even 200+:1. and out of that, maybe 5% are making money consistently day in day out. the rest are just backsliding into debt and crime to feed their delusional greed habit. chatting over AIM what's moving and listening to that annoying little geek over the squawk box bark out baitandswitch trades does NOT qualify as mentoring. paying for webinars with esignal, paid for by kickbacks on the professional trader data fees, does not qualify as education. hedge funds absolutely DO NOT provide better mentoring. hedge funds are staffed with pirates, blood-thirsty sharks that are in it for the money, and will employ every possible strategy, play every possible angle, manipulate and coerce everyone they can for an edge, with absolutely no concern for anyone but themselves, and their employers' bottom lines. prop firms are about churning execution volume. nothing more. the more bodies they get on the network, the higher their leverage, the more money they make using your risk capital deposit in their collective accounts to trade against the positions (didn't think of that, did you?) of inexperienced traders, and in their own volume trades having access to a deep seeded string of waiting trades on the bid/ask in which to liquidate against their own traders. you do not honestly believe they have your best interest at heart, when they can just recycle naive college student after college student with $5K, $10K of daddy's money to burn, do you? it's no different than an atlantic city casino game of roulette. place your bet, lose, double up, lose double, double again, win, double down again, bust out. and all along that process, the house is betting against your position, delaying trades, front running, shorting you out, keeping you on a string scalping dimes so you don't get wise and rat them out to the sec. any scumbag can hire a couple of traders to buffer incoming trades to cut .005 off every position, double them up, send them back cutting another .005 or whatever they can get away with depending on the volatility of the stock or etf. this is why you see massive gaps in the opens and closes. pending overnight trades coming waiting on preopen with delayed execution against opposite side positions within the same firm. you have a room of 100 prop traders, half of them think AAPL is going to open down on the bell, the other half are long. it's not like any of these assholes can agree, or their opinions are based on any solid analysis, technical or otherwise, there are maybe 5% with university educations. most are wannabe poker players. at best. what a stock is going to do is all a guessing game. no one can predict the future. to assume you're right one way or the other is just insanity. so if you're the house, why wouldn't you delay executions by a half second, throw an extra .005 on there as a "liquidity fee" and run one side long against one side short and make money off both sides? hedge funds play volume, move massive blocks of stock against known opposite side positions of their clients, other funds, and the pool. the prediction and matching processes are completed by computers that can calculate pi to the 1024th bit faster than i can type it. humans can not out think computers. hedge funds eliminate risk from the process by evening the odds, they don't assume it, or create it. but they can be destroyed by it if the entire market moves against them, which ironically, is themselves cannibalizing each other into oblivion at the moment. you think you understand this game. well, you don't. if you did, you'd be starting your own prop firm and not pretending to be smarter than everyone else by thinking you can actually guess which way a stock is going to open in 7 hours...
i could take ten prop traders with 25K each, tell them to trade x shares of x stock at x moment in the day, x numbers of shares per trade, x times per day, and at the end of the day make x profit without barely breaking a nail. every one of them would walk out the door that day with more than they walked in. guaranteed. OR, with the same $250K cash, ANY prop firm today will give me less than .002 per share on execution, not including kickbacks, because i'm going to churn and burn 1M shares of BAC an hour cutting .02 per 1000 shares 1000 times over, all automated, executed faster than the click of a keyboard shortcut key, more profitable than a speeding ticket, able to leap tall blonde hookers on a single lunch. i'm supertrader. THAT's the advantage of prop firms. it's actually quite an incredibly boring game if the other side wins, the other side loses, all the time. why even play?
TYKTrading, There are firms that will give you more than 0.002 and most prop firms will offer 10 or more leverage/margin.
i'm well aware. thanks. it was more for the example than a statement of fact for any one firm. i may be a little heavy with the hyperbole, but the underlying principles are sound. the assent branches last year all offered me something like 98% and .0015 or with 100:1 on $10K because my track record was so good. i could start with $2000 on 4x and normal etrade level commissions and still make money. the numbers are somewhat irrelevant when the trading decisions and analysis are consistently profitable. i just don't like how assent operates, and i don't find being surrounded with neophyte arrogant college kids and asian number crunchers who know nothing about the stock markets, all of which are professional texas hold 'em wannabes distracting me in their run down trading offices. the nicest, best setup assent branch is avatar in nyc. they are a class act above and beyond all the other branches, have an incredibly well run floor with some of the smartest traders i've ever met, and the managers are beyond reproach. the location is great, the offices are a real pleasure to work in, and the computer systems are state-of-the-art. if i am going to recommend anyone who wants to trade prop with assent, it's avatar. ask for ray. and, my business goals are greater than simply being a prop trader, as you may have surmised...
TRYKtrading- You know nothing about Assent as your ridiculous drivel clearly demonstrates. Your stories are so wildly bad, I can't even imagine how fictitious the rest of your jibberish is.
imagine that. all i know, clubber, is what my experience was last year before the shit hit the fan, and what was put in front of me by the company and its branches, and the dismal success rate of the traders i witnessed working there. out of maybe 100 guys, i doubt even 10 of them were consistently profitable month over month. i made more money trading my retail accounts than off assent's dogshit anvil platform crashing and feeding false data, the esignal links failing all the time, no tech support of any kind, and kids screaming out to go long when stocks broke their 80% FASTK. it's a churn and burn shop. period. so if that's jibberish, then it's jibberish, and that's exactly what i want some dumb ignorant fuck with a nickname of a gonowhere mr. t. boxing character from a bad rocky movie to think. and if i'm wrong, reveal your identity and relationship to them, and TELL THE AUDIENCE HOW ASSENT REALLY WORKS. PLEASE.
LOL. You scream failure. Seen guys like you for the last 10+ years. Lose money, blame the platform, lose money, blame the other traders, lose money, blame the techs, lose money, etc, etc, etc. Not sure which mook office you went to, but after reading your whining it's clear it was a sub LLC, which is NOT Assent.
i rest my case. knockout in the second round. shall i list them? or perhaps they all operate under the same franchise agreement and business practices. which is more plausible?