Hello fellow traders. Just wanted to share my trading experiences and future plans. My background includes a BS in Meteorology, A Certified Financial Planner designation, insurance agency ownership, and now a position as an Financial Advisor for JP Morgan Chase. Now why would I state the previous, because I want to be a full time trader like so many others on this site. My trading experience began about 3 years ago surfing the internet looking for a new way to make money. I have been in business for myself since 2000 and I was really bored with insurance and retail financial service sales. I opened my first FOREX account with 1k and had no idea what trading was. Now I had read several books on stocks and actually worked as a stock broker for about a year so I had some market experience. Boy how little I knew I was about to find out. Needless to say I blew up my first 1k in about a year. Now losing actually taught me so much and I knew I found a new passion. I read tons of trading books, read websites like this, and decided trading was my future. One day looking on craigslist.com I ran across an employment ad looking for equity traders for a private equity fund. Sat down with my wife and said can you handle our insurance business, because I really wanted to try this. I spent about a year with the fund trading CEFs, REITs, and ETFs. My first 6 weeks I was making money even had a $700 day at one point. Then the broad market decided to go into the recent chaos and my profit vanished and my equity slowly took a nose dive. Frustrated with trading style of the fund me and two traders joined together and got a sweet prop deal. We thought we were going to finally make it and get rich or atleast make a good living. I put up 5k and two others put up 15k each. We began daytrading AAPL and other stocks with little success. I managed to close my account with $4200 in equity, one other pulled 9k and the other is still there with 3k and limited buying power. Once I pulled my money out I decided to spend some money in training with the online trading academy and dumped my 4k into my FOREX account. I decided that you CANNOT trade without atleast 25k so I took a day job as a Financial Advisor again and decided to trade FOREX at night. I have seen improvement in my trading and right now plan to trade FOREX and work my day job so I can save money, pay some bills, and better be prepared to take on the market full time again. I will succeed as a trader and I think most can too. It just takes dedication and at times the honesty to know that you are not ready for the endeavor. There is no shame in a day job. Just wanted to share my story because I know reading people stories really can be inspiring and educational. Wannabe Trader.
I have to point it out for you: You live in a fantasy world=you are delusional=you are day dreaming. Reason: success/failure ratio for traders is 1/99, NOT "most" as in your above statement. For example, you and two of your buddies went into the prop firm, none have succeeded, that is 100% failure.
By your theory there would be no traders and no wall street... if you work hard enough anything is achievable... dedication and persistence!
One of the greatest failures in this country is the health care system. Most of the sick people are not receiving proper care, especially the mentally sick. If you are physically sick, they will patch you up and send you away, but they seldom do anything to the mentally sick, unless they start purchasing guns on the Internet and then shoot people in schools, churches, factories and shopping malls. If they are caught alive, they are sent to prisons. They will never receive the psychiatric care they need in the first place. What's the result of so many mentally sick people living within the healthy population? They pop up everywhere (prop shop, remote sites, basements, web seminars, trade expos, ET forum....). Every day there are some who become delusional and decide to become day traders! I bet a large pencentage of the ET posters are mentally sick! bkveen3 may be one of them.
Who told you "anything is achievable"? Your high school principal? It's totally irresponsible to mislead young minds into the dead end. Actually, it should be illegal to tell people lies like that, it's very harmful. It will lead you into a life of frustrations, misery, failures, pain killers (Do you like hydroco? I just purchased 500 tablets from the Internet), shop lifting, scamming, setting up trading chatrooms, becoming a stock broker/car salesman/real estate agent/sub-prime mortgage originator/Mississippi resident/garbage collector/ditch digger/pig farmer.....
Why do these wanker/loser threads attract any replies? Pere490 is just one more fantasist who gets washed up on tide .. at ET.
Don't listen to 4DTrader he's been a loser since he joined ET. Look at his posts they speak for himself!
I for one thought the OP's story was honest and frank about the stages one must go through to be a successful trader. He freely admits to not having made it yet, which is more than can be said of most on here. Hence, he has more gonads than those who poison perfectly good threads with vitriol and hate.