actually, i would be willing to wager that a very high percentage of them actually make it all the way through the door.. who cares about percentages or averages.. i mean think about it.. average is basically the top of the bottom, bottom of the top.. or to put it another way, the cream of the crap.. i could care less how many failures there are % wise in the world, im gonna make it or die trying.. thats all i need to know.. -qwik
lol, you are qwik However I must say that I've also wondered what the failure rate is at the prop firms. Don, you listening?
"who cares about percentages or averages.. " I'll take that as a "I don't know" Anyone out there that does know, feel free to respond.
I went to a trading seminar One of speaker mentioned; 1. 50% of pro firm traders are profitable 2. Usually it takes 6 month to make money....(learning period) 3. A good mangement office has over 80% succesfull rate even in a same pro firm.
It is higher than retail, but still substantially less than 50%. I do not know the exact numbers, but I would estimate than 5 out of 10 new traders at my firm will tap out within first year or so, 2 out of 10 make less money than our technical support staff. I would estimate the success rate is 30%. I don't care how good training/support is, anything substantially more than that they are sugar coating it. Every firm (including my own) will tell you it is 70-80%, lies, damned lies.
actually what i said was more an apathetic "I dont care" than an ignorant "I dont know".. but you are right.. i dont know.. in fact, no one can know the exact statistics.. take Bright Trading for example.. they could take the total number of accounts they have opened from the first day of their firm and calculate based on the number of accounts that are still active.. but the problem is what about all the traders that left Bright for Echo or Worldco? what about all the traders that left to trade at a retail broker from home? what about the traders that went bust, went back to work to save money and then returned to trading.. and how do you define "making it".. 25k? 100k?.. no one can take into account all of these variables.. thats why this type of question will generate alot of "as many people as really want to make it do" type of answers.. i apologize if my joking around came across the wrong way.. -qwik
Cdntrader =), let me break it down.. you asked a question where the general answer is commonly known but the actual specific number cannot be determined with any degree of precision.. since we all know that the failure rate for traders is very high, it occurred to me to ask "who cares" what the actual number is.. then i went on to say that i do not "care" and expressed my view that the "averages or percentages" are not particularly relevant.. you see, the actual question itself does not interest me nearly as much as why it was asked in the first place.. mere curiosity like Nicodemus or mental BO? and thats why i posted.. i would have let my first remarks stand had your subsequent post not indicated a need to clarify.. again, no offense intended.. good trading.. -qwik
I can tell you that this is a tough question to answer for the following reason. There is a guy who who became a friend of mind who came into our office and trained with us. After about two weeks he bagged our training and traded nasdaq stocks and made a little money at first. Then he lost some. Then he bought 400 SCH and was down 50 cents. He went to lunch. Came back- down more. Finally closed it out after losing $20,000.00. plus. Then he committed to our style. Profitable within two weeks. In January 2000, which was about his fourth month, he made $100,000.00 . During 2000 he made over $300,000.00. In 2001 by July, he gave back more than $100,000.00 and quit trading for a while. Does he go in to the positive trader column or not. In 1999 and 2000 I believe that all of the traders in our office (10-15 traders) were profitable except about 3. (Two of those traders were not trained by us and did not trade our style so you might say all but one of the short term traders were profitable) During 2001 we took on 5 or 6 new traders and only 2 to three of them are profitable, plus we lost the one trader mentioned above. So as a group this year we are only around 50% profitable for the year. Those new traders were all backed with our money and unfortunately for us this fall was much tougher for short term trading NYSE stocks than previous falls. (They did not lose much capital, nevertheless we hate to lose any money at all) I normally do not talk about this stuff and the lawyer in me wants to post the standard warning, in case this post creates problems. Trading is difficult, you could lose all your money. Past performance does not equal future performance and my firm does not solicit retail traders.