To illustrate your hypocritical point, who cares about head to head competition of traders? That sounds like grade school whining to compete to prove one's self-worth. A good trader is validated in the daily sheets, not going head to head- especially for 3 months. 3 months is crap. So if you really believe the hype about mentoring, then leave the childish challenges out of it and just talk trading. It amazes me how people feel they have to throw quarterly returns around to justify themselves to others. If you trade for yourself, no one else cares about your returns and if you trade for a firm, you are making returns for someone else's pocket. So before the next person comes with the childish "My Dad can beat up your Dad" challenge of let's go head to head in a trading competition, realize that once you are an adult, leave behind the childish games to validate yourself.
Oh my f gawd. You wouldn't even come close to standing a chance. However, until you said this I thought your post was well thought out and even helpful. nitro
I do appreciate your comments, and can see your point where that came off sounding like a jerk-off. I am not the trader whom I was referred to and would not kid myself about making those type of returns. I only trade about one week a month due to the work load. We have a trader in our group who has put those number up along with some other consistant track records, but my point was taken out of contest and only wanted to take a jab at Don and his blabbering. I can give a fuck about ego and throwing numbers around, but for some reason, Don just gets under my skin with his approach to trading and how he handles his business. I should have thought better about that comment and challenge and will not spout off again about any competition. Can I retract my challenge? I still would like to see if there are small managers ( 5M to 10M) that can produce those type of number over a 2 to 3 year period. That was really my point and I let my love for Don get in the way.
i dunno don and have not much of a clue 'bout da way he handles his biz but he's gone through many bubbles'n'crashes without a problem [would he be here now otherwise?]...maybe he's got not such a bad money mngmt strategy in place afterall...
I will see if our big trader is a Jenga Fan and get back to you Coach. Like a good trader should, I will take my loss and look for the next idea and not put good money after bad....................and to give back to the community along with saying my 10 hail marries after confession: I will give a nice trading nugget to all that do not know about the expirations manipulation that happens each Thur and Friday morning with the futures and cash expiration. The Trade set up. Thur after he close, on expiration week. watch what has happen 7 out of the last 8 monthly cycles. This last month exp. was the smallest range yet, but still profitable. There are a few ways to play it but I just uses the futures as the easiest way to get involved along with a put below as an overnight event stop. Buy the ES futures at the close with your long put below 10 points as the stop. 2 to 1 ratio on the future to the cash index on the spx. The bigger banks and desk will run the over night futures up as gradually as possible and than really push the peddle into the cash opening. The cash spx options go out with the first prints of each SP500 stock. Many times...the settle price is 3 to 8 points higher that the cash hit in that first 5 min. Blow out those long futures and reverse your position by 50% of what you were long. In triple witch, you have to use the forward contract as the near term goes out with the cash. Using estimates, there are 3 to 6 point to be had over night on the long side and usually 5 to 9 points on the short side within the first hour of trading. There are combination of different trades that can be done on this set up........but I can not give it all away. Think....... I am full of shit? Go back the last 12 months on that 3rd thur and friday of the month and look at the price action. Recently, there was about $110 Million taken from short call holder in the SPX market (taken from at the money open interest) as the settled the cash spx index 6 points higher than the index traded that morning. That is dam good manipulation. The "big boys" pushed up the thin ES market place on a fewer that 25K contracts and than pulled the rug from the market with a nice 8 + point move straight down. Same trade happens in the NQ and AB. Trade well.
Nitro, After reading some of your posts and the fact that you are activetrader and seem to be prevalent on this board with savvy content, I do respect your opinion and thus would like a follow up response: Someone that can crank out 20+ % months on a consistant basis would not hold water to any Bright Prop traders trading a some what large account? Say $2M -$3M. I just have not seen a equity traders in the past 2-3 years come close to that type of scalibility month in and month out. Making a few 100K per month was a big month in the office I was at during the bubble but that was not consistant. So your comment about not coming close to competing with 50+ % quarters to a Prop Day Trader trading decent size is supervising to me. I may be off .....but tell me if I am. I will attach a monthly sheet of this guys account that he sent me just to confirm my comments. I blacked out his name and info so he would not catch shit from guys around here. This board is brutal. We can call him TraderTiv - He was up $610K on a $2.7M account. I honestly would like some clarity on this. Thanks for the time in advance. TC
Maybe TraderTiv is just another Victor N. of the hour ? 700k in short primium while VIX at historical lows ?
20% a month of any account > $25K is a tremendous number by any measure. You have to be real careful how you do your calculations because people at prop firms often put down 25K, but are using leverage that is many many many times that. So in order to compare apples to apples, you should always calculate your returns based on money in play, not return account. That is another reason why you need to be careful when comparing options traders to equity traders. Options trading allows great leverage, so it is silly to say I bought a $2.00 option and it went to $3 so I made 50% returns and compare it to the an equity trader that had the same position but in the underlying. Regular Bright traders don't trade options, so you would need some sort of normalized way to compare returns. Finally, a trader should also be measured by the number of decisions he makes in order to make his money. If you make one decision to make your money, and I tak ten to make the same money, people will say that the second trader is "churning" his account. I would say that probably, upon closer inspection, you would find that while he pays more comission, his risk adjusted returns are far greater than the less volumed trader. Options, except in some arbitrage situations, aren't meant to be traded in and out of except by MMs. I knew of one "Bright" trader that was making 100K a day a couple of years back. You have to be careful with defining a "Bright" trader because while there are traders that trade at Bright, they also trade with multiple firms. This particular person traded the world 18 hours a day at multiple firms. Many traders do that because they chase the "best" deal in each category of their trading. To be honest with you, I think there is a motive for your posts. I can tell you that I couldn't give a shit if I was making 50% a month and had to announce to the world that this is better than "Bright" traders. In fact I would keep it quiet and just rake in the dough. So I think you are some sort of salesman for this company. nitro
Nitro, Thanks for the time to answer. My motive for even spending time with this situation is to simply allow this guy to put his trading in perspective with the other smaller managers under 25M. I have never mentioned my firm nor who this trader is with us. I have been in that game for over 4 years now and do not need to prospect here or anywhere. I have already done that and It was the worse part of the entire process. We have 60+ traders whom to deal with and would like to cut that to 20 if i was still making those decision. Anyway, the progression from large prop trader to smaller managers to 100M manager is the stage we are in now. That is new territory for me and I want to see what type of commodity we have and how to develop the opportunity from here. If that is motive, than I guilty. I have given back to this network of traders and will continue if I can on the weekends, but the trading week is to busy. Thanks for you time. I do appreciate that. I like the short side here for the next 60 days. That is how I will be setting our our options box and will sell bounces with our intraday scalps til the 1322 level is taken out. I have no worries about liquidity, its a think markets in the indexes and when the weekly options pick up volume than we have a nice little weekly trade to play with. Trade well>