What is the optimum business plan for a great trader/investor? How does an individual best leverage his ability to make long term calls in the market? I can open an etrade account and invest with 2-1 leverage. Not much leverage and bound by my own capital limitations. What if I only have X amount I want to risk. Severe limitations there. I can find a prop firm to give me 10-1 leverage. But then if i have a 10% drawdown on 10-1 leverage i would be out of business and they would want more money. Once again bound by my own capital limitiations. And overnight strategies will have greater than 10% drawdowns. So basically what i'm looking for is a firm to back my trading completely. I need my buying power to not be dictated by my personal wealth. But rather by my skill to be a profitable trader/investor. Does such a thing even exist? If I see ANF at $9 like it was 5 years ago I want to be able to buy every share i can. If its a good trade, i don't want to have any limits on how much of it I can buy. If I see HD at $22, i want to buy 5 million shares like bill gates did. What do i need to do to be able to do this? Are there any firms that allow proven traders to trade like this? Or is the only way to do this to have your own hedge fund and raise capital from investors?
hi silk I thought your best returns in your best yr were made in intraday trades without overnights? have you traded some of your money since then in a longer time frame ? maybe you can try leveraging with options?
I have done well in all time frames. The day trading game can be leveraged far more than the overnight game because the max drawdowns are so much lower. Problem is the day trading game has a maximum liquidity that you can day trade. As i mentioned in another thread, you can't really day trade stocks with over $15 or $20 million buying power effectively. So as i see it, the over $20 million game is longer term swing trading or investing. I don't have $20 million. And if i did I wouldn't want to risk it. But at the same time if I have a 55% expectancy at the craps table, i should be betting $1 billion a throw. Some big company that could risk it should be giving me $1 billion to play with. So who is that company? And what is their phone number.
I was actually looking for a firm that would allow me to trade with 3:1 leverage for overnight trading. Anything more then that would be to risky for overnight trading. A 20 % drawdown and I would need to put up additional cash to get me through it. Any my max is 19 %....but that doesn't mean that you won't get a larger drawdown in the future.... Leverage for me would have been a simple tool. It would allow me to trade my model in an optimum way while allowing me to allocate the rest of my funds to another project. Once the other project is complete I would increase my deposit and decrease my leverage accordingly to reduce risk and expenses like interest since the model is intended to trade with no leverage. Well, I couldn't find a place and it's OK... I didn't really have the time nor the drive to take any broker tests.... IB is fine....commission is ok for my trading, 2:1 is also ok, I simply had to deposit more then I really wanted to.... and you get SIPC protection to boot. As far as getting backing like the type your talking about you would probably need an audited track record and you would still have to adhere to some kind of risk profile. I don't think they would let you buy 5 mil hp like bill gates did.
I would want infinite leverage. Meaning i have no money up except maybe for hold backs of past profits. Getting to keep 20-40% of profits would be good.
hey silk ... basically you want to become the manager of the worlds largest hedge fund ... good luck ... I hope to read about you someday in the traders monthly instead of global fx LLC
People are doing what you are talking about at Schonfeld/Opus. If you prove yourself - $20 mil buying power is a definitie possibility -- and you do not have to put down a single dollar.Trading 100% the firms money puts things in a whole different perspective and takes your personal finances out of the trading equation. Many people (including myself) have regrettably left Schonfeld for what they thought were greener pastures only to find that they should not have been changing firms but working on their trading skills in the tougher market environment - in most cases, its not the firms - it all comes back to the individual traders. Schonfelds model now is to find great traders - and back them to start up hedge funds. If you are looking to do something on a large scale there are probably a few firms - SAC (probably impossible to get in), FNYS, DE SHAW, and Schoney.