This is the continuation of my first journal. Since 2016-08-05 I trade this live account that was initially funded with 10k. Before that I trained for about 4 weeks with an IB paper account with realtime data that was funded with 1M. I'm trading equity options and of course also the equities (ie. stocks). I plan to trade also futures and their options. Here I'll postly only weekly or monthly results, like many other authors do in their journals.
"4 weeks"...I paper traded/Studied the market for more than Five years ...before finally returning to it live, after I lost a significant portion of my account when I first jumped in during the crazy financial crisis days.
Similar here I had been a hobby trader for many years, then I took a break of about a year and studied the field of options. Now after doing paper trading with options for some weeks, I recently went live. Trading has now become my primary business. Before that I worked as a professional SW-developer (C++) for a very long time. I'm still learning the IB C++ API. I'm making good progress but developing the automation takes some time...
Incredible! PL (unrealised) now almost +60%... Update: "unrealised PnL" is maybe not the correct term; I just meant the profit if hopefully all positions expire in my favor, ie. the value $16079 below (called by IB as "cash") minus the initial value of 10k: Current status:
If I only had a bigger account then I could make much more of such profitable trades. With the instruments I'm trading there is much profit possible as the BidSize and AskSize are really big; one just needs to take that liquidity...
Yeah, you can't count that as a 60% return since you still have those open obligations on the options. That wouldn't even be remotely close to accurate. Nonetheless, good luck with the trading!