$1k a day is peanuts here in NYC. I wouldnt even brag about a trader unless he is pulling atleast $1mil a year for atleast 5 years. $6-7k a month is not even worth looking at a computer screen all day. A good secretary on wall street will make more than that.. get your facts in order dude.. u dont know what uare talking about. Soemone like Marty Schwartz pulled in $40-50k a day and sometimes even $100k. When I read his interview somewhere on the net.. he said that he doesnt consistently make that much anymore because the game keeps on changing and as he gets older he loses his interest. Mecro.. u continuously have the attitude of I know everything and everyone else is stupid. In reality your points have very little insight. Anyone thinks that trading is about making money every week or month.. will learn a good lesson after 5+ years. Anyone that consistently makes money for so long (on a weekly or monthly basis) is bound to run into problems because more than likely the reason that they are making it is because of some type of edge they exploited.. which eventually will rid itself out. Every single market cycle will bring new players with different characters.. thus u will have different characteristics of the market... thats how edges get washed out. In the mid to late 90's anyone trading commodities was getting killed because the market did nothing... it was basing for the rally we had that started in 2002. The commodity traders in the 70's were the legends as where the stock traders in 1999-2000. A good example.. look at David Floyd. Van Tharp and even his son brag about this guys amazing daytrading record. He has aleast 5+ years of making nice money.. and his consistency was amazing. Look where he is today. He pushing his crappy services, selling books, and focused all his attention to FX market. Trading is not your ordinary business and shouldnt be viewed that way at all. The risks and pain threshold is much higher. How many businesses do you know where u can click one button and in 5 minutes your entire life's earnings can be washed away? Hell that can even come from a mistake and there very well might be nothing that can be done. Are u gonna compare that to a risk of a restaurant getting more healthy competition? How many businesses do u know require you to compete everyday with some of the smartest people in the world... that have much better information.. more resources and in some cases a much greater edge than u?? U think u can compare this to your typical Joe starting a plumbing supply store or pizza shop?? What a joke. Thats why most people fail. --MIKE
Pabst Elite Member Registered: Dec 2001 Posts: 1968 10-27-03 04:39 PM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Quote from DHOHHI: To do so would require a lack of discipline IMO. To not reallocate some assets to "safe" investments as one accumulates more profits is foolish. Again, IMO. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LOL!! Of course going broke "requires" a lack of discipline. Who knows whether in one year, ten years, or thirty years when their own season will change? There is a prevalent yet dangerous fallacy among younger traders that getting over an arbitrary experience threshold guarantees long term monetary success. Nothing can be further from the truth. Many of you twenty something gentlemen are in your trading/personal prime. You're living in nice apartments, dating pretty girls, and making enough money to give you the illusion of both prosperity and security. Now let's look ahead as you perfect your craft with age. All of sudden you're now 45. You've been trading for twenty years. If skilled you may have a nice home virtually paid for, a million in your account/bank, a wife and kids. But inside you something has changed. Maybe you have an affair with that hot chick you met cross town. Then your wife finds out and voila', you're dream house...gone. Half your liquid assets...gone. The lolita that caused your life to turn into such turmoil...gone. Now you're back in that one-bedroom apartment that you started in, twenty years earlier. At 45 you clearly have more experience and savvy than you did starting out. Even post divorce, you have more money then you did back in those days of prop shop trading during the boom. But now your expectations, your longing for what you had and what you lost, places you in a position where the notion of regrouping and remembering what made you a success is as remote as the blind mans memory of squinting in the morning sun. Now you're pressing, overtrading, chasing the mythical dragon. Next thing you know, you're being sued for child support, and unable to afford an attorney, you spend a night in county jail, your jaw fractured by a fellow inmate who thinks you're some rich asshole. This story happens every day to some formally happy to be trading more than one year, now I've made it trader.
a good trader trades his system well. over time, his system improves, as his system imprves, so does he. saying someone isnt a good trader becuase he doesnt make $1M/year is horseshit. maybe someone does $10,000/month with very high reward/risk - and stays within his comfort zone - just nicks the market to death and sleeps well at night. i talked to a buddy about trading. he said he knew a good daytrader at the gym - big beemer, big house, etc. guy blew his brains out. good trader?
U are miss quoting what i said. I said i wouldnt "brag" about a trader unless he is pulling in serious money... like $1mil a year. In New York the cost of living is very high. $100k before taxes is not enough to support a family with 3 kids.. 2 cars and a nice house.. assuming you have a house wife and owe a mortgage. You will have no savings and be living under massive debt your entire life. Just wait until u have to pay for college or even dream of sending your kids to private school, or even take a nice family vacation every year. Its not doable if you live in NYC.. and wanna live in a half decent neighborhood. I agree a good trader can make $10k a month.. for that matter a good pizza shop owner or salon manager can make that money too. Whats your point?
first of all, you can get experience from whatever you do... if nothing else, trading teaches money management, risk analysis and patience and discipline. those skills are transferable. its all change. guys that do residential appraisals are being replaced by AVMs, call centers being shipped overseas, IT, tech changes, etc. there's no guarantee at all - even MDs get squeezed by Kaiser Permanante and the like. but i can almost guarantee you that if you dont try trading before you get too old, you'll never do it. im almost 50 yrs old and biz is good, so im milking it, but i wish i'd taken the leap earlier in life to trading. i can do my biz PT, which will make trading a little harder when i go FT... if you guys wanna do it, try it before you have a wife, children, house payments, etc. go for it, if you fail you adjust - thats life anyway... my life is flying by now, just smoking past me; the pages just disappear off of the calendar.... new year's, tax time, summer, thanksgiving, christmas - dude, it flys by - our rubbish collection is once a week and i feel like i rolls those cans down the driveway every-other day. my biz has been very good to me, but socal real estate has been hot for most of the past 20 years - my timing was lucky... the best thing i ever did was starting my own biz and i was scared and ive been doing it successfully for 20 yrs. sometimes i feel like telling a client to 'eff-off, but a short time later something happens and i wake up in a cold sweat thinking "geez, im glad i didnt drop the F-bomb" on that client. im taking a few victory laps to make sure i never have to work again when i stop, which wont be long. giving into fear and taking a govt job or big corp job and spending your whole life a cubicle on the same hamster run maybe be a bigger failure than going for your dream and having setbacks, perhaps major setbacks. anyway, some of you younger dudes will think im a "full-a-crap old geezer" but i thought the same thing when guys my age talked to me when i was your age. goood luck
HMM.. thats a tricky statement to say. Assuming u use the same system and it loses its edge you dont have much of a system anymore. How are u gonna get better? So are u gonna be system trading or .. trading systems? Let me give u a real example. In shwaggers new stock market book there is a guy named Steve Lescarbeau. He was an outstanding system trader with amazing risk to reward with great returns. Eventually his systems stopped working... he ended up losing a little right before the bear got underway and called it quits and went into cash. To me he is a brilliant man. Now lets say u are average Joe that wants to become a trader and u are using a trading system thats making u decent money consistently. All of the sudden it just stinks and u cant make a dollar for over 6 months. You think all u have to do is fine tune it or find some other edge.. but u just cant find anything that works well because the market is not behaving to your liking. Bills are mounting.. u need to pay the dentist .. what are u gonna do? Can u afford to just stop everything and keep on backtesting systems until u get confident.. in reality the pressure will catch up with u and u will be another trading casuality. Its easier said than done.. and let me tell you.. you need brass balls to system trader. And blue balls to know when to quit when your system craps out. --MIKE
look dude, everything changes... whatever biz you start in today, there is no guarantee that there will be demand for your services in a year or decade into the future. NONE! so you might lose your edge, does that mean you dont attempt trading? poll the people here and ask them if they trade the same exact system or if they have the same approach they did on Day #1. almost none will reply in affirmative. life changes - run around looking for guarantees and your life will pass you by. so if i extend your statement a little; then no one should trade a system because they cant guarantee that they wont lose their edge.... commute 1-hour to work each way, live month-to-month and crap your pants when the guys on either side of you get pink slips - that'lll lose your "EDGE" real quick.. walk out into the rain at 55 yo realizing you just got cut from a job in a declining industry - the market is saturated with job-seekers - you're too old to hire (whether they admit to you or not). you're debating - im trying make an entirely different point. below is a portion of your original post that i originally responded to. im not gonna argue, debate, whatever... "$1k a day is peanuts here in NYC. I wouldnt even brag about a trader unless he is pulling atleast $1mil a year for atleast 5 years. $6-7k a month is not even worth looking at a computer screen all day. A good secretary on wall street will make more than that.. get your facts in order dude.. u dont know what uare talking about."
I am not debating with you.. but u misquoted me and referred to one of my statements as horseshit. I just further clarrified my position on the whole issue of trading for a living. No hard feelings either way. peace --MIKE
To me, the dividing line is simple: to be successful as a trader, you have to love it. Plain and simple. If you're trading just for the lifestyle, or if you're trading from an "away" motivation- to get away from a crappy job, to get away from a commute, to get away from a boring life- then it's probably not worth the effort. I crack up when I hear all these stories about how bad corporate life is, and trading is so much better. Working for a good company, or working for yourself, can be a lot of fun. In the business world you get to share your ups and downs with others, and you can make six figures on a much better reward to risk basis if you know what you're doing. "Corporate America Sucks" isn't a reason to become a trader. The only reason to really become a trader is if you really, truly love the game. If you love it, that makes up for all the late nights and the bad breaks and huge obstacles. Otherwise, you probably won't have the ability to see it through. I think that becoming a successful trader is more comparable to professional sports than to running a business. Running a business isn't that hard if you have the contacts, the ability and the skillset. Succeeding as a professional athlete, however, requires years of devotion and sweat no matter how much talent you start with. Also, while business success has a lot to do with who you know and how well you can sell, trading and athletic success have zero to do with other people, except in terms of what you can learn from them. I think Brett Steenbarger is right that most individuals simply don't have the time, the capital or the stamina to overcome the learning curve- that long slow road that drains your motivation as you train. On the other hand, though, it's just as dangerous for would be traders to take the "I want to succeed no matter what" mentality and then waste ten years of their lives because they're too stubborn to realize it wasn't meant to be. If you're at the crossroads, you have to wonder: To press on, or not to press on? No easy answer- but if you truly love the game, you don't have to ask the question. For so many who get into trading I wish I could ask, what do you want? I mean, what do you really want? Do you even know? Are you sure you're not just looking for a diversion, something to distract you from the rest of your life for a while?