PT, if you were only expecting 10-12% annualized returns, that is not worth a 60% drawdown, and you should immediately hire a financial advisor than following your algorithms because they will not ever at best outperform a diversified portfolio of buy and hold ETF's.
1) yes if I were using my failsafe method a drawdown of 60% is possible. 2) I said a conservative estimate of avg annual return, so 15-18% is not unlikely. 3) Your advice to get a financial advisor is just plain stupid because : A) this is exactly what happened in some asset classes in 2008. B) No financial advisor net of fees is going to generate annualized returns greater than 12%/yr.
1) yes my all time high was apx 1 million 2) still down 35% from there but that beats 55% IMHO 3) made 200k in 3 weeks changing strategies, that was sweet. 4) I have too many financial obligations for the 10-12% strategy to be the optimal default choice. 5) My risk is pretty high and I expect it to be so for the next 2 yrs after that I plan to cut back. Sooner if I can get my equity to 1.5-2 million. 6) All 60% drawdowns are not the same, but I wouldn't expect you to understand that.
Phoneix Trading: Fisrt I wish you luck and I also have a question on IB IRA. I have a margin IB account with IB and a 401K account with Fidelity. I was planning to trade in my 401K using their brokeragelink account which is a kind of IRA.But the restrictions imposed by Fidelity (they say it is cash account restrictions) which handcuffed me from trading. Here are some restrictions. I want to see whether IB has the same restrictions on IRA accounts: Fidelity says if you have for example 10,000 in your account and buy a stock and sell it at 11000 with 1K profit the same day (so far it is OK). You sale money will be settled after 3 days. Now if you do another trade for 10000 (same day) , Fildelity will let you do that but actually Fidelity is borrowing you money because your money from the first trade is not settled. If you want to sell again the position that just opened, you cannot do that. The reason is that you cannot sell any position that you have not paid back the borrowed money. That locks you to one trade in 3 days or 2 trades without being able to close the second position. The opther restrictsion that I have are: I can sell cash covered PUT, buy Call, sell covered call and thats it. I cannot do call spread (but a call and sell a call at higher strike price) to reduce the risk. I cannot sell PUT spread. I wish I could transfer my 401K account to IB IRA but unfortunately I cannot. So if IB, imposes, the same restrictions, your hands will be tied.
The restriction on selling a put is one placed by the govt on all retirement accounts as far as i know. You cannot sell short: stocks, stock options, . You can however short futures but you don't get to use any intraday margin you must basically maintain overnight initial and overnight maintenence margin at all times. I don't seem to have those settlement issues that you describe with fidelity with regard to stock purchase, stock sale ,stock repurchase. They all have the same settlement time period. I suspect that could be an issue when mixing instruments of differing settlement times, stocks , options back to stock. Myself I don't use options because I don't understand them very well. The ones I'm interested in would be weekly VIX options if they were european style. I don't like American style options. best of luck to you , I would contact IB chat If I were you and ask them.
That's true but I must remind you that a financial advisor that does not have me 100% in stocks has less than a snowballs chance in hell of making annualized 12% returns. Lets just be honest the only way a financial advisor net of fees is going to beat me is LUCK flipside might be better off doing as you suggest but not myself.
12% annualized returns without 100% equity exposure, oh PUHLEEZE get real. besides you've got to remember 12% is a low ball estimate for me. 12% for an advisor is bumping the credibility/ luck ceiling (not that people on this site couldn't benefit from them).