No, you misunderstood what I said. Let me clarify. There are "plenty" of people making money trading futures. They just don't have an edge. Most of their success is tied either to variance or "excessive" risk taking. So what I'm saying is this, those two variables will block you from succeeding in a combine but might permit you to generate p&l in your personal account. But sooner or later, given enough time and trades, excessive variance and risk taking will doom you in. But over short periods of time they are illusory.
Given my 2 year experience in trying to learn to day trade futures, and looking back at it now, and see no reason to disbelieve anything Maverick74 has said. I fit his description perfectly, young and naïve with no marketable skills (and English was my second language) and figured I didn't need any college because I had all these day trading sites to learn from. Why go into student loan debt when I could pay $50 or $100 a month to learn day trading from a guru? Or learn it for free in a forum or chat? I would make more money than most anyone who went the "traditional" path and not have any debt either! Yes that is what I thought...... I truly thought I was on a legit path. As for whether anyone makes consistent money day trading futures, I have no idea what is in others pnl. But given some of the characters I have run across online...... and seeing them caught in lies or other deception, or finding their posts full of contradictions that just don't add up.... I have no reason not to believe what Maverick74 has said. It all makes sense actually. Eventually I realized this whole business was simply crazy and had to swallow my pride and admit I was wrong about making a living day trading (or even worse had been skammed by some) and get on a better path in life and enroll in school. Yes it sucked because I felt like an idiot for believing some of the stuff i came across but just call it a life lesson I suppose.
It sounds to me like those people all need to find themselves a real edge, instead of something based on temporary outliers. Based on price action itself, your edge can never die
Just show me your charts from the combine. For some reason everyone on ET is a billionaire except when they do a combine and then they can't find their head from their ass. That's not directed at you but just generally speaking. I just find it humorous that no one ever has a losing trade on ET except when they do a combine then the excuses come out like the rules are too strict or they are making me trade too much! LOL. Look man, I had a lot of these big talkers come into my shop, A LOT. Many of them had journals on ET and of course, extremely successful. Then they join my firm and suddenly they can't find a winning trade to save their lives. That's what I love about TST and I have said this over and over. It's because they essentially are offering 3rd party reporting where the trader can't change or mask his results. So let me know when you do the next combine and post it publicly and I'll be the first guy on here to give you props both for doing that publicly and for any success you have.
if TST still offers public promo combines like they did with yours and surfs, I'm good to go starting Monday. If they no longer offer that type of promotion, then my next combine will be never. So we'll see what the reply to my email proposal is and we'll go from there.
Here is my $400 advice for you. Go ahead and do it using their free 2 weeks trial version. There are slight differences, you might have to follow max. DD on your own,etc. but that is worth 400 bucks in my book. Or you can just subscribe to their sim trading, I think that is $100 per month, you still save 300 bucks, and post your results here. And by the way CTS itself (the maker of the T4 platform) also has a 2 weeks trial, there are again, slight differences between the 2 platforms, but nothing major. https://cts.sim.t4login.com/register/?ref=CTS-t4
Man, you really like to keep making a fool out of yourself. You've failed all your combines so far. Where was your real edge and hindsight charts then? I would never make fun of a losing trader or try to belittle him, but you're trying to bullshit people (and possibly even yourself?), so you're asking for it. By the way, have you posted the blotters you were talking about last we spoke?
Interesting. So what you're saying is that you believe intraday price movements are random? My own experience says otherwise, although I'm aware that price certainly can appear not to be random and still be random. Are futures any different from equities or other financial instruments then?
No, not at all. I'm saying "liquid" futures do not offer an edge that exceeds intra-day varience. And it has nothing to do with "appearance". I'm not even sure how one could even objectively measure "appearance". The general economics behind any kind of asset pricing is that the less liquid something is, the more asymmetric information one has and the larger the information vacuum, the greater the edge potential. It's precisely the reason why Goldman makes all their money in various structured products vs day trading the E-mini. So given this, the greater the liquidity, the more widely available information the more efficient a product is. Based on that assumption we know that in economics, when we have a competitive market that is highly efficient, the only competitive advantage that can be gained is through cost. Again, this does not mean one cannot make money trading XYZ whatever XYZ should be defined as, it simply means you are going to have to take excessive risks or use excessive leverage to do so hence why brokers offer $500 intra-day E-mini margins. Next we can calculate the cost of ruin given enough variance in the product you are trading as a function of time.