It doesn't matter about any of that because YOU are the one that continually posts about blowing up your account, multiple times. Why would you attempt to demean someone about being pathetic when it's you who keeps going bankrupt? I was getting ready to give you some useful advice, but now I'm not. Figure it out for yourself.
OMG!!! The guy is a pathetic troll who just wants attention. Two years ago he already claimed he was starting to trade MES with small accounts because he blew up $20K two times and now he's doing the same again? No it's because his last thread generated 23 pages (it's amazing how prophetic people in that thread were about the demand for cleaning equipment and services and health measure tools like masks because of covid that if the OP had gone into that business instead of stuck on trading he would've indeed made money 10X over) and he was so swooned by the attention that he got he wanted to do it again with the same story. In his last thread 2 years ago, his very first post responding to people's comments was him swooning over how much attention his thread has received. If somebody is genuinely concerned about his/her trading performance and really wants to find out how to improve it, how much reaction that his/her thread has generated would be the last thing on that person's mind. There is no wife. His wife has already left him or he probably never had a wife to begin with and now he's lonelier ever so he's seeking attention online. The guy never wanted to learn. People have already given him ample advice in the previous thread on what to do and he hadn't taken any. Two years later, he is still posting the same old shit. It's very obvious he is not into trading. He just made up all of this story to troll to get attention. If he's genuinely trading, it's very obvious why he is not making money. He is bottom-fishing and top-picking so when the instrument is trading in ranges, he makes money provided that he picked the right bottom and top but when the instrument is trending, then he's screwed because he's constantly buying at the dip or shorting at the peak hoping the trend would reverse when it just keeps on trending netting him strings of losses. And because his SL is so wide in order to make money so by the time when he SL'ed, he's already lost a lot. He knows his trading is not working and everybody has told him so and even told him what he needs to do but he still wants to keep doing it ignoring what everybody's told him so either the story is all made up or he's got a serious problem with a gambling addiction. Oh well, he will stop eventually when his money becomes $0. We will just read his threads like entertainment. It's like reading an interactive story. It's cool. Thanks @GoldDigger, for digging up that previous thread to make us more informed.
I agree that this guy has issues and being an attention seeker is a strong possibility. There is no way that anyone would continue trading for SEVEN years and not figured out how to make profits. Anyone who takes the time to learn the fundamentals, takes it seriously, and puts in the work, should have no problem making easy trading money.
You believe, "the wheel strategy ... shouldn't be hard to make small profits". Huh? It sounds like you are just selling insurance and somehow think this places the odds in your favor for making money. That is not true so only one of two things can be true: 1) You have a more detailed strategy for trading SPY with excellent statistical evidence that it makes money but you haven't told us what it is, or 2) You just don't understand that you aren't putting the odds in your favor by winning most of your option trades.
They say that people asking advice really just want confirmation of their own view or decision. The advice you've gotten is pretty much in agreement, but I have a hunch you're not going to take it? Will you let us now how you proceed? With a large account you can make good money in nominal values without taking on too much risk. So, IMO, the way to trade a big account is to keep your risk very small per trade. Big accounts seek stability; smaller accounts seek volatility. If your risk per trade is very small it can even be an option to martingale or average down once in a while, but still within a fixed max % bet size of course, i.e., if initial risk is 0.5 %, you can average down or martingale to a 1 % bet size. Generally, it's a good idea to keep your risk per trade small. Only if you have a massive edge to the point where you won't be making threads on ET it's okay to size up a bit more. You have a decent account size, but there are traders who lost FAR more with their trading operations, so don't think there isn't a risk you'll blow it all just because the account is "big". It's quite possible you will if you don't scale down dramatically or even decide to quit trading for a while until you learn a bit more. Good luck and let us know how it goes!
A few thoughts that come to mind: 1. You have a good situation with your wife being able to support you financially, fund your trading, and pay for living expenses. You should maximize the opportunity and set yourself up for success. Focus on learning above all else. 2. On the downside, your wife has you by the balls and wants to oversee your trading activities. It seems you are mostly to blame for this because you blew out her $17K without keeping her in the loop. The problem now is she may not understand that paying tuition to the market is the norm for people self-learning. 3. Putting more money ($50K) into the account is 100% the wrong course. You are thinking backwards as so many do on this site who blame “undercapitalization” for being a loser. Your goal should be pulling money out of the account, not putting more money into it. You want to be trading only with profits which removes the possibility of losing off the table. Be a winner. 4. You have the right idea about trading a couple of MES to start. Keep the tuition low. I would divide your available capital ($140K or thereabouts) into 10 equal blocks ($14K) and fund the account with only one block. After you lose the first block, take time off to think and write out what you did wrong and make improvements. Reload with the next block and make it last longer than the first block. Repeat the thinking and writing process each time you need to reload your account. 5. When you get to break-even and no longer need to reload, don’t BS yourself into thinking that you are “close.” Keep working and improving. When you triple your account and take out the reloaded block, then you can call yourself a winner. Don’t look back on all the previous blocks as losses to recoup. Think of them as the tuition you paid for learning a new skill. 6. Always keep learning and improving.
Big accounts are subjected to certain risks. It is important to choose the asset wisely while trading on a big account or else one might face heavy losses.
Good post/approach. However, I wouldn't recommend him to do this with his wife's capital. However, on the undercapitalization part, I can't agree if I understand you correctly. $14K for a few MES is what I would say very well capitalized, so definitely not undercapitalized. You can trade with a fairly large stop (or even without a stop) and the risk per trade or capital fluctuations of your account will be fairly small. It should almost be like simulator trading assuming you're not a complete newbie. I could go to bed with one MES open without a stop and sleep like a baby. Even a complete crash wouldn't mean that much. It's true that a large account is not the solution if an individual doesn't know how to trade. The OP is already proving this and there's countless examples through history of big players who blew their entire accounts. There's a few on ET as well. I won't mention names, but there were a few even on ET who had 50 % unrealized drawdowns trading futures on 300K + accounts. Haven't seen them post lately. Maybe they blew it all. The common denominator being that they're all trading with a way too high risk profile even with a large account. What a large account can do is that it will let you trade fairly conservatively in terms of % risk / P&L fluctuations and still make good money in absolute terms. Funding a 14K account to trade 1 or 2 MES isn't going to take you anywhere fast unless your trading is at an expert level which puts you among the very, very few. However, trading a 50K or even 500K account can enable an intermediate player to make good money in absolute terms as he can still keep his % risk fairly small. In summary, trading 1-2 MES with a 14K account is good for practice and probably the way to go, but I wouldn't say it's undercapitalized. If you're beyond the practice stage and have some consistency in your trading it would still take a while to get somewhere if you start out with 14K and 1-2 MES.
1. If not his wife’s capital, then whose? He doesn’t seem to have his own capital to trade with. 2. I never said $14K was undercapitalized. Exactly the opposite. I recommended dividing his current capital of $140K into 10 equal units of $14K and trading a couple of MES with one unit and keeping the remainder in reserve. 3. My central advice was to focus on learning above all else. Focusing on the money is what most people do. Your post is an example. That’s just the way it is.