i'm an engineer...we always design for the worst case scenario and its funny you say that, a few years ago a friend and i were planning to start a business together. he always had the "when we succeed" mentality vs my "if we fail" mentality. i always had a backup plan for myself in case we failed. disagreements arose, our friendship ended, i got out of the venture and he took over. however he never got the business going regardless of his mentality.
Meh, the whole "mentality" thing is so overrated. I haven't really ever heard succesful people say that it was all due to their optimistic outlook or something similar. Persistance of course is important, but even moreso is skill and also luck. The ideas put forward by those books such as the one by Hill is really a huge smokescreen. Same goes for Tony Robbins and all that kind of BS. It makes people think they can do anything if only they put their minds to it, which is just not how it works. Have a backup plan. Thinking only "When I succeed" and not "What is plan B?" does not yield any edge. That said, it is often good to have no alternative, like how Julius Ceasar (and others before and after him) burned the fleets which carried armies to their destination, so that it was win or perish. Win or perish is not really an environment anyone sane would willingly create for himself regardless of the benefits so I don't think that is really possible anyway.
I believe what's important is not nessarily confidence in one's success, but persistance and effort. Clearly one needs to work hard at this business to make it work but that doesn't mean that I will subborningly hold on to the belief that I will make it as a trader if the evidence starts proving me wrong.
What kind of daily returns and volatility is that? Looks pretty good to me, like a 2+ sharpe. In general it is best to have a basket of strategies especially if the PnL is cumulative. In investment 100$ is always bound to one asset. In short-term trading in many cases that 100$ can be used for several strategies. If the strats are uncorrelated that is a good way to produce extremely stabe returns. However that is quite hard to do, because strategies often have the same risk-factors, and worse sometimes they can correlate at the worst times.
"Typical" day is a gain or loss in the mid to high thousands of dollars. Best day was +33k, worst day was -15k. All trades closed out at the end of the day. I also have my long-term L/S strategy, which is up about 40k ytd (not reflected in the equity curve), although I don't have as much time to devote to that anymore, and being out of the hedge fund world its a lot harder to source ideas sometimes. Yeah my goal is to develop a bunch of automated strats to supplement these two main strategies. That is my dream. Hope I can end up doing something with it and all this effort to learn programing doesn't go to waste.