I never hold overnight, so I am nowhere close to my trading limit. In fact, I never hold for longer than an hour, win or lose. I have a definite plan and stick to it.
Yes, that is true, nobody like to lose, and anything can happen. But being too conservative means your funds will never grow very much. It is a matter of being comfortable with the amount risked, and I am comfortable at this level. It is an individual preference, everyone has their own risk tolerance. Like I said, I would probably be a lot more conservative if I was playing with $1 million, my amount of margin power used would be less. But at this level, I feel OK. As for losing 40%, yes, maybe that will happen one month, maybe this month, maybe 5 years from now, who knows...... But I'm not going to be so worried about it that it stops me from taking any risks.
Yeah, things have been going my way lately. I know things go bad sometimes, but right now I'm just riding a great winning streak.
Your risk management parameters are so different than the most widely accepted that no comparison can be done... The more you increase your risk, up to the optimal size, the best results you can get. The reason no one is doing this is that anyone will experience losing streaks at some point in their career. With 8% risk (and I guess the initial margin is accounted for in these 8%), you WILL get blown out one day. So basically, you are playing some sort of roulette. I approximated what your performance would be, using conservative risk parameters example : a max loss of 0.01*(K-IM*Nbr Contracts) and I think there is absolutely nothing to be proud about... To give you an idea, the traders I work with as well as myself tend to get 25%-40% monthly returns, using extremely conservative risk management and no compounding. TOP traders tend to reach 100% /mo. OHLC
To give you an idea, the traders I work with as well as myself tend to get 25%-40% monthly returns, using extremely conservative risk management and no compounding. TOP traders tends to reach 100% /mo. What amount of capital are they using to return 100%/mo.?
about 150k EUR last year... You will find a LOT more top traders in equity trading than in futures trading, by the way. OHLC
How do you calculate your annual ROI (performance) if you dont have a set $$ amount you are starting with as it is at most propr firms that does not require your own capital? I have just the minimum $25K at my firm but my buying power is much greater than that.....over $1M if I wanted. My only limits are share size and # of open positions at any given moment. If I start with $100 and make $150, that's 50% reutrn. Easy to calculate. But if I start with $25K (the required capital maintenance amount) and make $500,000 this year, my reutrn can NOT be calculated as $475,000/$25,000 = 1900% return. Any ideas? Somebody told me once that I should use intrad day average (or highest) open $$$ amt at any given moment to use as my base.....Not sure whats right.
Here's a good way to judge traders. How much equity do you have at risk? (Real money, not margin.) Compared with how much money you can take out at the end of the month. No compounding. This should assume normal risk management ratios as practiced by surviving traders. (No trading at the margin limits or any other form of all or nothing types trades.)
Most traders have more than enough leverage to destroy themselves. The professional stock trading leverage is very similar to futures leverage (10:1). So the real test is not to compare your maximum borrowing power to your gains, but to look at your equity and discard all results from traders who do things like put 20% of their account at risk per trade (the so called optimal amount). The gains should be expressed as a percentage of equity per month. A trader with $25K who makes $5K a month has a gain of 20% per month. My guess is that the monthly gains are more like 10%.