Don't quit your day job until you are already profitable. To really know you are profitable with confidence you should have a high sharpe ratio, at least 3, and be beating the market in most conditions. How much money to have - I recommend at least $100K for trading risk, 200K is much better, plus a few years living expenses on the side. You can use the living expenses for margin if you have the right risk controls and you know you won't lose it. Do the math on how much money you need to live on, if you spend 20K/year then you need to make 20% to breakeven with $100K but only 10% with $200K. Making 10%/year is a lot easier than 20. Don't ever put yourself in a situation where you have less than 1 year to become profitable again if your strategy stops working, the stress will be terrible.
Everyone is different, different lifestyles, family needs, debt, so if you can't be making like 5 times what is needed each year, keep the day job. I was single back in 1999, thought of getting married again most likely will never do, had 3 million in bank that I thought at the time I never run through it, but also has made a couple of businesses and real estate, so it wasn't like I had no money coming. I think very important to always have something on the side before quitting a job with many benefits. Just makes sense to me to develop your methods around a job till you pulling in huge amount consistently and stock pile money to show oneself you can do it well for 3 years. And now, if you can automate it, keep day job if you enjoy it or find another job you enjoy. Money is a funny thing, people puts different values on it like freedom or material needs or in my case a way to keep score. You never have enough capital on the great trades and too much on ones you lose. We all seem to have wishes in life and most can't happen, I wish my body was 25 instead of sickly 62. I think if you can actually be happy in your life, you are 99% better off than most of the world.
How would you handle being at your day job while the system is running? As you stated previously, demo isn't enough, need to run it in real time. However can lose a ton a money on even one contract so not sure whether to ask current job to let me come in late (risk losing position) or what to do. Like to hear your take. Btw, following your advise of backtesting was game/life changer. For whatever its worth, thank you...
Good stuff on this thread. So if you had a couple hundred thousand in an account that is basically going to be in SPY, why not day trade the SPY and try to make a quarter percent a day on it each day. If you miss and have to leave it in SPY so be it, that’s where it’s sitting anyways likely going to average 8% over the long run. Of course a lot more to the system and indicators of when to take the trade with some downside mitigating, but I think you may see the point here...
%% Mainly pay off home/car; save some. As far as quitting a job, cant help you there, I haven't had a job on >>20 years LOL.Never have SEEN A NEUTRAL MARKET; if you mean a sideways slop chop trend [aka barbed wire range],dividend ETFs can work well..
That seems quite excessive IMO, you basically already had a whole career by the time you saved that much, then you become a fulltime trader? It seems to defeat the point to some extent (accelerated wealth accumulation)