Maybe. It looks nice. But then it could only be $120. You are profitable but are you successful? Do you have another skill set where you can make more money and expend less effort and time. Could you make just as much money buying and holding SPY.
Success is a state of mind. "Are you happy" Forget money and capitism etc, are we content with our environment? Money is a means but not the end.
Money is not everybody's idea of success. Money is needed to exist in the modern world. How one chooses to exist and why that choice, is a personal matter. Can this topic be juxtaposed with answers from people of other countries too? Maybe the formula for what is success exists in Monaco, Nigeria, Bulgaria, or Argentina. Your definition of success is not any better or any worse, not more correct nor more wrong, than anyone else's definition of success. If YOU think it is, you are merely a schmuck. IMO of course.
Hello Mick, & Others who concur w/ -- ? Do your 'old' methods no longer work, or do your new methods just get better and better ?
A good question. From my point of view we all evolve as we travel the trading road, maybe sometimes we evolve better if we have a vision in mind we have clung to from many years. One seed in my mind was I would find a holy grail indicator and so I started years ago paying a real guru to code me indicators. Long story short I learnt to code and after many many years of trading decided to create an algo called Superalgo which was a creation of all my trading rules type thing. It was a large algo which had many columns of choices but it was kind of built for volatility as its main theme. This as (a) I was a long term trader (b) volatilty gives huge clues on quality/non quality stocks. For some reason later, (can't remember), I wrote a new short formula which I discarded. Some weeks later my mind revisited this idea so I found formula I'd discarded and tried it again. And I liked it. Long story short again I turned this into what I called Superalgo2 and the result was I lost a huge amount of money trading this over a year, lost close to $100,000. Well damn it, I still believed in my creation, stopped trading it, but just watched it for about a month, no trading. Welp I tried it again on very large cap stocks and began making money quickly. Long story short once again, superalgo2 works depending on your skill of how to use it, it wont work across a blanket of stocks. So, this thing doesn't use indicators or any conventional TA, it is basically just maths crunching of the market. All my conventional thinking on Superalgo1 has gone out the window. Superalgo1 made me money but slowly. Superalgo2 created me mayhem initially because I was applying it incorrectly. This algo works fast, it's a cross between day trading and longer term trading. Sometimes I hold for minutes, my most noticeable trade a week or so again was I plonked $17k on a stock and sold 4 minutes later for a $8k profit. All my $100k loss expermenting on this damn algo wiped clean in a few short weeks. Currently having fun trading this thing because profit results are fast, looking forward to a market correction so I can have a rest.
My origonal Superalgo1 is in the bin as I no longer use Amibroker. I've had to buy new computers for this new job.
You can actually make much more money in poker with a small bankroll. But with trading you can scale very large, but in poker it gets harder to do so. Also, I feel its easier to define an edge in poker. I win 10 sessions in a row and lose maybe 1 or 2 the next one. There are so many hands played per hour that its easier to control your variance and edge in poker than in trading. In trading, most day traders make 10-15 trades/per day, Swing traders make maybe 1 trade a day and investors make a few trades a year. If you have a 50% win rate and 2:1 profit loss ratio, I would estimate it at least a few hundred trades before you can see and edge and that it could take years to show you have an edge. (Also to prove you can survive in all market conditions and not only in a bull market).
If you can make 2% a month on average - and keep the drawdown under 25% - you are already a good day-trader.