I went to the bank today. I gave the clerk a twenty dollar bill and asked her to double it. Now I have two ten dollar bills.
shoot I only have 20,000 in my trading account. If I only made 20% I would have to get food stamps!! i think it is funny trying to breakdown your return into a percentage basis. I started trading on the floors of Chicago's futures exchanges and I never heard anyone talk percentage return. Either you made money that day or you did not! Either you traded like s h i t or you went home happy! I make between 20-100 trades a day! I am a futures trader. With 20,000 most clearing firms in Chicago will allow you to trade(intraday not overnight) 20-30 Emini S&P contracts. So the amount of money you have in your account really has no relevance to your profitability. In theory a trader could make 200,000-1,000,000 with a 20,000 account. I could not imagine trying to make a living trading less than 50 times YTD. That is less than 1 trade a day. What type of trader does not trade everyday? How could you watch the markets without making a trade? I have a hard time sitting still for more than 15 minutes without making a trade. I looked at my trades today. I made 30 trades. I only traded from 7:45-10:11am CST.
Warren Buffett may not trade every day, and it is highly likely that his P&L (measured in US Dollars) is greater than yours.
maybe that explains why his returns have been so poor in the last years. Maybe the magic is gone, or maybe the value investing myth is not working lately. But what can you expect from a moron the has been bearish for so long on the economy of the most powerful nation?
Your poll will be meaningless to a lot of the traders here because, as has been pointed out, they trade the firm's or clearning house's money. Their own cash is basically put up as collateral, and at some places, they don't put up any cash at all. If you make $20,000 on a basis of zero, what's your ROI? Since you asked though, I did 75 trades and made about 25% return on my account equity TODAY.