In term's of not blowing out and mega longevity, yea, agreed. But in terms of actual income pretty low compared to the heyday of financial futures. Locals in the grains consider a quarter mil a great year in these markets. (Grains have traded at pretty low volatility for the last decade). A friend of mine from the Bond's recently went into the Corn. He hope's to make this year what he used to make in a month during the pre-electronic Bond days. BTW Gann, I heard back around '97 or so that 40 guys in the Spoo's made over a million, with a handful in the 4-20 range. You're in the CME building so you'd have a better grasp than me but my guess is that with the big trade in ED the last couple of months guys are either blowing out all over the place or having 500k months.
Yes they rule the pit ... until the pit disappears That what happened to the french futures market and many locals couldn't trade any more because they didn't have the same edge with electronic trading. Pit traders are what I call "pavlov" traders ... like me when I was a scalper at that time not on the pit but at the time the pit existed it was much easier liquidity was much better and in derivatives magazine they knew that the liquidity would degrade with electronic. The french pit traders asked for 500 Millions of compensation for loss of their pit's edge. Being a pavlov trader doesn't necessitate much intelligence but reflex/aggressivity : as a former "pavlov" trader I know how easy it was .
For the last 2-3 years, ED pit has been good to many people. Not unheard of for over a million/year. A few have been pulling out 5-12 million a year. I know of some that are up 5-10 million this year. Of course, there's some volatility to those earnings.
There's always a handful that pull more than a quarter mil a year. Of course that's a small handful. Even so, not bad for less than 4 hours of trading per day!
Ask Jack Hershey.. I think they are trading rockets.. and should be making a min. of $100k a year just starting out. --MIKE