Hi Sammy, Thanks for sharing. I've been a frequent reader of your journal for a while. Great Work! Could tell me some more info about your deal? I am retail like yourself and was curious how you were able to get .004. Are there other costs as well or is .004 it? Do you get rebates for adding? That's better than my current retail situation and I would venture to say I do about similar volume. Thanks in advance, Mike
hey, Mike.. nope, no other costs. .004 is it, plus the .00325 to remove, and .00175 to add. basically our old office manager asked me what i'd be comfortable paying. i thought i was lowballing him by saying .004, and he just said okay then .004 it is. i was sitting thinking i got hosed the way he accepting my offer so quickly, but it turned out to be the lowest deal in the office at the time. as far as the ecns, i used to pay .0035 to remove, and received .0015 to add. when e*trade went to self-clearing, they gave us an extra .00025 on each side. now everyone coming in gets .004. they say they can't go any cheaper. maybe some of the higher volume traders could get theirs lower if they threatened to leave, but if i ever threatened, he'd probably just say g'bye, lol. they probably lose money on me 'cuz of my light volumes.
You are the ultimate example of someone who is truly limited by a retail account. Prop will make your life so much easier. Good luck with the series 7 exam. It's not hard, just lots of reading.
Maybe I am hallucinating, but just from reading over the month by month analysis, where the hell do you people get 100-200k a year from?
A person started a thread about volume. He was focused on the daily amount. I commented on my limitations for trading a stream of money. I trade streams of money that are limited in size by volume. I think you may understand line 1 and line 2. Y ou probably crap out mentally on line three. This is line four. To answer your question, though, I was posting on daily volume limitations (meaning the maximum volume I allow myself to take on in a given money stream. Lets say you have a kid and you ask him to use arithematic to find out what I had in the stream of money when I bought. Then getting him to give you that answer, you wondered what I sold my stream for and asked the kid to figure that out for you. Now you would know two different numbers. Maybe at that point you would ask him if the two numbers could be used to find out if I made any money. The kid would say something like "I'll ask mom she might know or he would say I'll take the numbers to school and find out if my teacher thinks its important to learn about. If she does, I'll find out when we are going to learn about it and ask if you can come to class. The rules at school are pretty complicated now cause kids some times blow up when they learn something new." Don't do those calculations yourself. It would be too frustrating to have the buy and sell price and not know what to do with them. Why are you reading this anyway?
scalping q's and q options were a major part of my profits last year. that trading was done in other accounts. on April 21st, i started throwing some volume at them in this account. now i realize extrapolation isn't an exact science, but i don't think it takes an ingested hallucinogen to assume that adding roughly $300 a day ($6K a month) in fresh revenue to an account that already generates $300 a day in revenue, would gross between $100K to $200K a year. those past months were obviously small numbers from a baby account i was just using to simply re-acclimate myself to active trading after a 3 year hiatus. i swept the profits every month into a professionally managed account. now that i'm back in the flow, and have no intention of sweeping the account anymore, anything less than $12K a month will be a disappointing.. especially with the no-sweep compounding,