Recent content by wst

It's gambling because most things in business is gambling. LT Investing - you make a bet that the company will continue to make money in the future. Running a business - you make a bet that your potential customers will buy your product instead of your competitors product.

Can't quantify the market. It's a chaos system (chaos theory) like weather. Think about it, the market is a pool made up on millions of individual people all acting irrational and driven by emotions like fear, greed, anxiety, etc. Good luck quantifying that. :D But one thing you can do is to...

INTP, world domination 2010 ftw! http://webspace.webring.com/people/cl/lifexplore/intp.htm

Sure.. four losing trades in a row and your account is down -20% :D Well answer is it depends on a lot of factors.. 1) Overall goal for the year. Is your goal is to make 20% return on AUM or 200% return? 2) Frequency of trades (annually) 3) Win/Loss ratio 4) Risk/Reward ratio

Real prop firms allow you to employ any kind of strategy (except the selling naked options and such), they don't fiddle with your strategy of choice or mandate a particular trading style. Their only concern is that you as a trader make money, the account size at the close of the month is what...

To what risk? how many percent of the trading equity is at risk for each trade. Anyone can go all-in and double their money in a single day trading futures, that is nothing to strive for. Reckless gambling is not trading.

The risk of a black swan event like the "flash crash" in May? if you have enough accumulated profits it's not a problem with the ES dropping 100 points in one day, but otherwise you may be forced out at a large loss, would be more comfortable owning options or an ETF, you will not be forced out...

If your account is to small for ES cant u trade/chart the ES and execute the signals on a 3x ETF pair like UPRO/SPXU. Here in europe we have Spreadbetting (taxfree) and CFD's which allows us to trade with smaller ticksize, down to $0.5 per ES/SP point.

If i'm correct the elevator should start going down any minute now. :p

Sell the ES/SPX short here at 1070.. aleast 5 handles to be made.

2009 was a fantastic year, ended the year at +360%. This year haven't been as good, the quality of signals haven't been as good so I have been skipping signals (not a good thing thou), but the account is up ~60%, I shouldn't really complain compared to how others are faring.

Find something new that works, what else to do? A trader need to constantly reinvent himself and improve as the markets change and evolve. The 80's market was different from the 90's, that was different from 00's, what used to work stops working in the new market environment. Can add to that...

An annual return of 30% is very good, that is what the top hedge funds in the world is making. Most around here on ET are loser day traders that don't know jack shit about real trading and managing money. Lots of nonsense about prop, 100% is easy, etc.

The first case is a rule break due to bad discipline. The second case is nothing to sob about, it's perfectly fine to give back not-yet booked profits because it is part of the trading plan, ie the price reversed before the profit target where met.

No, it's not rigged. It's called a "bullmarket".