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"Too close" and "too precision" compared to what? Any scientific analysis needs a control group. Where's yours that you would make such statements?

Look, I'm not the person who started this thread, so it's clearly not a burning issue in my mind. Me and my trading actually have nothing to do with this thread at all. The reason I bring up "how many traders make X" and do the math on the numbers you are throwing around is because there needs...

It's called simplification to make a point. How many traders do you think make $130K/year on a single ES contract? That's the relevant issue, not whether or not I assume 20 point range days every day (I don't, that's just an average over a year to make the math easy to follow. I'm not...

Do you guys ever annualize the gains on these theoretical constructs? If you trade 1 contract and the daily range of the ES is around 20 points and you capture 10 of those (50% accuracy), that's $130K, pre-commission. $260K if you capture all 20. How many ES traders do you know making even...

There's a certain type of poster at ET that thinks no one ever knew anything about trading until they came along. These posters also seem to think their newfound "knowledge" is universal and applies to any trading methodology. In my own case, a "time stop" would actually be detrimental to my...

Just so we are clear, do you mean that you stay in losing trades beyond what your strategy would dictate? If you were to exit those trades at the proper price, would you be profitable? If the answer to the second question is "no", then it's not your ego that is the problem, it's your entire...

If you are talking a 5-day trading week, $120/day is about 2.5 ES points/day. I would say that's stretching it as an average day. It's definitely possible, but I would say that maybe 5% of traders actually accomplish it. If you can actually do the equivalent of that on any futures...

You should probably base the amount of time offered free on the number of trades. At the end of the day, no one reads those things for macro-analysis, of which there is more than enough to read for free online. They read them for trade recommendations. Earlier on, you were talking about 4 or 5...

Yes, you want to maximize along the demand curve, but also think about the logistics of handling a large subscriber base vs. a small one. If you're going to be a one-man operation, providing support for 1,000 customers is a lot harder than providing it for 100 customers. Sure, the marginal cost...

I guess I am a little confused by what you actually are proposing. EWI is a scam and their trading advice is atrocious. If you follow it, your account value will eventually go to zero. Is that the caliber of "advice" you envision yourself giving? If that's what you want to emulate, I think...

It is true there are no guarantees that a service will be profitable. The guarantee is that subscribers won't have to pay if it isn't. It's a slight difference but the result is that the primary thing your subscribers have to worry about is the opportunity cost of taking your recommended trades...

See, that's the other thing. If you only charge $100/year, I'm going to be likely to think the service is worth less than that, i.e. it's basically worthless. For some things, the higher the price, the more acceptance among the target segment. Again, to say how I would do it, I'd even...

I think the issue with having a service which gives you only 4 or 5 set-ups is that there is a fairly reasonable probability that they all fail, meaning that the entire year is a bust. Your winning percentage would have to be off the charts to ensure that at least 1 of 5 trades is a winner...

If they bought it to fade it, that's actually not a bad idea. :)

At one point, I paid $45/month for a service that had positive expectancy. Given that, I don't think I'd pay any more than that. That said, if a service provides guarantees of certain minimum profits per month, then I suppose the price I'd pay would reflect that guarantee. If you are...

As an addition to that point, I think that IF the OP can find a strategy which works, his first goal should be to execute that strategy with 100% compliance to its rules. If the strategy really works, money will be a byproduct of that compliance.

Doesn't that just mean that the definition of risk is "returns adjusted by variance" or "returns adjusted by drawdown"? But, it seems like you are talking about theoretical risks as opposed to realized risk. Maybe I'm misreading your comment, but I take it to imply that a risk model would...

We get it, the guy can use leverage. Let's say he levers up 20X, so he's swinging a line of $1 million in futures contracts. He still needs to generate 12% returns on that $1 million. How many professional hedge fund managers get $12% a year, year after year? How many do that from day 1...

I wasn't worried about how much was in his account, I was worried about the amount he wants to make and how that stacks up relative to what we know about the distribution of day trader income. The IRS data I saw years ago showed that very few traders make an average of $500/day, regardless of...

Right, so long as they've overcome the first hurdle, which is having a consistent positive expectancy strategy. Then, if you've either got a large account to trade or can trade with enough leverage, you can make $500/day average. Still, you don't see a lot of traders making over $120K/year...