Yeah, the big problem with being fast is that there are large upfront costs and you have to move off a retail platform. Our monthly data and infrastructure costs are around 30K and we've done it as cheap as possible. My other post explains many of the difficulties I came across going from retail to... less retail
A path towards profitability
- Thread starter garachen
- Start date
Yeah, the big problem with being fast is that there are large upfront costs and you have to move off a retail platform. Our monthly data and infrastructure costs are around 30K and we've done it as cheap as possible. My other post explains many of the difficulties I came across going from retail to... less retail
I too agree with the traits you have outlined, in which you believe will make a successful trader. I am by no means consistent, partly because I haven't traded huge size yet, but I've been waking up for the US/eur overlap. I have watched the EUR/USD for about 6 months now. I can usually wake up read the news and watch price for say, 20 mins, and tell where the market is going.
Very true. Thanks for responding about the off-thread non-manual space.
I tend to get whatever feedback I can (especially when it's good) until someone tells me to get lost. So..
What is your opinion on taking the CTA route for a retailish/quant-wannabe trader with less than $100K and target returns in the 25%-35% per year range?
I'm asking for a buddy of mine who has less than $100k
imo your experiences has 0 inputs of algo/quant work.
- Part of my time is spent at identifying good stocks/futures on any tradable exchange around the globe for movements (intra day of at least 50c to $1 movement) and ensuring systems close their positions EOD etc
- Another part of my time are spent preparing reports about the win/lost % of various algorithms and their performance.
- During actual trading itself ? I sleep, play games or do something else.
Im playing around with numbers and tweaking them so the win ratio or avg trade $ goes higher. It has got nothing to do with any type of trading abilities.
Its pure usage of Maths. Its very different hearing what you've said. I expected something from a BS in Maths.
- Part of my time is spent at identifying good stocks/futures on any tradable exchange around the globe for movements (intra day of at least 50c to $1 movement) and ensuring systems close their positions EOD etc
- Another part of my time are spent preparing reports about the win/lost % of various algorithms and their performance.
- During actual trading itself ? I sleep, play games or do something else.
Im playing around with numbers and tweaking them so the win ratio or avg trade $ goes higher. It has got nothing to do with any type of trading abilities.
Its pure usage of Maths. Its very different hearing what you've said. I expected something from a BS in Maths.
That's right. This method of manual trading I presented purposefully has nothing to do with math. That's why I said math is not required to be successful.
That doesn't mean that modeling intensive approaches don't work. Of corse they do but from my experience the edge captured by a manual trader is quite a bit larger than what most algorithms are capable of.
Yeah. I can price a Bermudan swaption off the Mexacan yield curve which was a great skill for when I was a quant but not so useful for manual trading.
That doesn't mean that modeling intensive approaches don't work. Of corse they do but from my experience the edge captured by a manual trader is quite a bit larger than what most algorithms are capable of.
Yeah. I can price a Bermudan swaption off the Mexacan yield curve which was a great skill for when I was a quant but not so useful for manual trading.
Quote from caementarius:
I tend to get whatever feedback I can (especially when it's good) until someone tells me to get lost. So..
What is your opinion on taking the CTA route for a retailish/quant-wannabe trader with less than $100K and target returns in the 25%-35% per year range?
I'm asking for a buddy of mine who has less than $100k
I don't know. Soliciting money and running a bunch of small accounts has never been something I've been interested in doing. There's a guy a few doors over in my building who does that. Seems like the game is to start with 20M or so and just last long enough to bring in a 100M client. All the fiduciary responsibility stuff for really little benefit in my opinion.
Thanks - I do think you are correct it's not a good idea for someone like you.
What would you do if today you had less than $100k, some gaining confidence in your trading, but realized you could likely only do 30% per year while keeping drawdowns low (<10%), a most optimistic case? And if you had to keep your day job...
It'd take 9 years to reach $1.06M. Only alternative is to be a cowboy and likely blow up.
Edit: here's a _novelty_ chart I made just for giggles on compounded returns on $100k:
http://atsdev.s3.amazonaws.com/returnson10k.pdf
How did you get your start?
Trading is not like investing so you shouldn't really measure your progress in terms of % return. It's generally not applicable.
30% on 100K breaks down to $120 a day. Pretty easy to do trading just one contract. So, trading 2-3 later down the road I don't think is going to blow out your account if you learned how to trade 1 pretty well.
I'm not sure you can do this while having another job. Even if you could I'm not sure it would be ethical if you are doing it while at work. It does take a lot of focus.
I started by first quitting my job. Maybe had 200K saved. Did very well then it got stolen by the broker. They took almost everything. Left me 40K. But by then I knew what I was doing and the markets had lots of inefficiencies so it was pretty easy to recover.
If I were a different personality type I'd think that making money off of 100K doing some other type of business besides trading would be worth looking at.