A trading contest..........

B

bighog

Guest
Well, not an actual contest but if someone ever asked you "How can you make a million dollars within a year trading JUST futures? No overnight trades, no adding on to winner, no scale-in, scale-out, no overnight globex just regular rth times.

You can be in or out as many times as you want but every trade must be the same size and consistent. You are not restricted to any one particular contract, they can do as different as you like as long as the per-trade amount remains the same.

To make a million smackers within a year (do not worry about commissions, assume the contest pays ALL commissions for the winner), HA.

To make a million in 240 trading days you MUST average $4,167.00 each day.

Can you come up with a DECENT viable plan to get this done. Not a balls-out plan that has a snowballs chance in hell, but a REAL doable plan.

No, I am not selling anything..........

:cool:

PS: The easy answers will be met with tighter restrictions, so THINK before you leap. :D
 
Yeah the only possible way I could do it is with $1m starting capital. Would trade 100 cars ES, only 1 trade a day. Strict rules, with daily trend, pullback entry only/no breakout.
 
Say you have a 70% hit with 3:1 RR, then for example:


Expected Win: $40
Expected Loss: 40*1/3 = $13.33
Win Rate 70%

On a 100 trade sample you can expect to be + 2,800.00 (ie ($40*100*70%))

35715 sample yields expected p&l of 1,000,020.00


So find a system that has above parameters and yields you 149 signals a day in aggregate (over many symbols). Shorten days required by half by expanding to other instruments
 
Both Dan Zanger an Tim Sykes have done this---Tim has done it twice in public-- mayb not one year but starting with 10k or so both times.

All of this was prior to HFT however.

surf
 
First restriction: No single instrument trades over 8 cars per trade allowed.

Second restriction: You are restricted to use 25k margin at the most.

Third restriction: You must trade at least 3 different instruments within any single day.

Fourth restriction: can not say "with specific rules" without saying what those specific rules are.........

Remember, this is no easy task if one is serious. Luck is not an option.

There are many ways to NOT make a million within a single year, but in this contest your task is to average $4,167.00 a day.

To remove not workable daily wins lets assume the trader has a plan that he/she does not book any more than 6k a day and will not have a daily loss larger than 1/3 the required initial margin needed to trade. Lets be realistic, a well heeled trader is not going to be dropping any more than 25k a day. (the losses are not cumulative, each day is a new day, if you lose 25k in a month you can refund the account up to BUT NOT MORE than 25k usable margin funds, this is to avoid nonsense).......losing 5 k a day is doable but rare.

Ok, off to a BBG :) PLEASE, no more answers like a 100 cars a trade, be realistic.

PS: Whatever other friends of marketsurfer did is mox-nix in this contest. Who gives a shit what Timmy or whomever did in the past? this one is a REAL contest, fiction yes, but it is about offering others how to plan a plan. Surf... "GO FISH!! "

Calling out "HIT RATES etc is NOT a plan..........try again. This is about HOW it can be done. Osmosis is not an option.
 
I'm not good at contests.

As a practicality, though, it can be done by an experienced trader.

This would require three daily efforts in one instrument..

1. Determining the carry over from the prior day (40 minutes in the evening). An annotation from bar 25 onward would have to be scribed.

2. Doing the opening trade and closing the account for the day (up to a 40 minute hold beginning on bar 1). In the Summer months the 40 minutes would be replaced with 25 5-minute bars beginning with bar 1. See below for details.

3. Sweeping the daily profits into an unused account daily to keep the trading platform free of adjustments.



There are a couple of caveats.

1. Since I'm the trader, I would use the MAT account level of my last two "opening trades only" most recently posted prints.

2. For Summer trading, I would use the first 25 bars and have the trades similar to those posted for the open on the most recent trading day (last Friday).

3. I would only trade for 34 days to not exceed the contest goal.

4. The complete system I would use would be the system posted in the 6 steps and the related flow sheets, 56 elements of price, volume, trend types, turns and end effects. Google the 11 consecutive attachments. Because the symbols are organized by uniform names this will appear to be gibberish to most.

Personally, I feel that allowing compounding to happen is a good idea. Restricting and not allowing compounding takes away the greatest resource of any trader.

If you feel I've not conformed you are correct. Why trade more than one instrument? I am just trading the ES front month with no roll over.
 
Jack

Yes it can be done.

You lost me when going to the google remarks, sorry.

Compounding is not used, though you are correct it has a place in other situations such as interest bearing accounts etc.

Yes a single instrument could be used in another contest. If the restrictions allowed more than 8 contracts per trade I would simply use 20 cars for $250 a tick and seek 17 ticks and be done. That is VERY doable unless a prolonged tight daily range comes along to mess with the average and destroy the days where you get shall we say 13, 15, 20 handles. I do NOT trade 20 cars a pop now. ES itself can manage 5 handles a day as an average for a decent trader.

The math part of the contest can surely be understood by many, what I am doing is seeing WHO can contemplate using a strategy that is more automatic than shooting from the hip. Rambo traders are not going to make a million in a single year, NO WAY.

When conditions are right with this strategy, there will be few trades made daily.
I suspect by tomorrow evening the riddle will be solved .... :cool:

Forget about making a million a million, think about HOW you plan on making a million.. Think what you will do to make it happen... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=298nld4Yfds

Find the way..... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DohRa9lsx0Q
 
Quote from bighog:

Jack

Yes it can be done.

You lost me when going to the google remarks, sorry.

On ET, you cannot search for "6 steps"; I did not know about this failing of ET. Here are the 11 attachments:

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=3831294

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=3831305

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=3831309

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=3831311

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=3831320

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=3831328

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=3831333

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=3831336

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=3831340

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=3831333

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=3831334

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=3831336

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=3831336

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=3831340

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=3831347

the 6 steps shows where to use the other attachments to learn the complete system of the market operation.

Compounding is not used, though you are correct it has a place in other situations such as interest bearing accounts etc.

what I meant was compounding profits. making 5K a day allows the addition of 4 contracts, at least.

Yes a single instrument could be used in another contest. If the restrictions allowed more than 8 contracts per trade I would simply use 20 cars for $250 a tick and seek 17 ticks and be done. That is VERY doable unless a prolonged tight daily range comes along to mess with the average and destroy the days where you get shall we say 13, 15, 20 handles. I do NOT trade 20 cars a pop now. ES itself can manage 5 handles a day as an average for a decent trader.

I am an MAT type trader. So I do trade over 100 contracts a pop. I showed this on prints for just doing opening trades for a few days to point this out to readers, but they could not read prints. I didn't search for those prints; if there is an interest maybe someone can put them in a post as attachments.

The math part of the contest can surely be understood by many, what I am doing is seeing WHO can contemplate using a strategy that is more automatic than shooting from the hip. Rambo traders are not going to make a million in a single year, NO WAY.

When conditions are right with this strategy, there will be few trades made daily.
I suspect by tomorrow evening the riddle will be solved .... :cool:

Forget about making a million a million, think about HOW you plan on making a million.. Think what you will do to make it happen...

Find the way.....
More...

as you say it is summer time. the following show the open for last Friday:

https://www.elitetrader.com/et/attachments/ot-bs-page-1-jpg.138188/

https://www.elitetrader.com/et/attachments/ot-bs-page-2-jpg.138189/

https://www.elitetrader.com/et/attachments/ot-bs-page-3-jpg.138190/

as you see this beginner's work shows that in 25 bars plus exiting the long, that the beginner has made 6 points per contract. for me trding in parallel with my MAT accounts, I have over 100 contracts making the 6 points per contract.

As I said, I am not good at contests since I am trading to make money for others who spend the money to solve local problems.

The solution for making money is to use the expressions and filters presented in the charts above. I'm glad you will be putting up another solution this weekend.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Going to make this easier for the math part. Making a million within 240 days might be easier to swallow if the bites were smaller. Think not of making a million, think in more baby steps by making $4,167 a day.

Lets assume 4 instruments (ES, CL or whatever you like for the 4 or less). The total number of contracts allowed to be traded at once is 18 per trade. No single item can be more than 8 cars used per trade. If 4 items are used, than you could use 8 in one, 4 cars in two and 2 cars in one. That is 18 max. The max number of ticks allowed to book if using 8 cars is 12, the max in the items that use 4 cars is 35 ticks each, the max ticks allowed to be booked in the item with 2 cars is 12 ticks. No trade can book more that 35 ticks.

First the math, then later the strategy and tactics to move $4,167 a day from their wallet to yours.

This can be done in 4 trades max for each and every day, not gonna be that easy though, HA!!

One of the goals is to reduce commission costs because I do not like giving hard earned ticks to the casino.

Compounding booked profits, I get it, but do not use that, it sounds good but in a game of chance, compounding is suicide when that LARGER retrace pops up when some hedge fund clown shows up and sweeps the mkt and your STOP mkt order gets filled on the worst tick........
 
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