Am I Wasting My Time?
- Thread starter Tall Mike
- Start date
You're profitable and doing better than most.
What's got you down on trading or why not stick with the indexing ?
wrbtrader
Every or most markets have a huge variety of players with different motives and time frames than you.
Your day trade long entry may simply offset the part of an order of a larger player hedging his portfolio or some other player taking profits on a long term trade.
As long as your chosen market have sufficient liquidity for you to enter and exit without significant market impact, I maintain the view that there's no competition.
It does of course depend slightly on what it is you're trying to do. Low latency strategies/HFT/arbitrage is a different game. But as a retail trader I assume that's not something you're attempting or even considering.
LOL oops, was typing too quickly. 0.002 * 100k = $200. Quickly added a % at the end.
ET is free. No one ask me to pay to join.
Mostly random but not completely. If you have some math background, all you have to do is look at daily stock price movement. None are exactly normally distributed => not exactly random.
Everything starts with a thought, than comes the actions, you can make this a reality if you put in the work, we build our own stories.
Give yourself a goal, write it down, pursue it every day. You should have at least 2-3 years of living expenses outside of your trading acct. It is preferable that you are using profits already made while you were employed - this is positive feedback & gives you the confidence to do this.
It helps to have a higher purpose other than just making $, things that your really into that you spend your free time on.
To many full time traders lack having a purpose. They started out passionate about trading only to turn into reclusive shut-ins wallowing in complete misery.
Give yourself a goal, write it down, pursue it every day. You should have at least 2-3 years of living expenses outside of your trading acct. It is preferable that you are using profits already made while you were employed - this is positive feedback & gives you the confidence to do this.
It helps to have a higher purpose other than just making $, things that your really into that you spend your free time on.
To many full time traders lack having a purpose. They started out passionate about trading only to turn into reclusive shut-ins wallowing in complete misery.
Last edited:
After seeing your background I'm surprised to hear a yearly 50% return recommended as a minimum to determine if you should be trading or not.
I was rounding and corrected myself to ~40% but at the same time he only had 100K and I am making an assumption that $200 a day can get an average person by. Earning 20-30% a year is good but it wont get you by with 100K unless you're really young. Hope that makes sense as this was more geared towards the parameters of his situation rather than a general statement on what expected ror should be. When testing people out good traders with potential fall between 30-60% range but this is only based on months of demos. There are traders who can get 10-30% annualized over 2 months but again most of them can't sustain it so I do look for 30-60% because I hate wasting my time. For seasoned traders that I see, we rarely use the top end of our buying power and our deposits are highly leveraged and change over time so ror becomes hard to track. If we calculate based on BP then ror could be in teens but based on deposit ror could be in the thousands lol.