Anyone here actually profitable?

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Rutro said:
I refuse to pay for another book, course, or mentor. Tired of it all.

Can someone give me a no bullshit assessment on whether this is actually achievable or not? I have iron-clad discipline but zero strategy. Psychology has never been an issue. Not trying to strike it mega-rich at this point but just to consistently put money in my account and take a few trades a day.

I'm beginning to lose my mind. Thought trading would be a good way to try and pay off medical debt but boy was I wrong. Maybe if I could swing 5 lots on ES and take 8 points a day it might happen, but as of right now all I do is lose money.

Any and all help would be appreciated.

Thanks.
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Hello Rutro,

Lets us ALL stop bullshitting please, just for one day!!

Sir, if I was making million of dollars of trading the market every year, and I NEED to trade another year to make a million dollars to pay my bills and support my 3 pretty girlfriends and drive my fancy cars: I would not tell anyone I am trader and I will damn sure not ever post on https://www.elitetrader.com/ every again my life.

Why would I do this and log off ET and never return? Because I do not want to give a mirco of a hint/tip/help of my trading edge to anyone if I need my trading edge to pay my bills. Once I run the edge to make about $4million to retire and no debt, then I come back on https://www.elitetrader.com/ to provide some help. But that only help will only be "Keep working hard buddy, you will get there"

I am not telling you damn thing on earth. You are my competition and I gotta keep my 3 girlfriends happy so I can stay waxing their ass everynight.

Forget about it. There is no help. No one is going to show you EXACTLY
how they are making millions of dollars trading the market. EVER not in 1 million years.

So you are COMPLETELY on your own my friend if you thinking someone going to tell you something that will pay your medical debt off.

Keep on trading and get better, that is all you can do.
 
tomkat22 said:
There's bunch of mistakes you can make on every trade and the market is usually unforgiving and punishes you when you make one of those mistakes. Best you can do is learn to stop making those mistakes.
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The OP said he doesn't have a strategy/system, so he needs that first. Will easily take a few years minimum.

Now, even with that in place, it's still so easy to make mistakes and get sloppy or override your rules/system. There's really not much room for error in (short-term) trading.

That's why I think it's much harder to succeed in trading than in your average small time business. In most businesses or jobs you can still have a bad day or two with little to zero impact. In trading a bad day or two could mean blowing up your account.

I'm not sure how good the system was, but with the famous Turtle experiment a large group of traders were given the same system/rules to trade. Only a few succeeded.
 
FreeGoldRush said:
A small franchise almost never fails because someone sold you the recipe. So I guess it depends on the kind of business you are talking about. I'm thinking mostly tech startups.
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They fail all the time. You just don't see it because the corporation will clean it up.

Tech startups are less like trading than the are like gas stations.
 
Experience is everything & few are cut out for trading to begin with. The goal of a trader new or not yet profitable should be to stay in the game long enough to gain enough experience - most churn out way to soon from taking on way to much size in relation to their skill & acct size, over trading is the other problem.

If there is a secret of wining at trading it is detuning your hard wired flight or fight instincts - no easy task, takes an awful lot of experience & pain to grow from.

Its not about knowledge or entry signals, it's about developing the right behaviors & executing consistently while improving over the long term.
 
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Rutro said:
Maybe if I could swing 5 lots on ES and take 8 points a day it might
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8 pts a day is more than 2000 ES points a year, not going to happen, trading isn't that easy because you have to factor in the losing trades as well.

Instead you have to be happy to net in the low hundreds of points per year but do it at larger size (think 50 ES lots instead of 5).

But sometimes you do get crazy upside outlier years where you make a lot points wise, but you cant rely on those every year, but they are the kind of years that hook people in.

Of course you can just put on 50+ lots at the start of your career, you have to build up to that kind of size.
 
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comagnum said:
Experience is everything & few are cut out for trading to begin with. The goal of a trader new or not yet profitable should be to stay in the game long enough to gain enough experience - most churn out way to soon from taking on way to much size in relation to their skill & acct size, over trading is the other problem.

If there is a secret of wining at trading it is detuning your hard wired flight or fight instincts - no easy task, takes an awful lot of experience & pain to grow from.

Its not about knowledge or entry signals, it's about developing the right behaviors & executing consistently while improving over the long term.
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Sage advice, comagnum. :thumbsup:

I have a quote which I probably got somewhere else which I think is spot on: "There's no substitute for experience."

No amount of reading, testing and research can substitute experience. And that simply takes time.

I think most of us come into this business with very unrealistic expectations and want to start making a killing right away. After the first wake-up call and touch with reality we realize it may take at least a few years. And after a few years we realize we still have a long way to go. And at a certain point in time we start wondering if we'll even make it at all.

In order to give the OP and others in a similar situation realistic expectations - what would you say is an approximate number of years to become profitable and experienced enough to become a successful trader? Here, I assume a retail trader trying to learn this on his own without a mentor to guide him.

With regards to detuning the fight or flight instincts, I imagine the solution is to trade small.
 
SimpleMeLike said:
Hello Rutro,

Lets us ALL stop bullshitting please, just for one day!!

Sir, if I was making million of dollars of trading the market every year, and I NEED to trade another year to make a million dollars to pay my bills and support my 3 pretty girlfriends and drive my fancy cars: I would not tell anyone I am trader and I will damn sure not ever post on https://www.elitetrader.com/ every again my life.

Why would I do this and log off ET and never return? Because I do not want to give a mirco of a hint/tip/help of my trading edge to anyone if I need my trading edge to pay my bills. Once I run the edge to make about $4million to retire and no debt, then I come back on https://www.elitetrader.com/ to provide some help. But that only help will only be "Keep working hard buddy, you will get there"

I am not telling you damn thing on earth. You are my competition and I gotta keep my 3 girlfriends happy so I can stay waxing their ass everynight.

Forget about it. There is no help. No one is going to show you EXACTLY
how they are making millions of dollars trading the market. EVER not in 1 million years.

So you are COMPLETELY on your own my friend if you thinking someone going to tell you something that will pay your medical debt off.

Keep on trading and get better, that is all you can do.
More...

Nobody is giving anything away because why would they water down their trading strategy? There are a lot of trading strategies out there for free, in plain sight in the internet or You Tube. Also, what each trader earns is their business and nobody else. Nobody is engaged in any pissing contests here. Original poster has not even put in enough effort to learn how to trade yet, wants to earn millions? Not going to happen in this lifetime. Either put in the time to learn or forget about it.
 
smallfil said:
Nobody is giving anything away because why would they water down their trading strategy? There are a lot of trading strategies out there for free, in plain sight in the internet or You Tube. Also, what each trader earns is their business and nobody else. Nobody is engaged in any pissing contests here. Original poster has not even put in enough effort to learn how to trade yet, wants to earn millions? Not going to happen in this lifetime. Either put in the time to learn or forget about it.
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AGREE
 
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