Been trolling this board here and there and never bothered to comment but tonight, I tell you guys a story...lol
I started daytrading back in 1999 at Schonfeld Securities as a prop trader. It took me 2 years to learn and I did very well in 2001-2004. I missed out on the dotcom bc I was trading 100-500 shares. I saw guys make millions. If you made less than 500k you were a piker...lol..
In 2007 I decided to trade with my own money. I wanted to test out w 25k account and trading your own money was totally different. I ended up almost wiped out with only 6k left and then all of a sudden I had the best run I can think of or read about. Jan 2008, my lows was $6000 and I closed then month back to 26k. Feb 2008, I made 60k. My firmed closed down bc everyone lost money except for me. They returned my money and I opened an account at T3 with 10k bc I wanted to see how they were. March- May I made 10k each month. My account was at 40k. My leverage at these prop trading firm was 30-1. They said you can get 50-1 but that’s if you are low risk. I wanted to trade a bigger account so I put down 100k at Echo in May 2008 and still keep my account at T3.
I would use the T3 account as my primary and when I see a great trade I would use my Echo account. My Echo account was 5mil. I got them to give me 50-1 bc they didn’t know I was volatile.
My first trade at Echo in June 08 made me 17k and ended the month up 100k profit. Then I was feeling good and traded this account mainly. July I made 500k. I told myself “Ok, I’m up 700k this year let’s stop.” It’s more than what I could imagine ... So I took august off.
September comes around and I tell myself.. let’s risk 100k and if I lose the 100k I stop. September was a crazy month. I didn’t know how it can be like this. I started out day 1 5k, day 2 10k, day 3 25k, day 4 50k. that Friday I saw a great trade and said fuck this “I love this trade.. it’s 5star trade .. I’ll risk my 90k profit this week and go all in. I made 110k that day and was like wow.. I’m up 200k this week. I got more scared each day. The following week I made 3 days and had a bad day. Lost 75k. I was gonna stop but the market was too good. Now I called up risk mngr and asked for a raised in BP. I had 1.5mil in this account and I wanted 10mil. They only gave me 7.5mil BP. I follow this with an 800k profit day but closed the month up only 900k. Yes, I made 800k usd with 7.5mil BP.
October 2008 I made 1.1mil and at my highs I was up 3.8mil in this account. Remember, I started with 100k account in May and by Oct I was up 3.8mil. Pretty crazy run huh? I traded 10-20k shares of banks like GS, JPM, WFT, C,SKF (3x fin), tech stocks like aapl, goog, amazon, and metal stocks. I usually have 10-20 positions on at a time.
Beginning of Nov I decided to stop trading big and took my most of my money out and put into a long term TDAmeritrade account. I had 2mil and used margin.. Yes I figure in 6 months these stocks would rebound 50%. I bought 10k jpm @ 16, 10k gs @81, WFT @13, bac @6, etc.. I bought everything Ma, V, Aig, Axp, SPY, Tech... the Dow was around 8000. Then 3 days after Obama got elected the mkt crashed around 10-11:30. all financial stocks crash 50% or more. I saw my account drop 250k every 10mins. While trading my echo n t3 account I was making easy 5-25k everyday but the main acct was losing so much that 5-25k profit were like pennies.
Long story short I had margin called on my TD account bc BAC was 99cents.. JPM was $9, everything dropped hard. My TD acct had $143000 left. My echo n T3 suffered loses bc i was going max long or short trying to arbitrage the move in my TD account.
Both my account suffered death like losses ... Lol.. I just closed my account n took rest of the year off. All that work amounted to not making anything..
The next yr was my worse year where I lost 250k and I was done with...
I nevered had the funds to trade big again and in 2010 no one wanted to hire w/o putting your own money out.
I resorted to trading futures with a 2-5k account and let me tell you.. trading a small account is very very difficult. I worked a reg job and the money i saved I used it on trading ES futures. I learned a lot and always think I finally got this but my account never went passed 25k. If it did i was too fixed on making money and traded too big. Futures you cannot trade big bc a big drop in ES wipes out 80% of your acct. That happened to me..
So, what am I doing now? I’m broke.. no more money but I did learn a lot the past few years. I know I'm not fast enough or good like i was few yrs ago. I know more now then I ever have. I cannot day trade like I in my younger years.
In the next few months I’m looking to open a futures trading prop firm w some investors and I manage and teach them. My trading days are long gone...
btw, all of my trading in 2008-2010 was done in Vietnam with slow internet speed. I moved back to NJ in 2010-2017. I’m looking to open the office in Saigon.