Hi wrbtrader,
what about those traders who have won the various trading competitions? How profitable do you think they are?
I'm not sure which particular trading competition you're talking about because there's lots of them in reference to real money competitions and simulated competitions.
Real money competitions usually have a duration like 1week or 1month. In contrast, simulated competitions tend to last longer with duration like 1 month, quarter or year.
I've seen the results of
real money competitions in the past few years where traders won by profiting 100k to 1million dollars. Yet, I don't know if they are discretionary or system traders but they are traders that trade their own private capital.
I've also seen the results of simulated competitions that show results of discretionary trading teams, system (automated) trading teams in different types of market assets. Some categories the discretionary trading team won and in other assets the system (automated) trading team won.
Note: Those simulated competitions did not involve individual trader competition. In contrast, it was a team competition.
My point is that I don't think trading competitions is an adequate representation of what the OP of this thread is talking about. I could be wrong but I was under the impression the OP is talking about traders that are consistently profitable of at least a few years for the past few years because its already well known whom were famous traders in market conditions of the past (e.g. Paul Rotter).
Once again,
its impossible to know which group (system traders or discretionary traders) are the most profitable in
today's market conditions. unless someone has access hundreds of thousands of trading records on this planet. Anyways, I gave the anonymous name of the CIS trader (a discretionary trader) but only because that guy has some close system trading pals that he said did poorly during that infamous profit run he had.
That's just one example but it doesn't represent what's going on every where else in the world because as I stated...we can easily name 1 or 2 profitable traders that are system traders or discretionary traders but we can not without a doubt determine overall which group outperforms the other unless someone thinks simulated trading conditions is a good way to do it. If that's ok with folks...
simulated competitions I've seen its about even between system traders versus discretionary traders.
P.S. Barclay's top trader is
not a systematic trader. Yet, he has a team. I think he got something like 12% to 15% as a bonus for each 25 million he made. He make like 170 million euro dollars if that's of any value to anyone. Yet, I don't think institutional traders that are not automated are part of this discussion because they have access to resources that the typical retail trader does not have access to. I also don't know how his performance compares to the performances of Barclay's algorithms.
There's other top institutional traders that are
not systematic but as stated above...I don't know how their performance compares to the firms algorithm systems or automated systems and these top pros usually don't work alone (they work in a team with them being the
head trader of that team) and they have access to resources us typical retail trader do not have access to.
Note: I use the term head trader but that's not accurate. There's another title given to them but I can't remember what it was.
on a daily basis that constantly change and a whole plethora of other variables that make it tick the way it ticks`
