Quote from Don Bright:
I've never said running a trading business, trading prop, whatever you want to call it is easy (simple maybe, but not easy)....but there is an unlimited upside and a very small barrier to entry. I would think one would want to be a trader than pay $250,000 for some franchise fee to start a business that "may" work...(hiring people, advertising, selling sandwiches, whatever).
That's my main point, the "entrepreneural" types seek the independence.
It takes a lot of work, as we all know.
All the best,
Don
I'm a business student, and I have to agree that there are many franchises that are questionable in terms of ROI.
For example, we have a major gasoline retailer up here in Canada (which shall remain unnamed), which involves very high upfront costs in order to purchase and establish your own franchise. The individual owners make very little money off gasoline sales, and all merchandise sales prices are set by head office, so the franchisee basically has no price control.
I attended their supplier tradeshow a few years back (was working a summer job for one of their suppliers), and many of the franchisees were extremely disgruntled with the state of things. Running one of these gas stations essentially meant attempting to generate ROI one bag of chips at a time, I would really love to see the books for one of the franchisees. As an amusing side note, one of the last, best means for making money was to install a car wash on a franchisee's site, though that involved big bucks as well (those auto carwashes are damn expensive).
I suspect that one of the primary reasons that people choose to go the franchise route is the degree of hand holding, as well as group marketing benefits. When you purchase a franchise you end up with someone helping you through the entire process re: finding a location, building the site, acquiring equipment, how to run your business, etc.
Getting back to treating trading as a business, I agree completely. I'm currently an undercapitalized university student, my primary goal over the past year has been to gain some practical experience trading the markets. My next goal is to start building up a trading account, fortunately my current job will likely fit in very nicely with trading (I could work full-time yet still be able to trade for a significant portion of the trading day).
Regarding treating trading like a business, a perfect example is that I've been doing a fair bit of research and trialing to find a good quote feed solution. More importantly, I was looking for an
economical choice. When I was first looking around at options such as Esignal, I found the monthly cost to be very high (roughly $250 USD/month), so I was very happy when I found an alternate solution that will run me roughly $70-80 USD/month. Pretty standard business thinking - the lower your costs are, the more likely you are to be profitable.