Costs of trading

Discretionary Trading: stocks, options, futures, day trading combined with swing trading.
This sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Have you added your hourly rate costs because I can imagine you are working like a Trojan.

Simplify your trading, drop your labour hours, increase your position size, be an expert in one field, not a Jack of all trades would be my advice.
 
Fonz said:
I created an LLC to segregate my short term trading activities and being a pro for the IRS. That way, wash sales don't apply (big deal for my swing trades) and in case of a big yearly loss (we never know for sure) I can deduct all of them, not just $3,000 per year. I can deduct a lot of business costs, like professional market data.
The only way I can reduce the market data costs is to get rid of Tradestation. unfortunately I really need them for the platforms, and having my capital into 2 or 3 different brokers make me feel better.
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I see. If you can deduct those market data costs then these are indeed of lesser importance to you.
 
themickey said:
Discretionary Trading: stocks, options, futures, day trading combined with swing trading.
This sounds like a recipe for disaster.
More...

Yesterday results of swing trading = very bad, like always during a big 1 day drop after +10 up days. 1 day total trading capital DD = -3.85% (high leverage)
Yesterday results of day trading = very good (very very good actually) on SPX and volatility ETF.
1 day total trading capital DD = +5.9% (single call and put options only)
This recipe works well so far. This is my way of hedging my leveraged swing trading.

Yesterday IB option costs = $133.31
 
Not all opportunity costs are created equal but I agree that it should be a consideration into one's costs. I've left a six-figure job to be a stay-at-home dad for my three kids as my wife make an order of magnitude more than me. As a result, I'm not working because of trading therefore it's not necessarily an opportunity cost for me.
 
Lost in this discussion of expenses/commissions , is the execution routing. I'm thinking of moving some funds to cheaper brokers vs. IB . The SEC 606 reports of some of them is giving me pause... some firms route 100% of their orders to MM firms. I can't envision scenarios how that would translate to better price execution of option spreads. Your thoughts? Thanks.
 
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