ES Journal - 2019/2020

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Guys - here is a post of mine to a good friend who is struggling to become consistently profitable. I pointed him to the book "Trading Mindfully" by Gary Dayton. It's a huge look into the trading game from a Psych point-of-view. It won't create a winning system for you, but it will explain your thoughts and emotions during the trading day.
No, not very good....average. Very good is an average of $1500 per day of trading income. I'm at half of that....as there are losing days which are expected when dealing with the most volatile trading vehicle ever made ! Man, there have been stories of bankruptcy, divorce, even suicide over E-Mini market trading. It has humbled and even ruined many a trader. Just go thru the history of results for this trader: http://mbagearhead.blogspot.com/ He's lost so much money trading E-Minis, it's not even funny. I don't know how he can continue quite frankly. Look at his equity curves. This is risky business in it's highest form...everyone should know that. Risk management and money management are paramount to success. Indicators and bar time-frames are secondary-at-most.
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Amount of money earned per day is not a good indicator of one's profitable level.
Making $1000 on 50K and 500K is a big difference.
I see someone use points per contract. That gives a good information about one's profit level.
Since you know how many pionts per contract you make per day on average, then how much percentage profit of your capital you make, depends on how high leverage you use. If two winners make same amount of money per contract per day(on average), and one of them make more money, it is because he use higher leverage. These two people should be regarded as being at same skill level.
 
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bbpp said:
Amount of money earned per day is not a good indicator of one's profitable level.
Making $1000 on 50K and 500K is a big difference.
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Agree. But can we assume traders only allocate a certain amount of capital to E-mini trading ? I mean, wow, $500k is a lot ! What are we talking here ..... 50-100 lots ?
bbpp said:
I see someone use points per contract. That gives a good information about one's profit level.
Since you know how many points per contract you make per day on average, then how much percentage profit of your capital you make, depends on how high leverage you use. If two winners make same amount of money per contract per day(on average), and one of them make more money, it is because he use higher leverage. These two people should be regarded as being at same skill level.
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I agree that using leverage and money management (how many contracts to trade) are paramount....and you can't compare performance on a strict dollar basis. It's gotta be a percentage of the margin commitment. Still I think most pro traders are in the 4 to 20 contract range for ES or NQ. Is this a reasonable expectation ?
 
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syswizard said:
here is a post of mine to a good friend who is struggling to become consistently profitable. I pointed him to the book "Trading Mindfully" by Gary Dayton. It's a huge look into the trading game from a Psych point-of-view. It won't create a winning system for you, but it will explain your thoughts and emotions during the trading day.
More...

This might assist some day traders that haven't yet found their nitch:
Trading the Indices on Fundamentals
 
bbpp said:
Amount of money earned per day is not a good indicator of one's profitable level.
Making $1000 on 50K and 500K is a big difference.
More...

On the contrary, I say it is. Market conditions sometimes don't give you the big points even if you had 100% wins. e.g. 2017, the whole year didn't give even a 2% day swing, even if you caught both the low and the high of the day you were likely to get 4 or 5 pts max. The only way to make it big in these conditions is to play with $500k but then the per cent return would be low even though no one could do better. So, a good trader not only needs a good win ration but also needs to know how and when to scale according to market conditions. A consistent $3k/day under all market conditions makes a good trader in my view, regardless of the capital deployed.

I keep $500k on stand-by but only deploy a max of $50k to trade, only once in a blue moon do I deploy more than $50k, when I do it is in market conditions as those of 2017 or when a black swan creates a serious oversold condition. I aim for $3k/day and scale when markets are near flatline to achieve the $3k, so according to you I fluctuate between a good and a poor trader, right?
 
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FXtrader8911 said:
On the contrary, I say it is. Market conditions sometimes don't give you the big points even if you had 100% wins. e.g. 2017, the whole year didn't give even a 2% day swing, even if you caught both the low and the high of the day you were likely to get 4 or 5 pts max. The only way to make it big in these conditions is to play with $500k but then the per cent return would be low even though no one could do better. So, a good trader not only needs a good win ration but also needs to know how and when to scale according to market conditions. A consistent $3k/day under all market conditions makes a good trader in my view, regardless the capital deployed.
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I don't understand what you said.
You said you disagree with me, but talked about a lot unrelated things.
So at the end I only know you disagree with me, but don't know what is your reasoning.
 
I am comparing traders' performance.
Under current circumstances, if I make 3 points per day on average, and other traders make 2 points per day, so I would be considered better than my peer. It doesn't necessarily need 10s of points per day.
In fact, I think 2 points per day would be very good performance ,it translate into 50% profit per month, if you trade on $5000/contract, or 23% per month, 1200% per year, if you trade on $10000/contract.
 
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