Quote from TheCaymanIsland:
Question: If I wanted to make $15,000 a day using an algorithmic futures platform, what kind of risk requirements would make sense?
Ratios, Notional Values, Contracts per day, etc?
15K is a realistic amount for a hedge fund. In my experience (2 years trading for a hedge fund in the past), depending on what you trade, you should assume a maximum annual return of 20%. This means you need to have a minimum capital to start with of about 20 Million. If you make more, that is fine.
Now, as far as contracts per day, you need to design a trading algorithm that will risk no more than 1% on each trade and generate enough trades to reach your goal. This is to keep your risk of ruin low.
For example, let us assume you are trading Crude futures and you have an objective of $0.5 per trade and a stop loss of $1 per trade. With 20 Million you can risk 0.01 x 20,000,000 or an amount of 200,000 on each trade and this means you need to buy or sell 200 contracts each time, since 200 x $1,000 = 200,000
Thus, each time you win you make 100,000 and each time you lose 200,000. If you can maintain that, then your expectancy per trade, assuming you can make a trade per day, will be 15,000 if
15,000 = w x 100,000 - (1-w) x 200,000
Solving for w we get: 71.6%
So you need to have a win rate of more than 71% to get your average daily return.
If your trade every 2 days, then you need to have a higher win rate so that your expectancy is 30,000 per two days,
w = (30,000 +200,000)/300,000 = 76.66%
As you can see, you need to be more profitable and this becomes a problem as the frequency of trades decreases.
In general, if your trading frequency is N, then
N x E = avg. win x w - (1-w) x avg. loss
I suggest you read
this paper and also
this one before you start doing anything. They can save you a lot of time and trouble.