How did you grow your account into a big one?

Quote from garachen:


At the time, this frustrated me. I was 25 and had only saved about $150K. Thought I was doing at least reasonably well - but apparently I wasn't "really trying". He'd motivate me with stories of how he made his first Million, then the next ten, fifty and so on. There's a lot of good story here that I'm skipping. Suffice it to say, he motivated me to quit my job at the hedge fund and try a different approach.
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clearly, I havent been trying hard enough either... something to consider and think about changing...

Quote from garachen:


During the interview process I pretty heavily screen for personality traits that I think are important for trading so I end up with people who can resonate with my particular, very risk averse, style.
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I would be curious to know what those traits that you are...
 
Quote from garachen:

We like to take vacations together. Used to be we'd take everyone (wife, kids). It's a pretty pleasant work environment.
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must be a california/west coast thing... NYC is more cut-throat... even when we are networking we are measuring the "competition" and I've never seen the sales/desk traders vacation together... when they hang out at the lounges some of us IT geeks who trade go there as well and it is more about them showing off spending than anything else... which is complete total contrast from the PB side, those are more about making sure they can expense the drinks on the company dime so there is always a client in the mix... :)

but vacation together? not even within my own IT team we do that, well, with the exception of one of my buddies that I have know for over 15 years and we frequently spent time hanging out at each others house letting the kids play together.. and we went to brazil together for a friends wedding... that was a fun time out there... anyhow, I digress...
 
Quote from ofthomas:

perhaps you are looking at it at the wrong angle... $25K margin, depending on the contract and intraday requirements, amounts to much greater notional value...

for example... I will use one of my equities strategies that started performing again that I am looking to deploy soon enough...

it risks 10c to make 20-25c and it, with $2500, can achieve ~30% on capital, but when looking at how much notional is around 2% return... if instead I deployed the same strategy with $250K I would achieve 3% return on capital...

you get the picture... to me, I personally prefer to measure rate of return on the notional amount... garachen is clearly mentioning the margin capital required, which is why people go nuts over a rate of return that seems unsustainable and crazy, when in fact it is not..
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notional amount of bond futures: 100,000
margin: 500

so with a $5000 account you have 1 million

so with $5000 you should make 100,000 a year, since that is only 10% on 1 million.

LOL
 
Quote from garachen:

Manual trading. My low frequency auto trading and HFT are counted separately.

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There's a lot of less- liquid products out there. Also, there are lots of spread products that are not available through the traditional broker setup (IB) but you can see them when you use TT or write direct.
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I assume the $1K a day then is not actively trading (intraday) those contracts but rather structuring a position that can last days to weeks... I presume now the $1K daily is the average per day, which would make a lot of sense.. and if that $25K margin in use is for spreading, then you are certainly carrying a bit of size... (then again, depends on what you are doing spreads wise...)

my only concern with less liquid spreads is hedging for fat-tails...
 
Quote from BlueTurtle:

notional amount of bond futures: 100,000
margin: 500

so with a $5000 account you have 1 million

so with $5000 you should make 100,000 a year, since that is only 10% on 1 million.

LOL
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doubtful... 10% on notional on bonds and you are a rock star... more like 2-3% bud... and trading 10 bonds on $5K is ... hmmm... suicidal? (not to mention retarded)... anyhow... I gather you don't get the point, so there is no point to try to argue over it...
 
Thanks garachen and ofthomas.

I believe every word of what you say. Your success is truly astounding. I am not sure if other accomplished successful traders also achieve this kind of success. Maybe they do, I don't know.
 
It all varies. But is definitely intraday. As I look over. My three new guys have traded so far today on average 70 contracts. All three are positive. Average $400. The more experienced guys, same products averaging 300 contracts (slow day) about $3000 average so far. Another manual trader (different products) 16,000 contracts - up about 10K. Another guy 700 contracts(different products). Neg 5K.
 
there seems to be some confusion on margin and account size

at 10%, 25k margin implies a 250k account

so being 25k margin committed doesn't mean you are 100% margined, it means you are 10% margin committed

and yes, 25k margin will get you a 1k swing everyday, or every hour, whether you want it or not
 
How to grow your account size is a really good question...!

FXCM used to have (I don't know if they still do) a King of the Micro contest and they published results...

These are the results for July 2012...

http://forexforums.dailyfx.com/king...-contest-results-winner-returns-956-51-a.html

A person from the Ukraine won by turning $500 into $4801.51 a 956.51% return...

REPORT
http://media.dailyfx.com/sales/micro/kom_docs/JUL2012/julytradereport1st.pdf

Looking over the trades this person traded gold exclusively. You quickly notice the massive increase in size from 15 lots to 60 lots in XAU/USD... And then a decrease in size to just 1 lot with further trades despite the fact that he/she wasn't losing.

So to answer the question... You grow your account by betting big on sure things and then just churning along for everything else.

If anyone ever read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Jesse Livermore he pretty much says the same thing. He used to go really big when he was sure of something.

Obviously, if you get it wrong you're going to lose a huge portion of your account but this is really the only way to go about it if you want to make huge gains.

You can also grow your account steadily with the same size and gradually increasing your size as you win steadily. However, this implies a very high amount of consistency which is next to impossible to achieve in trading.
 
so, if I put a trader on and authorize 25k in margin, hopefully, I have 1mm to back that up. And yes, I expect about 1k a day.

that's .1% a day

2%/mo

24%/yr

otherwise, the bullshit detector is on high alert
 
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