How much did you lose on the journey to becoming profitable?
- Thread starter Risepoint1879
- Start date
A f***in' lot.
should be good in time.
For those quoting losses, I challenge you:
how much money were you withdrawing along the way?
Don't be quoting how you "blew up" a $25k account when you drew $1k from it for a year before blowing up. Had you counted only your successes along the way, you'd have taken a $75k account down to $50k. But sometimes, the mortgage has to be paid. The electric! Oooop! There went the transmission. And the kid's bike just got stolen. And there's that knocking again, from an aging Hot Water heater.....
I'm not saying that accounts don't get blown up by trading mistakes. I'm saying, let's not forget the successes that get hidden by only looking at the drops. If your trading is truly your living, you've got to look broader to fairly gauge the deal.
(And that certainly works in the reverse: if your account has weathered the market satisfactorily, but you're not drawing a living from it? WTH? You might as well be trading sim -- the kind of sim that those who 'fake it' trade: the kind of sim that produces no blood-curdling pit-in-the-stomach when the market moves against you. EVERY trade should feel like the mortgage is on the line. {Eventually, it will be.} Proper sim does this.)
how much money were you withdrawing along the way?
Don't be quoting how you "blew up" a $25k account when you drew $1k from it for a year before blowing up. Had you counted only your successes along the way, you'd have taken a $75k account down to $50k. But sometimes, the mortgage has to be paid. The electric! Oooop! There went the transmission. And the kid's bike just got stolen. And there's that knocking again, from an aging Hot Water heater.....
I'm not saying that accounts don't get blown up by trading mistakes. I'm saying, let's not forget the successes that get hidden by only looking at the drops. If your trading is truly your living, you've got to look broader to fairly gauge the deal.
(And that certainly works in the reverse: if your account has weathered the market satisfactorily, but you're not drawing a living from it? WTH? You might as well be trading sim -- the kind of sim that those who 'fake it' trade: the kind of sim that produces no blood-curdling pit-in-the-stomach when the market moves against you. EVERY trade should feel like the mortgage is on the line. {Eventually, it will be.} Proper sim does this.)
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I think this shows the idiocy of the PDT rule. People should be forced to trade with LESS, not more. 25k limit just makes the losses bigger.
And if you go offshore, than the commissions are too heavy to best. Unless ofcourse you over leverage on low price stocks, and risk everything.
And if you go offshore, than the commissions are too heavy to best. Unless ofcourse you over leverage on low price stocks, and risk everything.
You have zero idea what you're talking about. The PDT rule is to prevent you from getting absolutely destroyed. Do you honestly think someone trading on margin with less than 25k is intelligent? The PDT rule is to protect them from themselves. More to the point, do you think a broker wants to take the other side of some idiot's trade who overleverages his pocket change and runs up > 100% losses?
Related to the question: I've been profitable from the start. I decided early on risk management is literally the most important thing you can have in your arsenal and risk no more than 1% per trade. This has kept my drawdowns low, and my returns mostly stable. I don't get huge yacht money hits to my account, but I make decent trades and take decent money from the market. It's a game to me. I don't have my life staked on it. One day I hope to become a day trader, but for now I have a stable job and I trade because it's interesting to me. It's important to keep life in perspective. The second your entire life depends on a trade is the second you overleverage and blow your account up. An important lesson in reminiscences of a stock operator is never develop the mentality of using your brokerage account to "pay" for anything. If you pull your bills from it, you should be doing that regardless. But you should never say "oh if I can nail this I can afford to eat" or "oh this trade will help me pay for my car".
I've been meaning to say this but forgot which thread was it where people were arguing about the 1% rule.
I am of the opinion that some people here thinks that if they keep repeating the 1% rule, it makes it true.
Wait why? Do you not understand the law of large numbers? This is the first and most simple rule of gambling. It's not "repeated until it's true", it's literally mathematically verifiable.
Most ET traders here don't even know how to trade or even understand how market dynamics works. Therefore they think that if they cling to the 1% rule, they'll somehow magically become profitable. Real trading is not gambling although there are similarity.
In gambling you have at best a 50% chance of winning. In trading, assuming you have an edge, you become a bank.