My teacher only charged me a one-time fee and we talk on the phone often, to this day, and I purchased it 6-7 months ago. I'm one of his only students who actually keeps in touch as often as I do. He didn't sell his method to alot of people.
In his experience he saw a lot of system vendors not even trading their own system. They just wrote something that tested half-way decent in tradestation or some other platform on old data and then just packaged it and sold it. Or if a system was profitable, it required a large starting balances $250k+ and had to handle large drawdowns at times. you should expect 10-30% annually.
He said if there really was a fully automated system that could consistently print money (profitable no less than month-after-month, and usually week after week), it would NOT be sold or leased. (remember, for smaller starting balances).
But again, what are the starting balances? What are the percentage gains?
Because $5-10k I believe is what most of us start at when trading futures. Some may put in $20k initial.
Unless you inherit your fortune, most of us had to start from rags or at least a more humble beginning. Hence the "low" amounts.
I don't see why 5-10% weekly is not possible. Especially with compounding. Even without compounding, With a 5k acct, $500 (10%) would require 50 ticks net x $10 per tick. Well, a little over 50 ticks to take out the commissions (say $5 rt). The overage would depend on the volume of trades.
Quote from markbrown:
you know thats a good point - most people fly on commercial aircraft and YET they did not build the craft or fly the craft - but they got to where they were going just the same.
i was quoted in a book one time as saying i didn't have to make the toilet paper in order to use it.
This is true. But, if we could afford it, most of us would probably fly (or own) our own jets vs having to fly commercial . Most of us own a car and toliet paper
Yes, but again what kinds of drawdowns and balances are we looking at? I can't imagine if it is 20% monthly for real that the drawdown would be very large. Is this being sold to the general public?
Also, there has to be some sort of cut-off point to where you could only trade, say 10,000 lots per day or xx% of the average total volume in a particular market. In other words, there would be a saturation point for each market traded.
of course, once you're acct is built up to that saturation point, well, that's definetly enough to live off of.
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This thread is actually quite interesting. I appreciate all of the insights.
I think the bottom line is, in order to make a living with fully automated systems ($3k per month for a single person enough?), you must first have a substantial amount of money to start with, say $100k.
So then the little guy would first have to hustle and grind (either manual trading or some other forms of income) to build up to that minimum first.
