Opportunity is not evenly distributed.
Longtime prop trader says 4% of day traders made decent money
- Thread starter Slope Trader
- Start date
Opportunity is not evenly distributed.
$100K/year is only a decent living? LOL It's a luxury living. But then again, everybody's different.
I guess it depends on where you live and what you consider decent.
I google cost of living in US and get 61K/yr average.
I would hope "decent" would be a step or two above average.
I know I'd be hard pressed to maintain my lifestyle on less than 100k.
I agree. I would consider $70 - 80K to be decent. The biggest living expense is housing cost and the average housing cost across America with the exception of a few cities with ridiculously high housing cost like California, New York and etc. (all the cities where rich immigrants want to live) are all not too bad. So that's why I say $100K is way more than decent; it's pushing towards luxury, maybe on the low end of luxury.
I honestly believe most people could achieve success in anything if they work hard at for a long time. I used to be more of a gamer in my teenage years and sucked at Call of Duty for a while, but the more I played the better I got. Silly example, but it still holds true of anything.
And yes, many people out there (myself included) try something out but don't work at it hard enough for long enough. This could be for a variety of reasons, loss of interest is one too. It's sometimes hard to tell if you really, truly lose interest in something though, and many just give up. But one thing is for certain, it's not just discipline in trading that matters, but discipline in life in general. And sometimes we don't want to work lol! It can be boring and unenjoyable at times, even in the fields of study that interest us.
If it really is that frequently unenjoyable to work on a particular subject, or in a field, then maybe that thing you're doing is not for you. But even in the subjects and fields we like, there are always going to be days where we don't want to work on it. The key here is to do it anyway, unless you didn't sleep or are legitimately exhausted dealing with some other life stuff, (that's understandable).
Anyway this was kind of spiel, but just my two cents.
Any data to back that up? I would think it would be the other way around with swing traders and investors being more successful.
It's not even close to 4%, this is completely ridiculous. The problem is, most people that do "decent" don't realize how they ran like God, until a terrible multiyear downturn happens. I'd guess that people that start off day trading, that in a 20 year period, have a risk profile better than holding the S&P is probably 250 to 1 or even worse. Go to excel and input a 0% win rate over a 5 year period in 1000 scenarios and see how many do "decent". Look at hedge fund databases and IASG and see if over 2% of them you'd consider investing in that have a 10 year record. Then, think of how many went bust in those 10 years. Then, think, "hmm....could this person have ran well, why didn't they lose more money in X year, doesn't make sense....hmm".
Also, it is impossible in trading to know if you did well or not. You can sell at a top and cover at the bottom and have been simply lucky. How would you know? You could lose continuously and have a great strategy overall. Poker players struggled deeply with who was good or not and if they got lucky or not and there we can actually look at real probabilities. Trading is much, much harder. I could easily make a great trade and lose money and worse make money on a bad trade thinking I did something good. That's why "run good" is so hard to detect in trading. In poker I could see my all-in EV was 80%, but in trading it's ??
To beat the markets on a risk adjusted basis is extremely difficult and if you are starting out and think 25-1 make it, you are going to lose it all. It is much, much more difficult than that.
Also, it is impossible in trading to know if you did well or not. You can sell at a top and cover at the bottom and have been simply lucky. How would you know? You could lose continuously and have a great strategy overall. Poker players struggled deeply with who was good or not and if they got lucky or not and there we can actually look at real probabilities. Trading is much, much harder. I could easily make a great trade and lose money and worse make money on a bad trade thinking I did something good. That's why "run good" is so hard to detect in trading. In poker I could see my all-in EV was 80%, but in trading it's ??
To beat the markets on a risk adjusted basis is extremely difficult and if you are starting out and think 25-1 make it, you are going to lose it all. It is much, much more difficult than that.
Let me guess...
You never have made any money trading (not investing)!
(Again, just a guess!).
Not saying that it's easy being profitable with trading.
A salary means they are trading the house's money, and receiving a weekly paycheck, whether they make or lose money for the firm in their trading. Like a prop desk at a big bank. They are not sharing in the profits or losses the bank makes, they are simply earning a salary trading the bank's money.
So if the average prop trader makes 1M per year for the bank, they may make 200K per year. If they are great and earn the bank 200M, their salary may increase to 500K. They are making a steady income week to week, and they have no money at risk.
Like prop traders at a casino.
That is wholly different than these "prop trading firms" with combines and evals that you pay money to participate in. Not the same thing.
Have all the people on this site forgotten that there's such a thing as salaried work with W-2 forms, being an employee of a firm?