Quote from l2tradr:
Hi,
A friend of mine is wondering if one can make a living trading the YM or the ES with a $30K account. He's been trading stocks for 5 years, with approximately 60% yearly returns (day-trading, no margin). Great money management in place, with very low drawdowns over this period.
He wants to trade mini futures for a living (currently works in the evenings). Is it possible for him to make a living with a 30K account? He has more money but wants to trade only 10 contracts intra-day.
Do you guys think that it's enough capital to achieve this goal? His living expenses are less than $2K a month and he could always go back to work if things don't work out.
Any advice for him? My opinion is that it would be very difficult to do it, but he insists that he can.
Thanks
As you have probably noticed, ET is seperated into two camps. There are the people who have "done it" and the people who tried, didn't, and now believe it's not possible. For whatever reason, the second group likes to try to convince the first group what they have done is not possible. Often.
Jack has incessantly tried to get people to consider the market's potential. In whatever instrument you trade, calculate how much money changed hands on whatever day. Another way of doing this is Jack's "crayola test" (I wonder how many people have ever actually done this... anyone???) and start at the beginning of the day, trace the path price takes, and figure out how much you'd make per contract for the day.
This is what's possible. Now, what is humanly possible? Your only job is to clear out all the crap that prevents you from getting to that place.
There are some people who should not be listened to here. Some lines that automatically turn off a poster for me are:
"If you could make [blank] percent a day (fill in the blanks), you would own the world in x amount of time". Isn't it obvious that anyone who says this has never been profitable??
The original question was "Is this enough capital to achieve his goal?" There is only one answer. Of course it is. There are literally thousands of ways he could turn that into a fortune in a very short amount of time, in plenty of different intruments. The question isn't "does he have enough money", the question is "does he have enough knowledge".
TNG
