Professional Trading - where does it stand compared to other high pay professions ?

[nooby_mcnoob]

Not if you go thru an agency....they generally give you a 30-40% "hair-cut"....so that comes down to $600-$700 per day and only $400-$500 considering employment taxes.

One of my buddies goes around through multiple agencies then gets a backdoor agreement to go direct. Only had it backfire once and he paid 10k to settle for what turned out to be a 600K contract. You gotta have balls if you want to do better than average.

 

[ironchef]

I've seen the unbelievable opportunity of trading the Emini market. I'll bet some competent traders are pulling down $1000 to $3000 per day with 5 to 10 contracts on one trade.

But then it struck me...how does this income compare to other high paying fields ??
Now I'm talking people good in their field, not necessarily superstars like Tom Brady and Jeff Bezos.
These come to mind:
1) Internet Entrepreneurs
2) Drug Dealers
3) Sports figures
4) Movie stars
5) Corporate CEOs
6) Lawyers
7) Doctors / Surgeons (especially cosmetic - those guys make a fortune !)
8) IT Professionals

Have I missed any ?

I thought professional traders are those that work for institutions, HF, mutual funds, investment banks... They mostly trade OPM, gets their pay from collecting a fee, + 20% of gain? NYC average finance salary ~$99K, top finance type collect billions every year. So professional traders compare very well against your list.

Us amateur retails, we trade our own funds. Even for us full timers, we are mostly small potato compare to HF..., but we don't need a salary.

 

[syswizard]

Final tally: figures assuming full time earnings 250 work-days per year.
1) Internet Entrepreneurs ($10k per diem)
2) Drug Dealers
3) Sports figures
4) Movie stars ($7k per diem)
5) Corporate CEOs
6) Lawyers
7) Doctors / Surgeons (especially cosmetic - those guys make a fortune !)
8) IT Professionals ($1k per diem)
9) Escorts
10) Financial Advisors

 

[murray t turtle]

I do not count drug dealers as professionals. They are criminals. I think we should confine the comparison to legal law-abiding professionals. The income from trading all depends on you. If you are good, the sky is the limit; you could actually be making more money than those professionals. But what's more important for a trader is the job satisfaction from trading, whether trading is your cup of tea. To me, you shouldn't go into trading just for the money aspect of it; just like everything else you should go into it because you like the aspect of trading, the analysis, the research, the negotiating all of that you will be doing LOTS of. It's really easy to be mesmerized by all the shiny profit that seems to be so easy from trading, what you don't see is the disappointment, the anguish, the panic, the anxiety, the anger from the losses which is quite often.

%%
I agree. And it's more common for business owners+pro salesmen/women to make big bucks. But some traders/investors run their trading like a business.
And other good points about the the location/ low pay of UK doctors.....

 

[Sig]

Not if you go thru an agency....they generally give you a 30-40% "hair-cut"....so that comes down to $600-$700 per day and only $400-$500 considering employment taxes.

What country are you paying 33% "employment taxes" in? We're talking 3.8% marginal in the U.S. if you're making over $250k married joint filing.

 

[Winjak]

It may be compared with the IT professional salary. It's possible to earn around $2000 a month, but sometimes the figures are much lower. I recently started trading cryptocurrency on forex, maybe it will help to stabilize the situation.
It may sound strange, but crypto market is much more easily to predict now due to downfall trend. Btc and other altcoins don't show tremendous price hikes, which is why forex trading suits it best. If someone interested, I may recommend crypto accounts at justforex broker with dozens of cryptocurrency pairs (the list is described here).
Anyway, without enormous budget you aren't able to earn tens of thousands of dollars.

 

[Sig]

It may be compared with the IT professional salary. It's possible to earn around $2000 a month, but sometimes the figures are much lower. I recently started trading cryptocurrency on forex, maybe it will help to stabilize the situation.
It may sound strange, but crypto market is much more easily to predict now due to downfall trend. Btc and other altcoins don't show tremendous price hikes, which is why forex trading suits it best. If someone interested, I may recommend crypto accounts at justforex broker with dozens of cryptocurrency pairs (the list is described here).
Anyway, without enormous budget you aren't able to earn tens of thousands of dollars.

If you can find an IT Professional anywhere in the western world willing to work for $2,000 a month who knows what they're doing please send them my way! Maybe you for got a zero on that?

 

[schweiz]

Anyway, without enormous budget you aren't able to earn tens of thousands of dollars.

Problem is in general not budget, but knowledge...

And the knowledge whether you have that knowledge or not. Many miss that. Especially those who say:

• markets are random
• 90% lose
• it is impossible to make money consistently
• etc...