Quote from mofak7:
Been reading through this and want to hear from people who have actually went the prop firm route and succeeded.
Please let us know how you started and what is has been like -
-How much you were required to initially deposit if any
-The payout percentage
-How long it took you to become profitable consistently (post how much you average daily, if u don't mind)
-Also any advice you will like to give to beginners looking to go this route as well
Thanks
Years and years ago (2004 or 2005?) I started out at Assent. Oddly, they actually gave me a pretty good bit of training in terms of understanding what the market was doing, what to look at, etc. I didn't succeed the first year, and eventually left for a sub-LLC that used Genesis. The commissions rate made a huge difference, and I succeeded for a while until I lost my edge. Leaving assent (.008 per share at the time) and going to the sub-LLC took me to .003 per share, both were 100% pay-out.
So, I was profitable for about a year and a half, or so, but wasn't making killer amounts of money compared to a day job. I then left trading, worked at a few banks, went to grad school, came out (around 4 years later) and then started making money.
Here's the deal: you can go in, get training, use any weird technique you want from, say, a technician, tape reader, quant analyst, whatever. But the information won't "gel" in your head until you see the big picture. And by big picture, I do mean like a hippie "free your mind" situation. It's wrong to assume there is a fixed, rigid way to make money -- you have to understand a few key principles and relationships and adapt to them before you can make money, and there is no way to do this without just brute-force in-depth study, day in day out.
Whatever you do, even through cycles of failure, you should never ever ever disconnect yourself from the market. You should always read new material, new blogs, new web sites, whatever. Something might not work, but you might find someone doing something that triggers an "a-ha" moment, and that turns into money.
Some people on the forums say 6 months to a year, but I would actually say 2-3 years of solid market time is more realistic.
