I went to hitman's diary site, one of the best I've read in a long while. I am not very familiar with the realm of prop trading, and many of my curiosities were answered reading this site.
My question is: is this a reasonable picture of what a successful prop trader is? I mean the trading for .50 (or less) targets based on tape reading, grinding it out each day, paying 50%+ of gross in commissions? Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking anything that generates a nice bottom line (to each his own), but I always had the perception that off-the-floor scalping was mostly just a broker-take-all game, and the very few who were successful at it end up, like hitman, graduating to management and recruiting other traders to eventually securing a percentage of their commissions. Would a consistent and successful scalper at one of these firms be able to, say, land a job as a trader at a respectable hedge fund? Or is the game of "profitable commissions generation" completely separate from the institutional/hedge fund world?
Put another way, would a swing trader who used a mix of technicals and fundamentals, and who, god forbid, tried to minimize transactions -- would this trader be welcome at a prop house at all, even if he was extremely profitable? A position trader who plays for %gains instead of quarters/half-dollars -- is it worth it for him to look for capital to trade with at a Worldco or Bright?
