Thank you shatteredx, this appears to be some great info. I'll take a closer look. Much appreciated.
Tell me why I can't grow my account to $1M in 12 years
- Thread starter jeffbader
- Start date
Thank you shatteredx, this appears to be some great info. I'll take a closer look. Much appreciated.
brokerage industry stats - 1% of retail accounts make enough to live on... you need talent and 5-10 years of hard work to make it into the 1%.... are you ready to put in 10000 hours of work? so this should be easy to explain to an engineer... why bother when there is a high probability way to make 1.7m
you can paper trade... heck, in the beginning even paper trade is meaningless.... like where do you even start....
if you still want to ... you need to find a mentor who is proven to be profitable, with the trading style you are looking for, to point you in the right direction.
otherwise it will be years before you even find 'what to work on'...
so yeah it is a waste of time.
Aren't I asking you the same question? To answer, because my attempt to learn trading is not currently compromising my existing finances or relationships. I've achieved "10,000 hours" with only two skills in my life so far, and both of them were worth it. I perceive there to be a great possible reward with trading if I am willing to persevere. But I just don't know what "great" really means in terms of money. If all I am doing is just earning a better return than the QQQ or SPY, then perhaps it's worth it. The 1% success rate stat doesn't mean much to me, now that I know how tough it was to even stick it out for 6 months, either trading or watching several hours of the market every day and learning / reviewing on the weekends, watching my account dwindle down 10% in the process. The learning curve is more like a learning sucker-punch. It doesn't scare me anymore though.
I just want to see a normalized (so we're not even revealing actual $ amounts here) chart of a bonafide day trader's account value over time from someone that's been consistently successful through a variety of market conditions. Is that so much to ask!? lol, it probably is. I really appreciate your responses doz. I'm starting to think that my request is unrealistic because, as I said, none of you have anything to prove to anyone. I'm just asking for information that I seem to think will help me. Perhaps it wouldn't. Perhaps the information I'm after would make no difference at all. I'm going to try my best either way and I suppose I'll just have to find out the long way what my own personal ceiling is.
I think you may have nailed it here. I don't have a mentor. I need to find one. Do you think I should look on this site? Or try to find a person that is local to me? Or...
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No different than any competitive endeavors: << 1% made it as professional basketball players, << 1% made it as professional e-gamers..... In general, those that made it worked their tails off, either in trading or in any competitive fields. Trading to us plebs are a 24/7 endeavor and we work incredibly hard to find/refine our edge.
Welcome. Many of us here on ET at one time or another were like you so it can be done.
This is just one approach from an amateur retail who became a full time trader ONLY since 2010. Too short a history to prove that I can trade, so take it with a grain of salt:
1. It is very very hard to do. The published strategies don't work.
2. Don't quit your day job unless you don't need it.
3. Follow your real estate rental plan.
4. Follow @dozu888's advice and keep putting money in the stock market.
5. If you really really are interested in trading, then peel off a small % of your stock market funds to learn how to trade, honing your skill while holding a day job.
6. But before you do, read up on the market, how it works, take classes on finance, learn to backtest with your strategy to verify. Like engineering, you need to understand the basic of how things work before attempting to solve your engineering problem, otherwise, garbage in garbage out.
7. When you find out that you no longer need your day job to put food on the table, and you found a profitable approach, quit and trade full time.
What your graph shows is that you lost 10% of your account value in a mere six months. Repeat this nine times and your money is gone. I have the impression that you are overconfident, not just in being profitable with day trading, but even beating regular investments in the fastest growing equity ETF QQQ.
Don’t give up your regular day job. And be more humble.
The best quantitative hedge funds in the world produce returns in the 20-30%/year range. And this is by having armies of quants and programmers researching full-time. Even if you have $500k to start with (and willing to use it entirely for trading), a 20% return on $500k is only $100k/year in profits. Unless you already have a sizable stack to trade with, and an established edge or the time and dedication to pursue it full-time, it is a waste of time.
And if you just want to obsess over equity graphs, here's a site full of them for various hedge funds:
https://ctaperformance.com/
https://ctaperformance.com/
Robert Morse
Sponsor
"Tell me why I can't grow my account to $1M in 12 years"
The simple answer is that you won't know until you do the work. It might be your dream but you have to set reasonable goals during the process or you will feel like a failure before your learning of a process that works for you is found.
The simple answer is that you won't know until you do the work. It might be your dream but you have to set reasonable goals during the process or you will feel like a failure before your learning of a process that works for you is found.
Also an electrical engineer. I did it, but it took more like 20 years and a cooperative wife with a decent salary. Saved everything we could into 5% matching 401s, mostly invested in the good ole S&P. Retired now, but heck a million is saving only $100,000 a year (and of course lots less if adding capital gains and no taxes) for 10 years. We were careful the last 5 years and were saving almost $90,000/yr into various investments. So sure, you can do it. But odds are much lower if you try to do it only with active trading. The learning curve is steep. Keep at it and don't give up, but think more in terms of what you can lose vs what you can make.
Edit: FWIW Does Bob Morse ever sleep?
Edit: FWIW Does Bob Morse ever sleep?
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