The Perfect Prop Firm
- Thread starter Maverick74
- Start date
You seemed to have some trouble with very basic 3rd grade math so you have to understand my concern.
Then you are a moron. The 20% is the return on your buying power. Throw the abacus away. It's 2012 now.
Entertaining thread.
I was fully backed by a firm for a while and I won't do that again.
It didn't work for a couple reasons. Mind you I went in with a long track record..
Foremost, I lost a lot of my independence. The manager kept asking me to tweak my strategies. They were working fine, I was making good money, but, his argument was that I was giving back too much from my PnL highs during the day. I naively believed this person knew something I didn't and went to work altering my approach to the market... that was a mistake as I started to get intimately involved with my PnL, trying to "time" PnL swings. PnL attachment is something I trained myself to stop doing way back when. It f--ked with my head for a while and made me a worse trader as a result. I spent a lot of time "unlearning" that habit as a result. Discretion + automation is a tough line to walk effectively, let alone when someone is watching over your shoulder so to speak.
Second, my risk limits changed when I was having a bad day. That sucked. It was agreed upon that I had $X in drawdown daily; and that kept going up every month. Then I went into a streak where I was having a 1.5% DD on my buying power and I was then told that my risk limit was lesser... while I had an open portfolio. This particular firm seemed to change their risk limit based on my portfolio... that freaked me out so i quit the next week.
So in short, the payout and such was never the issue (almost didn't matter). The problem was, this firm was trying to control my trading and give "helpful" advice. That messed with my confidence and my results to some extent.
I'm not blaming them, it just wasn't right for me... I need independence and I don't think that's possible with any fully backed situation.
I trade my own capital with a firm now and its a much simpler (no stress) relationship. No interference. But, I can fund myself no problem...
I guess that's the issue, if you need capital then you have to give something up.
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oldtime, your reading comprehension is poor. Read for context.
Lucias, my impression of you is that you think much too highly of yourself. This business will humble you eventually. The degree of humbling is proportional to the size of your ego. Tread lightly.
I was fully backed by a firm for a while and I won't do that again.
It didn't work for a couple reasons. Mind you I went in with a long track record..
Foremost, I lost a lot of my independence. The manager kept asking me to tweak my strategies. They were working fine, I was making good money, but, his argument was that I was giving back too much from my PnL highs during the day. I naively believed this person knew something I didn't and went to work altering my approach to the market... that was a mistake as I started to get intimately involved with my PnL, trying to "time" PnL swings. PnL attachment is something I trained myself to stop doing way back when. It f--ked with my head for a while and made me a worse trader as a result. I spent a lot of time "unlearning" that habit as a result. Discretion + automation is a tough line to walk effectively, let alone when someone is watching over your shoulder so to speak.
Second, my risk limits changed when I was having a bad day. That sucked. It was agreed upon that I had $X in drawdown daily; and that kept going up every month. Then I went into a streak where I was having a 1.5% DD on my buying power and I was then told that my risk limit was lesser... while I had an open portfolio. This particular firm seemed to change their risk limit based on my portfolio... that freaked me out so i quit the next week.
So in short, the payout and such was never the issue (almost didn't matter). The problem was, this firm was trying to control my trading and give "helpful" advice. That messed with my confidence and my results to some extent.
I'm not blaming them, it just wasn't right for me... I need independence and I don't think that's possible with any fully backed situation.
I trade my own capital with a firm now and its a much simpler (no stress) relationship. No interference. But, I can fund myself no problem...
I guess that's the issue, if you need capital then you have to give something up.
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oldtime, your reading comprehension is poor. Read for context.
Lucias, my impression of you is that you think much too highly of yourself. This business will humble you eventually. The degree of humbling is proportional to the size of your ego. Tread lightly.
you're welcome. I myself am just expanding into stocks and am loving it. One thing though; both futures and forex give you so much margin that i personally dont see a need for prop firms there - i mean you alaready get 50-60 to one leverage trading them. If you've got anything consistent, scale up based on your expected drawdown ratios (using kelly if you can handle it.. or sub kelly or fixed ratio or whatever) and youre good to go.
All the best with your stock endeavor!
-gariki
Mav, this Lucias guy is very funny; he was promoting his thread in a reply to one of my prev post and i sure did check him out.
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=215790&perpage=40&pagenumber=11
He got completely killed on the other thread he started by baggerlord and he is advertising people to go and read that thread. From what i can tell he trades a 4000$ paper money portfolio
.Maybe i am somewhat off base; but i can bet not that off base
based on what i read in that thread. I think he just talks a lot.. thats all.-gariki
Quote from kcgoogler:
Mav, this Lucias guy is very funny; he was promoting his thread in a reply to one of my prev post and i sure did check him out.
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=215790&perpage=40&pagenumber=11
He got completely killed on the other thread he started by baggerlord and he is advertising people to go and read that thread. From what i can tell he trades a 4000$ paper money portfolio
Maybe i am somewhat off base; but i can bet not that off base
-gariki
Yeah I know. He has a lot to learn but I'm not going to begrudge him for paper trading. I wish him well. He's young and naive. We were all there once. The market will humble him in due time. I don't need to do it for him.
yes, that's the way us morons evaluate our perfomance. What you call buying power we call account size. It doesn't matter how much of that money is yours and how much of it is mine.
That's why when a prop trader brags he made 6 figures it tells me nothing about his perfromance as a trader because I don't know his account size.
If you put up 25K at a prop firm and take home 250k, then yes, I suppose you could claim you are a 1000% trader. But if I give you 1m to manage and at the end of the year you haven't made me 10m I am going to be a little dissapointed.
And your struggles with the written word continue. When you have some down time, will you please google the difference between buying power and account equity? Thanks.