What options do you have at $500 / month?

[schweiz]

The first thing I would do is save each month these $500. At the same time develop your skills in paper trading. If you are consistently profitable in paper trading, start real trading with the money you saved. With $2-3000 you can already take a start.
All depends of how good you are as trader. When I started I blew up my 50K account in notime. So even lots of money can not save you. If you are really good you can even trade with less then $1000.
All depends of how good you are. Try to find that out first. Don't listen to other people telling you what you can or cannot. Watch objectively and realistically how good you are in paper trading. And take then the appropriate decision. Nobody else can judge what is realistic for you as nobody knows how good (or bad) you are.

Start small, if it works you will be rich a little bit later, but it if goes wrong at least you will not lose everything you have.

 

[ironchef]

Might have stated here previously, I've got $500 / month to burn out of the savings I draw from my salary. I can draw more but like in trading, I don't like margin calls

With respect to finance I think of myself as some Swiss Army knife. I know programming (C++, Java, Perl) enough so I can build non-HFT systems from the ground up. I know quant finance enough to adapt the Fokker–Planck equation to a Black-Scholes statistical arbitrage case most people don't know or care about (coze it doesn't make money obviously, at least not until inflation reaches double-digit annualized percent . And I've done enough trading on my own $10k Interactive Brokers account to figure out there must be a better use of those 50% per year losses that I'm covering from my own pocket

So... I'm putting a temporary stop loss to the stuff I've done in the last 12 years (working my ass alone trying to break trough, all by myself) and contemplating what options do I have, apart from working my ass alone trying to break trough, all by myself.

As a quant developer employee in finance there was absolutely no difference from what I do currently outside finance: there's not a goddamn thing I can do about what I do and why I do apart from working 8 hours straight without questions asked and cashing the paycheck. And hoping it holds for another 30 years or so.

Apart from all that hype though, new languages, new paradigms, new tech, the fundamentals haven't changed much. So if I hold for 30 years+ that's gonna be because and if I can correctly identify those fundamentals out of the noise that gets wiped out periodically. And for that I'm willing to re-direct those $500 / month.

My idea currently is paying a peer reviewer to pair-program with me the stuff I make. Think NASA has not two but THREE different TEAMS doing the same thing independently before risking to send not a human but a robot to Mars. At $500 / month however, I can't get a half time CSS designer in Pakistan at least INTERESTED, let alone someone of a comparable caliber.

But $500 is not zero so I'm guessing it *does* offer me some options. Curious about what would you do in my place.

Someone with so much technical skills and talents often tends to get down into the weeds, i.e., only seeing the tree rather than the forest.

I wish I have 1/10 your skill set and talents, but I don't so instead have to rely on understanding the basic principles of economics and options. Principles are not complicated but the applications and models can mislead you if you don't understand the principles. Think Newton's law that leads to writing the algorithm for autopilot. But you cannot write a good navigation program without really understand Newton's Laws.

A humble opinion from a mom and pop retail options trader: Focus on the why instead of how.

Regards,

 

[truetype]

You may be quite shockingly surprised, what you can do with $500 in the market.

I guess you could pay for a month of platform/data fees!

 

[Gambit]

Develop a strategy and shop it around to the few prop firms that are looking for a profitable strategy. Positive Equity, Propex and some others back traders. Your background may be appreciated at firms that don't have full time quant devs.
Or set up a newsletter and make calls. Use 500/mo for ads and ET sponsorship.

 

[Gambit]

$50/mo gets you TT or CQG and you can pull all the data you want from the API. Seriously though, @truetype's suggestion is solid. A six figure job and some contracting on the side...you can get a decent chunk of change in a few years. Enough to start trading futures spreads for sure. You could prop trade full time and contract on the side or configure a mix of work/trading options that suit your lifestyle.

 

[RRY16]

A few freegans on here can teach you how to scrape data on the house and you can eat on the cheap grubbing Hamburgers and pizza, find a couple of friends who have a couch to surf and in a couple of years you're golden.. Dont worry about the calls you make, it's all about branding..Good Luck.

 

[Aquarians]

Speaking of branding, I'll probably open source my options backtester platform and accelerate it's integration with the live trading system by paying guys on UpWork to do some work. I'm not terribly happy releasing all of this for free (actually paying for it) but looks like it's the only way to personal branding. Without which those 6 figure salaries / contracts are just as elusive as $100k of capital when you only got $10k.

 

[Aquarians]

Nobody else can judge what is realistic for you as nobody knows how good (or bad) you are.

Who said that the only thing worse than a bad reputation is no reputation?

 

[ET180]

You definitely don't need six figures to trade.
That's even absurd to think that a larger initial account will generally equate to success, or greater success.
A big dumb rich trader, is still a big dumb rich trader. (or won't be for long)

You may be quite shockingly surprised, what you can do with $500 in the market.
An expert, or great, trader with a $1,000 trading account...will without a doubt surpass an average/or just good trader with a starting $100,000 account.

If you ask me, 'Risk Management' are for traders who don't have a clue what they are doing, or have no skill or edge or focus.
Their idea of trading...is to place many random bets across the board, and hope and pray a few of them expand hugely to cover all the other capped losses.

Make Trading Great Again 2018...High-Five`, ET extraterrestrials
Some people have a fistful of salt in their hand, while others have a fistful of something much more powerful...like Plutonium,

No, but trading with less than six-figures while one could be making over six-figures per year doesn't make sense (consider the opportunity cost associated with trading). Trading takes a lot of time and focus. Better to focus on a job while starting out. Then when one has enough capital, consider trading. And yes, it's easier to make money with a large account than a smaller account because more trading strategies can be employed.

 

[Van_der_Voort_4]

A few freegans on here can teach you how to scrape data on the house and you can eat on the cheap grubbing Hamburgers and pizza, find a couple of friends who have a couch to surf and in a couple of years you're golden.. Dont worry about the calls you make, it's all about branding..Good Luck.

now i understand why each of his new threads appear under OPTIONS section of the forum