Quote from ElectricSavant:
consistantly over 5 years minimum
I assume you are talking about annual returns, consistently profitable month
to month is difficult to achieve. Since I haven't dealt too much with retail
traders, rather, spend most of my life dealing with professionals (wall street,
hedge funds, mutual funds, etc). I would put around 20% for consistent
5 year profitability for professionals.
Look at the number of trainees at, Susquehanna / SLK / CRT / OCA / etc,
and how many of them worked out, I believe the figure is around 30-40%
(ish) in those places. Now these guys could claim that they took the best and
brightest (a lot of MIT / Caltech / Berkeley grads).
I know, people could come up with a million examples of how a kid with no
high school did well, for, say, SLK, but a MIT PhD flamed out, I probably know
a thousand of such cases. But overall, the statistics don't lie, having a high
degree *is* somewhat correlated to mental agility, problem solving, critical
thinking, etc.
Also, time period and strategy matters, for equities, '95-2000 is great (so I
would think >75% of traders did well), but 2000-2005, not so much (<20%??).
Trading converts between 98-2002 is like a free ride, since 2004 it has dried
up. ... etc, etc.