What's The Best Way To Convert This Edge Into Money?

Quote from murrica:

This is an interesting point of discussion that I think about from time to time.

What if there was the black hole swan where liquidity disappeared completely?

Likely? Probably not. But I bet some risk manager out there is pondering such a scenario, and figuring out what event(s) would cause something like that to occur.

I'm willing to accept the very small risk that in such a situation I would be bankrupted - ie. if CL slipped > 1000 ticks (basically an empty book). I'd be FAR from the only one.
 
Quote from murrica:

What if there was the black hole swan where liquidity disappeared completely?

A bit off topic, but I've been curious for some time whether anyone (Mav?) knows what the largest "liquidity hole" was in CL over the past 5 years. I've seen 300-tick moves on a chart in the space of a minute during the overnight session and I've seen 50-tick gaps on the CL inventory report in real time, and I've wondered what the largest real-time gap ever was over the past 5 years (not the gap between Friday night and Sunday afternoon).
 
Yeah I wondered the same thing. If I had that kind of take home pay from a regular job, I'd put away $6K a month while testing my "edge" in a demo account and if I demonstrated the discipline to execute it and proved solid after 6 months of trading, then I'd go live with it. In the meantime, you still have a job, and now you have $50K to trade with. If trading CL and ES, that's more than enough!
 
As mentioned in the OP, allocating more money from other sources over the next year is an option. I don't just have piles of cash sitting around under mattresses, but over time I can certainly free some up from income and other activities. My expenses are not particularly excessive (roughly $3500 monthly nut).
 
Quote from NoDoji:

A bit off topic, but I've been curious for some time whether anyone (Mav?) knows what the largest "liquidity hole" was in CL over the past 5 years. I've seen 300-tick moves on a chart in the space of a minute during the overnight session and I've seen 50-tick gaps on the CL inventory report in real time, and I've wondered what the largest real-time gap ever was over the past 5 years (not the gap between Friday night and Sunday afternoon).

Not sure how much of this was a gap but I remember this day well. Cleaned out a lot of trading accounts that day I'm sure.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/26841020
 
Trade it yourself w/your own capital. Don't quit your day job, like the other peeps said.

Anything else just wouldn't make a lot of sense.
 
Quote from volente_00:

What kind of obligations are eating up 12k a month take home ?

With only 13k saved to trade ?


No equity in your house ?

No 401k?

I agree with this, you are 30 yrs old, you make 200k a year but only have 13k to put towards trading? something is seriously wrong with that picture.

I just turned 27, only make 75k a year, have 100k liquid, no loans, worked myself through college, and absolutely zero family money. Oh and I should also mention I live in the SF peninsula which is one of the most expensive places on the planet.

For anyone starting a business you have to have passion about it. you obviously aren't passionate enough if you make 200k a year and have only managed to get 13k liquid available to undertake your new business venture. Get your personal life in check first then consider doing something as risky as trading for a living.
 
Quote from Took2Summit:

I agree with this, you are 30 yrs old, you make 200k a year but only have 13k to put towards trading? something is seriously wrong with that picture.

I'm not sure what would be wrong with the picture. Up until this, I had nothing that justified a large commitment of capital to trading. So it's all been allocated to other things. As noted in the OP, some of that could be redirected over the next year.

My salary also hasn't always been this high - It's ramped up steeply from about 80K over the last 3 years. And unfortunately I've run into some out of pocket family medical expenses along the way.

If you're suggesting I'm frivolously lighting money on fire elsewhere in my life, you're wrong.
 
Quote from SplawnDarts:

I have an good edge in scalping certain futures - ES and CL for certain and it's probably portable to GC. It doesn't appear to work in the rate complex. Theory suggests it might work in other places, but I don't know for sure.

The basic nature of the edge is a custom coded indicator I would describe as "automated tape reading". The actual entry and exit decisions are discretionary but don't involve much real discretion - just things like knowing when news releases are. Automation is a possibility. I'm a good programmer and could do it myself.

Here's the last ten trading days' stats - they're pretty representative and are from trading a 1 lot on IB:
Wins 33
Losses 20
Total Trades 53
Win Rate 62%
Avg. Win $62.39
Avg. Loss $43.64
Profit Factor 2.36
Aprox. Confidence Method > Break Even 99.8%

Commissions are included in the win and loss size stats.

Those stats are a mix of long and short CL and ES trades. The splits don't look radically different except the CL trades have slightly larger wins and losses than ES (no surprise there). Losses on any given trade are limited by in-the-market stops to ~$150+commission with slippage. Wins are bounded at $150-commission for CL and $125-commission for ES. Holding time is <10 minutes so liquidity might very well be a problem if traded on big size. Overall both the quantity and quality of trades has been improving with time and I could see the PF going as high as 3 and my number of trades doubling as my execution improves.

So here's my question: how do I best make money out of this and maximize the chance I'm set up for life? I'm ~30 years old. I've got an engineering job that pays about $200K+benefits, and I would lose a small amount of non-vested stock if I quit. Job outlook is stable to positive, but I don't really love it. I don't have to quit to trade (I currently trade mornings before going to work) but could probably find more trades if I didn't have to go in. I live in a mid-priced suburban area far away from major financial centers. I don't want to move for family reasons.

So what's the best way to proceed? Should I just trade my own capital? I could allocate about $13K right now, and quite a bit more over the next year. Or should I try to take this to a prop shop or some other institutional environment? As it stands now with a retail brokerage there's zero chance of anyone stealing my approach, but I would be concerned about it in other settings.

Can you explain again why there are only 53 trades in this sample? Given the short term nature of these trades, why can't you get a much larger sample? If these 53 trades are over the course of a few days, they are meaningless, as market dynamics change often. Even if these trades are over the course of a year, they are of limited predictive value.
 
Back
Top