Whatcha drivin these days?
what contract to you trade?, Ive been having great success trading futs on demo making an average of 550 a day with ES, ym and crude oil.
Who's making a living day trading futures?
- Thread starter peppermint
- Start date
Whatcha drivin these days?
what contract to you trade?, Ive been having great success trading futs on demo making an average of 550 a day with ES, ym and crude oil.
Quote from cashmoney69:
Whatcha drivin these days?
what contract to you trade?, Ive been having great success trading futs on demo making an average of 550 a day with ES, ym and crude oil.
Still driving my old beater car...but banking some nice cash.
I trade currencies, ES, and QM, primarily. I generally only trade instruments that I've been following and trading for quite a while, since it takes me a while to develop a robust approach. In these markets, most any mean reversion model can work, as long as you have sufficient capital to handle the volatility, and don't get into positions that are too large.
As has been said many times, money management is a huge differentiator between those that find success and those that blow up. I'm pretty disciplined -- I've learned painful lessons (and lost plenty of capital) in the past. I approach the futures markets with the mindset of playing defense, not offense. Minimize downside risk.
Interesting thread... I always wondered where that stat about only 2% of traders being profitable. Where does the media or anyone for that matter come up with that. Do the brokers just give a guesstimate? How many "traders" exist? I would like to see some stat about success relative to account size. I'm sure people trading futures with less than 20K probably lose. However it seems that if you can't make 50K after taxes with a 100K account you should be shot. In the end none of this really matters as long as you stay true to yourself.
Get a bunch of traders online in a chat room or forum and ask how many are profitable.
Next, ask for proof and that's where you get your 2%.
Mark
I in my gut have wondered this question as well. I lost probably 10 -15 k in my learning stage ie my 1st year and a half. I have made the back and then some over the last year or so but for every 700$ to 1k + day I have there are many < 100$ or small losses days. I love trading but wonder if going to get a more formal education finance mba or financial engineering degree is the right route. I want to trade though not do some bs back office stuff for a bank or hedge fund. I am still pretty young (31 no wife/kids). Maybe daytrading futures is not sustainable for a comfortable living?
Gearhead and Mark, maybe you can comment on my chart here
http://elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2301151#post2301151
Mark, you still trading hammers as your system?
http://elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2301151#post2301151
Mark, you still trading hammers as your system?
I doubt formal education will do much to improve your trading. I've got plenty of degrees, but about the most useful info (from a trading perspective) that I suppose is a function of my formal education is the training to approach problems in a logical, structured, and analytic way. If I were in your situation, I'd analyze the nature of both my winning and losing trades, and work to identify patterns and use them to improve your trading logic. If your methodology actually has positive expected returns, then the sequence of gains and losses that you describe might not be a problem. If you're like most traders, you might be undercapitalized relative to your strategy, e.g., your total expected returns for a year might not be sufficient to support your lifestyle, or you might avoid strategies with higher expected returns that require more capital to execute.
I don't think that biz-school faculty have too many silver bullets to provide. I've hired plenty of GSB grads (for example) to do consulting work, and few of them (in my estimation) would make successful traders based on what they picked up in business school.
I wouldn't recommend daytrading futures -- at least the way most retail traders do -- as a sustainable career path. You can certainly make it work, and there are people who do, but there are (for most people) more productive and more enjoyable ways to make a living. Then again...it works for me.
I'm not sure how my algorithm would have handled this (probably not well.) I generally am trading on a bit longer timescale (trying to improve the signal to noise ratio), but I probably would have been expecting mean reversion rather than a retrace at your first circle (e.g., a continued up move.) Depending on how the stops were set, I might have captured some of the move back up...but it could easily have been just a small losing trade or two that rapidly hit the stops. Generally, I don't re-enter a market for a period of time after I get stopped out -- since that generally tells me that my approach isn't working in that market at that time.
I believe the 95% or 90% figure is a myth as I have never seen anything credible published on it. I have come across a paper a few years back (but I don't know where to dig it up though ...) where something like 70 or 75% of traders lost money.
I don't remember if the study differentiated between traders who had been in the market for less than a year and more than a year.
Linda Raschke had somewhere on her site a study done on people in her room. It was a very honest study (traders and newbies in her room contributed anonymously to this study) and a bit more than half did not do so well in those few days the study was conducted.
To get started in an industry with little guidance is really tough though - no wonder the failure rate is so high. Kudos to some of those educators out there who are willing to help. The readings for the various CMT exams are really helpful (www. mta.org - check level1 and level2 exam recommended reading list). I am working my through them and wish I would have come across some of those books 10 years ago.
I don't remember if the study differentiated between traders who had been in the market for less than a year and more than a year.
Linda Raschke had somewhere on her site a study done on people in her room. It was a very honest study (traders and newbies in her room contributed anonymously to this study) and a bit more than half did not do so well in those few days the study was conducted.
To get started in an industry with little guidance is really tough though - no wonder the failure rate is so high. Kudos to some of those educators out there who are willing to help. The readings for the various CMT exams are really helpful (www. mta.org - check level1 and level2 exam recommended reading list). I am working my through them and wish I would have come across some of those books 10 years ago.