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I ask because there is a huge difference. If these are live (actual money from actual trades), they are remarkable. If they are sim trades, it is dangerous to spend very much time in sim because it creates unrealistic expectations from making essentially risk-free trades with no emotional stake in the outcome, which is not how live trading is at all.
So if this is sim, I suggest you start some live trading, preferably in one of the micro contracts so the amount at risk can be low, and trade the same way as in sim. The only difference would be if you were trading a large number of contracts in sim; if so, scale way back to one or two for live work.
It is good that you are doing well, but if you are sim trading, the time really has come to try it with actual money. Be sure not to use more than you can easily afford to lose.
Let us know how it goes, and good luck.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
100% live. It's so much more different live, but I still do the sim accounts to see different strategies across different contracts. I work from home, but I still watch to see where things are going. Since losses are built into the strategy, I'm not supposed to care, but I can't get enough of watching the candlesticks and learning by seeing. It's like a really sophisticated version of Donkey Kong, lol.
As for live, I opened a trade on Thursday that increased by $50k (roughly) at close today. Total on the trade: $92k as of right now (I hold overnight positions all the time)
Current results:
Profit including commissions: $154k
Start date: 5/18/20
I started small then tweaked things about 2 weeks ago that made everything take off. Super high risk, but I ran the numbers for a couple of years worth of data and felt confident that in a recession with no forward guidance that this strategy would work long term as long as I could a) stomach losses and b) stay solvent long enough to get things compounding.
With the compounds in full swing, I don't see anything going wrong outside of a few losses here and there that are expected.
One concern: I'm so vested in this that I have a hard time doing my actual job from home. It's hard to care about work when I can literally make a month's salary with a better tax rate in less than a couple of hours. It begs the question as to when I should quit my job? I ask because my job pays me $96k per year and just laid off a bunch of people. I have health insurance from my old employer thanks to the ultra cheap COBRA I pay so the only thing I get from them is a salary and a chance to put money into a 401k to a) lower my short term capital gains money & b) eventually use for a backdoor ROTH IRA.
Also, anytime I have to put up with BS at work, I immediately think, I don't need this. I do like the idea of adding more money into the account to get the compounding done faster.
I didn't see where you listed how much total funds you've deposited into your trading account.
Just listing raw numbers and not percentages doesn't give much insight. For example, if you are making big returns then we know you will blow up your account. If your returns are a tiny percentage, then much more likely to survive longer.
I am not even going to comment on anything else.... anyone that knows me knows what I would say
I'm open to any and all comments. I'm here to learn. You couldn't possibly say anything worse than my high school football coach used to yell at me, lol.
My starting capital is $84k. I put an additional $15k into the account. When the last bull run stopped, I got the account up to $700k. So roughly a 607% return before I took my loss on Monday night. This includes losses.
I took a $100k loss on my short that night(Monday night). I was right in direction, but timed my short position wrong. The next day I was laid off of work one day into my vacation (long story). I immediately took $100k of the profits and transferred it to my high yield online savings account for living expenses plus taxes. I will be moving to a no income tax state by the end of the year.
In retrospect, staying in the short position was the right call, but I'm wasn't going to chance being wrong on a short that went past previous COVID-19 highs on the position before crashing back to Earth. Stop loss is a stop loss, lol. Not to mention that I probably would've ended up in an intraday margin call before changing directions.
I probably would've played this differently if I had been monitoring it full time. I was having an overall bad day at work that distracted me during the night session as I was fixing some bad formulas from the previous account manager that we use for forecasting. Considering that I was let go the next day, I clearly had my priorities wrong.
I got back in the next day and was down again, but have since recovered. The account is at $460k right now.
I learned an expensive, but pretty awesome lesson. It's improved my trading substantially.
If the account goes down to $300k, I will pull out the loan capital of $96.1k immediately. If it dips below $200k, I will do a much more conservative approach. I can't think of any time since starting where I couldn't take some profits on a trade if I got in at the open, but I am trying to take advantage of the volatility to invest in dividend stocks for passive income.
In short, I have an exit strategy. I do not know if I can hit my goal, but I have a target that once I hit, I will be out for good. I have been buying and selling gold and silver coins since 2007 so I know my market, but I don't have the luxury of holding without a margin call on my side for the futures market.
Mind you, along the way to $700k some of my positions were losers as well. At one point in June, I was about $6k below my original starting amount even after putting in $10k of my own money. In almost every case, the loss was due to panicking although strategy failed as well (currently at 70% for the year and 89% for July). The panicking was probably the biggest obstacle. That's when I started collecting daily data since COVID-19 started and picking stop losses based on that knowing that an new high prior to a swing back in my favor is not very likely and just making peace with it.
What I've decided to do is to scale back on position sizing moving forward and most likely hold until the end of the swing rather than take profits during the day. The reason I don't like taking profits during the day is because after running the numbers, I ended up costing myself when I took profits on what up until that point was an all-time COVID-19 high only to find that silver blew past that number that day. My account would have been at $800k if I left things alone.
Lessons learned, but I am 100% open to feedback. I realize that I am totally new to this game even though I know the market itself well (we bought silver to build our parts and I had to track the price for quotes).
Not sure if products or sizing but fair to say u seem to have a high risk/high reward strategy especially holding overnight with size. You should think of this as a long term endeavor and you will probably learn a lot along the way. In the end it would be better to have sizable capital to trade once u know the ins and outs. So i would keep a majority aside until u learn a lot more and trade with smaller size. Don’t u think u would be better off with 400k capital down the road rather than 200? Of course u can say had I traded larger size I would have had much more in profits but with this volatility, risk of not being able to get out of things suddenly change etc it might not be worth it... hey but it’s your money
Do I think I'd be better with 400k capital down the road rather than 200k? Sure. But, I'm comfortable with this risk. Knowing that it's possible to not get filled at the 200k mark, I do set my stops to give me a bit of a buffer to keep things around there.
At the end of the day, as long as I pay the loan back it's all money that I didn't have in the first place. It will be more money than I ever made working for someone else in a single year. It will have all come from me coming up with an idea that worked. It's the best confidence booster that I can think of.
In September of 2009, I quit my job with $1400 in my pocket and no clue when I would get any money again for school and living expenses. My loans weren't going to come in until December, but I was willing to live in my car if I got evicted in order to get through school. My parents were deceased and I had nowhere to go so my car was my only option.
When I left the company parking lot after giving my one day notice, I got a call from my lawyer. He told me that after 9 months, my car accident case was finally settled and that I had a check for $10,000 coming my way in 2-3 weeks. I had no clue I was going to get this call when I gave notice. That decision led to me getting accepted to Cal Berkeley after having applied past the deadline and appealing a rejection notice (it turned out they used an outdated transcript sent to them by the community college I was attending to make their decision). I wasn't aiming for Berkeley when I went back to school, but I saw an opportunity and I took it.
That ended up leading to work where I started out making $20k per year and got my salary up to $100k in 3 years after college with a liberal arts degree.
Ever since I got the call from that lawyer, I have done my best to trust my intuition and be willing to accept the consequences. Sometimes there are bumps, but more often than not, they pay off. Part of that is asking questions (like here) and adapting.
