I have enough margin to cover a $25k loss but a $25k loss very much scares me. If you spend $5k a month you need at least $5 million cash to get you through retirement. Add plane, hotel, restaurants, and that little $5 million savings is going to dry up very quickly.
Frankly speaking, I try hard to earn $1k a day, and some days when I am not paying attention or I try and go long and wait too long to cut the loss I end up only making $200-$300 and on rare days I have negative. Most days I earn at least $500. Point I am making is I have never seen a $25k+ day ever with Futures. Stocks for sure when I am PDT.
I don't earn enough from my trading to make it a full-time exclusive earner currently, but yes, I make money from my futures trading and am tracking solid improvements in performance.
I am not profitable every day, nor every week, nor even every month, but I'm profitable since I started algo trading and discretionary seasonal ags last year.
It's not been a smooth ride though! At one point two technical errors that caused just two erroneous trades wiped out my previous five months of trading profits. Painful lessons that everyone I know who does this has had in one form or another.
There are a few people worldwide who do this full time, who are what I think of as solo prop traders; one of which I've known for twenty years, so can be certain he's not BS'ing. He knows a few others. So it's not a pipedream to think you can become a full time solo prop trader; they exist. That said, all the folks who do this full time do also have other income streams (teaching, book sales, real estate, other businesses, etc).
There are many others who claim to trade full time, who are full of BS and have other income either earned or inherited, so beware.
I think the best way to do this is;
1/ don't be swept up into thinking you can turn $500 into $1m. You can't, despite what you may have read or heard.
2/ work hard, save up, start small
3/ have low expectations for your first 2-3 years
4/ spend 10,000 hours learning the trade; Markets + Tech setup (eg hardware and software) + Money Management
5/ find trustworthy mentors, paying them if you need to (but make sure not to get conned by assiduously checking their credentials and not agreeing to anything that commits you monetarily without cancellation clauses and ideally guarantees*)
This is what I've done, and still do.... it's working for me.
J
PS. I've noticed some talk of guarantees. I'd run a mile from anyone who guarantees you profit. That's simply impossible, they're lying. But there are many ways of guaranteeing delivery (eg. teaching), guarantees of your (the customer!) satisfaction, etc. Anyone worth their salt selling anything should be happy to offer those and indeed they're enshrined in consumer protection law in most developed nations.
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I live in a small italian town (25000 people) and I know a guy who makes a living out of trading, but he trades stocks.
Actually there are people even in south Italy who run this business, but:
they have enough liquidity. Personally I wouldn't start with less than 200000 euros.
they know and use every market instrument, e.g. option strategies, portfolio construction with different kind of risky assets and so on.
they don't trade a small future account.
So I think that it needs years of work to save the capital to start with, years and years of work to learn to trade.
Finally I think there's much more to learn on Coursera than from trading gurus out there.
My two cents (maybe completely wrong)
P.s. sorry for my poor english, but I think I made it clear
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Last but not the least I think there's not a goal in term of profit.
Someone could only make a thousand a year, someone else would make a million (and again it would also depend on many parameters) but for me are both winners in the market.
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Almost all successful traders in history have traded on larger timeframes than a day. You can observe that in books containing interviews of successful traders such as Market Wizards.
The best traders have a plan, certainly a structure they adhere to, and focus acutely on money/risk management. But first, you must decide if you are "investing" or trading.
I can imagine many, many serious "investors" are/can be successful over significant periods of time (not measured in hours). Part of this is the magic of compounding and part through a painstaking examination of data. Corporate balance sheets, etc, etc.
Pretty soon there will be as many books written about trading the "Markets," as have been written about Napoleon.
Dude - that was years ago...before everyone had a high speed connection and fast trading platform that could be programmed.
Get with the times.
Some of the HFT firms are making a TON of money trading for ticks.
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