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I saw a similar poll on a different site and was surprised about the results.
Now I want to know what people on nexusfi think about what is a realistic average percentage gain per day on your account.
Sure, there will be days where you make a ton of points, but that is not what the poll is about. It is about the average gain on your account per day, so you have to take your losing days into account as well.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Trading: Primarily Energy but also a little Equities, Fixed Income, Metals and Crypto.
Frequency: Many times daily
Duration: Never
Posts: 5,049 since Dec 2013
Thanks Given: 4,384
Thanks Received: 10,206
Your lowest category, <0.25%/day, equates to 62.5%/year.
Anybody who can consistently return that would be a superstar.
Anything above that is nothing short of dreaming.
If I was doing this I would probably have picked <0.1%, <0.175%, <0.25%, <0.375%, <0.5%, >0.5%
4%/day is 1000%/year!
You are absolutely right, the numbers are totally exaggerated. I just wanted to keep it close to the poll that I saw. I even went a lot lower than they did.
I will include the poll that I saw and someone can try to explain to me how so many people can vote such high numbers
I am glad that in this forum here the first two replies by you and AnvilRob are realistic.
As a Daytrader on average I try to consistently average 1.000 USD per day out of a 50k account (obviously using ability to leverage that up, because my risk / trade is only a few pips)
And I come close to that goal. One out of 10 days I will fuck up though and give back a few thousand because I get stubborn and I am a moron. That is keeping me from sizing up more.
So yes, it is possible to yield 2% a day ROE / based on leverage 1:10 that is 0.2% a day ROA. Ca. 10-20 Trades across ca. 5-6 hours in 2 sessions, some days golden, some days very tought to make 200 USD.
And I know I can make up to 3-4 times that with the same capital if I can jump to the next level of mindset / can play biggger without emotionally derailing...
as I have plenty of leveraging room left with 50k equity.
The key is always trade frequency, trade quality and leverage. my "strategic" timeframe is the 5-min-chart, the execution is on the S15-chart.
In Daytrading multiple intstruments certainly you can cut out enough pips every day to achive that. Trading only a single instrument it will be hard because there will be stretches of days with super low vol / no quality swings to operate in. These will kill you, as it would require inhumane amounts of patience.
What is not possible is the classic Excel-spreadsheet compounding "I will be a trillionaire in 100 days" because you cannot size up like that.
The limit is your emotional capacity to handle large account swings / play high stakes. That is the bottleneck.
If you compound 0.25% daily, you get 86% annually.
Given that a buy and hold Nasdaq strategy last year produced a 40% return, 86% on an actively traded leveraged account does not seem quite "superstar" status. Marty Schwartz was one of the great traders of all time and he consistently returned 25% per month. Again, he was, IIRC, selling premium on crude futures but I could be wrong, and his results are quite amazing for what was no doubt a very large capital base.
Let's get real of course: most traders lose money, fewer break even, fewer still make any money at all, and a tiny percentage make enough to make a living. So, 62% or 86% would definitely be great.
My answer on what is reasonably possible on average with even a large capital base is 0.5%, but that is pretty top tier, at an annual return of almost 250%.
The question is a bit misleading anyway. To return 250% on a starter $2,000 account is not the same as returning 250% on $200,000, just because it's more money. Futures are scalable enough that the liquidity is almost certainly there for any given strategy in either of those cases, but psychologically it's tougher to risk $2,000 on a trade than $20. If one scales up progressively though, taking time, that's doable IMO.
I don't know what those $1000 days look like for you, but if you lose "a few thousand" on 10% of your days, then my guess on any given +$1000 day, you are often deep in the red before pulling out a green day. I could be wrong. But the behavior which creates a losing day which is a 3-5x multiple of your average winning day often means that your green days were possibly very red too. So, when we talk about average win, we must take into account those big red days which take back all of the green, because the behavior is linked.
In other words, it's not that hard to make $X in a day, if you frequently allow 3*$X loss or 5*$X loss days. What IS difficult is a consistently upward sloping equity curve, which means that we don't have a lot of the big down days which wipe out multiple days or weeks of profit. My point is that the behavior which creates the good is inextricably linked to what creates the bad. And THAT is what makes trading difficult.
For reference, I've attached four random days from my log over the last month. They all finished as positive days. However, the two on the left are the "deep in the red, pulling out green". Too many of those days on the left, regardless of how they finish, will result in a big red day sooner or later (IME, for every 4-5 of those days on the left, a big red day shows up). It's tempting fate too often when your trading decisions and behavior creates a big intraday drawdown, as you will take on too much risk toward the end of the day to pull it out, and it may work 80% of the time but the other 20% it's likely to result in an even bigger hole at the end of the day, and THOSE days are the ones that make progress impossible.
Yes good point, but the further we zoom out, the less great a 20% annual return looks for active trading. Naz has returned almost exactly 20% per year, compounded annually, over the last 15 years with a pure buy and hold (buy 1200 on Jan 1 2009, hold until today, is 19.5% annually).
But what really matters is what that 20% is made on top of. If it's 20% on a $5M account, then that 20% can do different things for you than if you made 20% on a $5,000 account.
