Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
"Averaged" $1475 per day over 10 years. First few years were "learning", good years 2006-2009, more challenging lately.
85.7% profitable days. Only 15 losing days in 2006, 17 in 2007 and 8 in 2008. But more recently he has had two losing months in January 2012 and April 2012.
Another thing to keep in mind is that his profit is only 0.07% of the notional $5.1BN of stock traded. Edges are tiny.
Here are the monthly results of a day trader, Matt. Trades stocks with a prop firm, mostly his own money. Employs mountains of leverage, buys thousands of shares and takes dimes and dollars out of the market. You can see him progress over 4 years from $120/day to $8k/day.
In another post, I discuss the results of 266 day traders at a day-trading firm that came under SEC scrutiny and made the P&L of their traders part of the public court record.
The profitable group falls into three buckets: 1) single digit returns (averaging 4%), 2) market-like returns (averaging 21%), and 3) leveraged returns (200%+).
Unfortunately, no way to tell how much leverage used, nor what the draw downs were like.
The day trader from Norway seems to be employing multiple strategies involving illiquid stocks. That may not compare that well with day trading futures. Nonetheless, the results are very impressive.
Your research on Tuco is quite illuminating, with less than 10% being profitable enough to be considered making a living from trading.
One of my favorite books is "Live The Dream by Profitably Day Trading Stock Index Futures" by Gary Smith. This was written back in 1994-1995. Gary was unprofitable for many years, and then decided to start day trading stock index futures (NYFE and S&P 500). He set a goal to just be profitable every month. I think that should be a good place to start for any day trader, rather than focus on any type of return. Over 90% of traders are unprofitable to begin with, so start with this seemingly modest goal. And, don't quit your day job!
Looks like they would expect you to return about 4.5%/yr on your buying power - unlevered. The levered returns are more like 125%. Presumably these levels exist because they have had some people achieve them. No discussion on line of those statistics...
Here are "implied" results from trading room recommendations from Maverick for 2013 for the FX group. Average win rate was about 55% with Wavg/Lavg around 1.7. Can't really tell but looks to be about 12-15 trades per month.
Here are some slightly different numbers from their equity/options group. They mentioned 2013 was their worst year for the last 5. Have seen win% in the high 50s to low 60s and Wavg/Lavg closer to 2:1, with calculated returns in the 50-80% range.
Myself I pay more care to the daily pnl, and try to get some consistancy there. Then checkpoint against weeklies and monthlies to ensure I'm not overly or underly active. Annual pnl takes care of itself.
This post is interesting because for me, I've always been the guy trying to poke holes in my own system. That trait is what helped me get it to where it's at today. I'm amazed at what it's become considering I'm entirely self-taught and yet I still find myself looking too hard for reasons to be wrong. It's quite strange.
I've been attempting to get to the root of my cynical behavior and my relationship to money because it prevents me from executing trades properly at times or even executing them all. Too often I'll look at stocks that match my criteria and try to discern which one is the likely winner. This defies the nature of distribution of win/losses in a system. This does not allow the averages to bare out as they should. If the system is sound and the risk management is in place, then cumulatively one should come out ahead.
BTW, I transitioned into swing trading full time over a year ago. I got to a point where I knew I couldn't go on day trading high risk positions for small pockets of movement for the rest of my life. One of the things I'm also trying to work on is my reluctance to remove risk via scaling out. Too often I'm narrowly focused on the total profit factor if I hold the entire position from A to Z.
I currently find myself down 6% on my $300,000 capital. Some things beyond my control happened leading into the new year and I made an unwise choice to offset the situation by increasing positions sizes about 2x-3x. It got me completely off my game. I couldn't mentally handle the $ fluctuations as the position was working itself out.