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Your post said elite trader guy lives in a mansion in Texas, and has a special pattern reading ability.
If you saw the show, you'd get the reference.
Essentially Jeff Lowe was a conman, that also lived in a Texas mansion. There's more, but but the show does much better job of telling the story.
I don't know what living in a mansion in Texas has to do with trading ability. I own a very expensive house in Manhattan, but have lost more money than I care to admit trading futures.
“Matt Trades” is not exactly selling anything. He is a funded trader by topsteptrader.com and earns on average $650 - $1000 a day. I actually pay YouTube $4.95 a month for the member fee which I think Matt gets 60% or more of. If he is selling anything it is himself. He has to give 20% of his earnings to topsteptrader.
He is very helpful in terms of having someone to trade alongside while you trade.
You would need full disclosure of all their trades along with a complete risk disclosure so you would need to see all their orders
as well because the trades don't show the stops. Specifically you want to focus on their Reward:Risk ratio during adverse market conditions.
You must be a decent trader if you can afford a Manhattan pad. I moved my family to Japan from California because I thought $10,000 monthly cost of living was out of control. Now we live in the mountains with a custom built home that took us a year to complete and including the mortgage our entire monthly nut is $4,000 down from $10,000 just 5 years ago.
I devote my entire schedule around 3 hours of trading futures and pre-market news stocks. I actually spend 6+ hours a day researching stocks to trade. I usually wait to trade futures until 10am EST.
Your point about losing money trading futures. I remember making an initial $1,500 wire transfer and have never added more money. I pay for my family and I add plenty too my stock balance so my margin is fairly large. I’m not that great of a futures trader but never blew an account yet.....there is still time.
Wife and I have had high disposable income for years, which we used to leverage large loans for investment properties in undervalued neighborhoods over the years. We've since retired from our previous careers to raise our new family, and live off the passive income for expenses.
My minimum monthly expense is about the same as yours was in Cali, about 10k per month.
Taking risks has always been very attractive to me, so daytrading feels very good. Initially I too funded my first futures account with a small deposit. I've lost more money at the craps table than I care to admit as well, so a couple grand in a futures account was play money. However I found success very early on, and that success ended up destroying me over the next year. I ended up putting more money into the account, and was trading 50+ ES contracts. I was completely unprepared for everything that entailed. I guess as a cautionary tale, even if you are having great success over hundreds of trades in a given month, everything can change the next month when the market changes.
Now I'm back to growing the account naturally, like you. It's funny too because while in the depths of my downward spiral, I was constantly reminded of Paul Tudor Jones saying to reduce your trade size when losing. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I lost all control. I had no business doing what I was doing, and ultimately paid the price of what I think a typical mansion would cost in Dallas TX.
Thankfully my wife has been very understanding of my demons. We all have our neuroses, especially folks living in the city. She truly is my soulmate, and we always lift the other up when one of us falls down.
Got it. At least Hilmy posts his brokerage statements. They do look real. However, in this day of photoshop and acrobat, one never can really tell for sure.
re: "and was trading 50+ ES contracts. I was completely unprepared for everything that entailed. I guess as a cautionary tale, even if you are having great success over hundreds of trades in a given month, everything can change the next month when the market changes."
Whoa...so with a 10 pt stop, we are talking a $25k potential loss on ONE TRADE ? So if that happens 4 times a week (easily could happen), you could be down $50k-$100k depending on the size of your winners. Right ?
Yes, day-trading and trading in general is an extremely difficult job. So is medical surgery, and aerospace engineering and architecture etc...
Yet, ardent individuals found a way to do it.
I've been checking Matt's Youtube videos and he doesn't seem to have a real strategy? Or maybe I'm missing something?
Perhaps you have been following him for a while and see something I don't...
I just see a guy that keeps adding to looser trades hoping to see a reversal and basically betting to have a gain above his average prices.
No stop loss or real analysis that could explain the reason to enter a trade...
What do you think?
Picking up pennies in front of a steam roller always ends the same.
By the way, thanks for linking to that elite trader thread. I never really browsed that forum the way I do this one. But having read through most of that thread, and a few others, I can relate to alot of the insane behavior from those guys. This forum is very PG compared to that place.
Thank you! This is an excellent way to articulate it.
How do you know if you are taking on excessive risk? Are there a set of metrics you look at?
Is it just having more than 1:1 risk reward and a high Sharpe ratio? Does it need to be compared to some metrics of other consistently profitable traders?