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This thread has generated a lot of response - not exactly of the character I anticipated, but pretty cool nonetheless.
I never made the entrepreneur/trader fail rate connection, but that makes a lot of sense.
I made the decision to go back to paper trading - and committed to do it for a maximum of the next two years. Everyday. I expect that things will start clicking sooner, but if I can't get it by then, I will move onto something else.
Personal experience and pro trader anecdotes share that the biggest battle is in the psyche, more so than in perhaps any other business. Committing to 2 years training is nothing - compare the potential reward to any other profession and the 2 year investment pales.
It took me awhile to figure this out. The typical big/easy returns for a brand new trader didn't help matters. Personally, I wonder if the next two years isn't more a disciplined journey back to the 'new/naive trader' mindset (read unencumbered psyche) than anything else.
Not sure how many actual survey responses this thread received, but I will spend some time going back over everything during the next day or two and edit the first post to reflect a summary of the survey responses.
Yes, it has become quite an interesting thread and I was happy to participate. Some more interesting success statistics:
people who join an MLM - 8%
people who attempt to get a product to market - 6% (from Entrepreneur magazine)
restaurants - 4 of 5 close within 3 years (Bloomberg BusinessWeek)
80% of new businesses fail within the first 5 years (Entrepreneur)
So that being said trading is not much different. Now you may say but we are talking about 5% in trading. Big difference as said before, my broker who was a former floor trader and sees so much garbage everyday (I know you all are getting tired of me talking about my broker, sorry but they have the experience) says it's because of the 2K account trader who leverages all his $$ fails in a month or faster then says trading does not work. Like any business, this takes time. So throw out those who fail within a few weeks and only count those who put in time and energy with adequate capital and discipline and the failure rate is probably a lot less.
Just found Bib Mikes last week...great site.....
Started trading after retiring from airlines in 2000. Traded Big SP with 2K per month overhead...
lost $25K of 50k account in about 4 months....stopped trading and started a charter aircraft
company which failed with no help from the economy...very high overhead low margin business...
I think the failure rate in that business is about 99%.
So....got the trading bug again about 3 years ago...lost about 35K so far
with about 7000 hrs screen time...(when I had 2100 hrs flight time I was qualified for the Airlines)...
I didn't go the Guru/Mentor route cause I figured if I could fly an heavy jet down to 0/0 visibility and
land on an ice covered runway at night with a 30 knot cross wind, then hell, I could do this
trading thing....wrong..... trading is about the most unnatural thing there is....trumping flying.
My brother ask me why I was losing money after being so successful in the airlines...I had to do some soul searching on that one.....
I had no fear of flying, or even dying, but growing up sharing very little money with 4 siblings in a society that
rewards financial success gave me a fear of being poor.....so I came to the conclusion that I can't stand to lose money.
So the best systems, indicators, software, money management, don't matter to a person who is
trapped by his own Ego. If I sim trade I do very well...so I know I have the technical skills be a decent trader...
but trading real money takes me to a place where I don't want to be.
Jesus said: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs will be the kingdom of heaven"
Maybe there's hope yet?
I have been mostly sim trading for the last 4 years with some live trading mixed in with the 6E and dax. I started with forex and found it to be too dishonest to make money from it owing to brokers running the industry. Lately I have been focusing solely on the dax and I have been averaging about 200 euros a day on a single contract. The turn around in my trading was based on 2 things. Firstly you just have to pull the trigger and do multiple trades given what ever system you are using to manage trading fears. And secondly just trade price action without the addition of any indicators.
My goal obviously is to give up teaching (which is my regular day job) when I am averaging around 400 euros per day.
can't remember which forum a survey was done on successful traders; but what was gleaned is that
approx 70% took 1 - 3 yrs to succeed and about 15% took 6months and the other 15% took 3 - 5 yrs to succeed --- maybe this is a healthier way to look at it.
1. No
2. No
3.Still working on that but for now my wife works and I spend hours everyday developing and testing that fits my style and my bank roll.
In order to make $100k a year I would have to have a big enough bank roll to trade big.
My trading style is very conservative and I only risk 1% until I find a system I like with the consistency I like.
I heard a trader say before that if you want to make more you would have to risk more and I believe that statement to be true.
That would be like risking more money on each trade or risking the equity of a trade by leaving on a trade that is already a winner in order to get more.