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If you are averaging $500- 1000 per day from part time trading and you had been achieving this for the past 6 months.
A. Would you quit your day job and go full time trading? - potentially getting better results from doing it full time since you can be more focused.
B. Keep your day job and treat trading as an additional income stream?
C. Trade for another year before deciding ? This might cap your performance for an entire year
It depends on how deeply I hated my current line of work and how much I enjoy trading and whether I believe that less work and more trading would improve my results.
I would probably ensure that my savings account could take a stumble year, so I would have to have at least 2 years living expenses working for me in a safer type of investment. Then I would drop the work that I didn't want to do (if that is the case) and do something I did enjoy doing along with trading.
In my opinion, if you can't trade in 1.5 hours profitably, then you may be a workaholic!
Further, if your profitable 70% of the days -- you make $1,000 a day 7 out of 10 days, but lose $1,000 a day 3 out of 10 days -- your net is only $4,000 over 10 trading days.
Now you are only making $90,800 a year and while you might think you are "making $1,000 a day".
Invariably, we see this philosophical/fantasy question consistently.
My first question would be....
If you can make $1000/day trading and you've done it for 6 months, why can't you make $10k/day?
At $500/day, over 6 months (126 trading days), that's $63k in profit.
Unless you're choking out your profits by spending them.....you should be able to scale up. Surely an extra $63k in capital would permit even the most conservative trader to add a contract/lot.
I guess if you were tying up $1M in order to make your daily $500, (or spending it),
But the first question I would ask someone who claims they can make $500/day trading and do it consistently, is why can't they make $1000/day, or $2k/day, etc.
I'm not in this for a hobby. I'm not in this for a day job. I'm in this to eventually retire and spend my days fishing or watching HS football or sitting on a beach and re-enacting a Corona commercial.
"A dumb man never learns. A smart man learns from his own failure and success. But a wise man learns from the failure and success of others."
Money is irrelevant... A better measurement of success would be the ticks per contract/share you make/risk...
If pull in $500 a day on the ES with one contract, you can make $5000 without needing to make any tweaks -- other than adding 9 contracts, of course...
me as that simple guy I am would clearly quit my day job, but I wouldn`t be in a hurry to do trading full time. I would like to spend the rest of my day for what ever I would like to but not feeling the pulse of the markets necessarily ...
I used to think this way. But then when I put it into practice, I quickly realized I am not a robot. I am a discretionary trader. Yes, yes, for all the automation guys out there. But I am a discretionary trader. So to answer your question as to why if you are doing 1k a day why not make it 10k, the answer is simple: psychology. More risk alters your decision making capabilities.
I continue to trade bigger over time, but it's not just a matter of adding some zeros to the end of my lot size and pressing "go".
Actually, if you don't increase your positionsize (along with your capital) then you're decreasing your relative risk.
If your R multiple is 30 ticks, and your positionsize is based off some rational relationship to your capital, then that 30 tick R, is 30 ticks, regardless of whether it's 1 contract or 2.
If reducing your relative risk over time is an actual deliberate goal, then trading and banking the profit makes sense.
Like I said, even the most conservative trader can pocket 50% of his earnings and increase his absolute risk (but maintain the same relative risk) by putting the rest to work.
Then again, I'm the guy that would definitely double down on a video bonus question at the end of the cash cab ride. You've already arrive and gotten a free cab ride. If you've gotten a free cab ride, it means that you answered more questions correctly than you answered incorrectly. The free ride aside, if you figure you have a better than 50% chance of getting the question correct, at a payout of 2:1, then it only makes sense.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. It takes risk in order to receive rewards.
I guess my overarching point should be that I usually speak in terms of profit% rather than absolute, because any length of time with a profitable % should incorporate varying absolute return values. (in my opinion)
"A dumb man never learns. A smart man learns from his own failure and success. But a wise man learns from the failure and success of others."