Hi there Black Swan, good to be back.
And yup, what'd life be if one couldn't believe that one can achieve something, how depressing would that be if one went through this journey thinking one were a victim of outside circumstances one couldn't influence.
That'd be quite a nightmare.
Hi Neil, good to see you and Claudia made up again
)))
But now I'm back, and she's gone again ???
Good points re trend R/R oildaytrader.
That's actually one reason I didn't talk about methods much here, a method - provided you have one with a positive expectancy, however that may be skewed with endless possibilities of hit rate and R/R mixes - just means you'll be net profitable over time.
But that won't tell you if you'll end up making 10, 100 or a 1000% per month or year or whatever.
Of course you need a method with an edge, but beyond that the main determinant of your income is going to be position sizing.
I had this on file, unfortunately without a link, but still a good inspiring read about Paul Rotter:
"Is eight figures a realistic goal? It has been done by private own account traders for years. Paul Rotter from Germany, 32 years old, is one trader that has made �50-60+ million ($65-78 million) per year for 10 years trading the most liquid contracts at the biggest futures exchange in the world, Frankfurts Eurex debt futures, primarily the Bund contract.
In 2003 I received an email from a former Man Financial broker in London who said, "One of our private customers has been the highest volume trader on Eurex for the last 8 years. He trades approx 3 million lots a month and makes himself �50 million a year, which he has apparently been doing for the last 10 years." In 2004 I learned that it is Paul Rotter. He is notoriously called "the flipper".
The bottom line is there are other traders, we never hear about, making 8 figure profits. If Rotter's trading style did not attract attention then we would have never heard of him. If Rotter and others can do it, then maybe you can to. Remember, trading is very risky and you will lose all your money if you do not know what you are doing and when to do it. So please do not trade unless you are ready and willing to accept and take personal responsibility for the outcome.
In January 1998, Kinski, Rotter and some other traders formed a Dublin-based prop-trading firm, Greenhouse Capital Management.
Rotter's balls-to-the-wall modus operandi helped Greenhouse prosper, but not without some tense moments. The firm began life with $1.3 million in seed capital and featured, in addition to Kinski and Rotter, two other standout own-accounters, Pino Curcio and Florian Albrecht, the latter one of Rotter's closes boyhood pals. As a unit, they worked well together, though Rotter was clearly the star. "It was do or die," Kinski recalls. "We knew Paul would have these large positions -- in one day we could have been out of business."
By the end of its first day, Greenhouse was up $526,000. Within three months the firm had made $6.5 million, though not without ruffling some feathers. "Paul has sometimes played a controversial role," Kinski acknowledges. "Some traders didn't like him because he was changing his position so quickly." In 2001, Rotter formed Rotter Invest and eventually moved his operations to Zug, Switzerland, an affluent town that's home to its share of traders."
Starting out I met a guy at a German board who actually started trading with him at the then Midas Trading House, they were all scalpers there doing hundreds of round turns per day. Midas eventually had to close down because the managers at the Salzburg office had conveniently "forgotten" to pay taxes at their Austrian branch where Rotter had traded for some time. When this happened he had already left Midas though and started trading for himself.
Anyway, just goes to show once again that one heck of a lot of things are feasible if you concentrate and believe in yourself.
Oh yes, another success story with a proven track record to back that up is Tony Oz who wrote a book documenting his real money real trades with a US$ 50K account throughout an entire month, he only went long even though that was the beginning of the 2000 bear market, had a hit rate of 69%, average winners of $1266, average losers of $321, and ended the month up 56% even though he didn't compound, that is he traded the entire month with the same position sizes.
http://www.amazon.com/Stock-Trader-Living-Trading-Stocks/dp/0967943507
Things
are possible. You just need an edge which honestly isn't rocket science, self confidence, concentration and discipline.
