Does anyone really make money trading futures?

Does anyone really make money trading futures?

I am just wondering.

I know I don't. I have tried all the indicators and the chat room gurus, and none of them make money.

I have a suspicion that a lot of the chat rooms for emini trading are just for hobbyists and market enthusiasts and not for serious traders trying to make a business out of trading.

For any new traders out there please be very cautious of paying anyone to mentor you or signing up for training or a chat room. From what I have seen the only people making money in these deals is the mentor, the chat room owner or the author of the training manual.

I would love to hear from you if you are a successful trader making 20% off your account or better over the past year. I know only 5 to 10 percent of traders are supposed to be successful, but I am beginning to think that zero percent of traders are successful over the long haul. Certainly anyone can have a streak of luck and rack up a few good months where they dramatically increase their account size, but these people are normally big risk takers and eventually they blow out their accounts by taking the exact same risks that help double their accounts in the first place.

Thanks in advance for any response.

BruceM,

I just want to clarify one thing. I have no idea what hunterone's intentions are, or anything about him. I was one of the first, if not the first, from here, to observe him in action, and I posted my thoughts. It seemed to me he was a straight shooter. Recall, also, I was the first one to comment on his spectacular returns when he first posted on this thread.

Anyway, I mentioned to voodoo1 that a common tactic is for a counter poster, usually one with no history at the forum, to come in when 'the con' is being run. I wasn't implying that I thought voodoo1 was doing this, or that hunterone was running a scam here, only that from the outside voodoo1 mentioned that hunterone comes in, shows people he can make the calls, has never charged anyone anything, now he will teach for money, and all of the sudden that smells fishy. As soon as I saw his post I knew that would be brought up.

What I wanted him to see was just as that may have smelled fishy, his post smells just as fishy to the rest of the readers because that is also a common tactic, the good cop/bad cop. All I wanted to show was just how hard it is to provide good information because no matter what approach you take, the scammers can and will duplicate it to 'prove' they are legitimate. So, voodoo1, who knows he is not a scammer and is trying to show us all a good point, fits the profile of a scammer, just as he was pointing out that hunterone now does. Hence why I called it a dilemma.

In this case I would guess both of the gentlemen are legit, but both now fit the profile everyone in here is so alert to watching for. I just don't want anyone to think I am suspicious about hunterone, because he did let me hang with him for almost an entire day, and he seems like a straight shooter. As always, I suggest people do their own thorough due dilligence if they plan to work with anyone, but I want to remain 'neutral' on specific people, and post only my experiences and thoughts that I hope may help people out. I try to probe issues and get people to think.

I think that Bruce has nailed it on the head. If hunterone would like his own forum where he can post his ideas and answer questions then we would happily set it up for him. I think that it would allow hunterone to achieve certain goals that Bruce has already listed and that I believe hunterone is interested in - i.e. teaching and learning by teaching.

As Bruce mentioned, this is a very similar idea to having an always open PalTalk room. I think in the software industry this parallels to open source. There's an excellent book called Mavericks at Work (Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win) in which they describe how a mining operation open sourced their data in order to find more gold fields and it worked amazingly well.

I was just mulling over what we've been discussing here. I don't think that we even need a dedicated forum for this. We already have the Trade Journals Forum and almost everyone here is interested in learning more or learning-through-teaching what they already know. If hunterone (or anyone else) wants to comment on the trades that they took during the day and elicit feedback and questions it's very easy to do. Similar to the great dialog that pt_emini and Bruce have in the Trader's Lounge every day. Just a thought...

Just want to say that I dont take anything personally. Due diligence is good but even that wont help much when it comes to trading courses. I dont want to be a vendor. That was not my intention. So I wouldnt want my own forum. I really dont have that much to say.

Everyone should realize that all methods look good when back tested so back testing is worthless. The 2 key points to trading are mental and how to determine if the trading signal you are getting from your method is a high probability trade or not. These are the 2 areas that almost no vendors have in their systems of teach.
I do have one question. If a vendor of a trading method offered a 100% money back guarantee would he still be subject to the negativity and attacks?

I'm guessing he would be, because I have seen many posts in here about vendors with 100% guarantees, and the people were fighting them to get the money back, without success.

Hunterone,

But the proof in the pudding is to put to test seeing a p/l run of real time posts of you trading 21 lots at a clip in the ES and making $267 per contract, whether its end of day or real time screen captures over a x period of time would suffice. You could also post your trades at www.collective2.com real time, were they you give a paper trading account for a $100K, nobody ever loses money paper trading.

Many newbies are lured into buying system that a vendor or poster states that he is trading x number of contracts and generating x number of dollars per contract, but the fact of the matter is that the system might have hugh drawdowns or the trader himself is a bit of cowboy and there is alot body english in the trading signals, of the vendor.

Again my question remains from a previous post, how much are going to charge for the system and what is the learning curve of the method and how long will you support a student to your system.

What if you only trade 2 lots in the es, that all of sundden changes the p/l per contract. The onus should be on you to prove that your stmts. in previous posts are correct and not just a hook, for prospects.

In refrence to your above stmt, how do you know that the signal you are getting from your own system is a high proability trade, the only way that you would know that is in backtesting? if you were forwarding testing the method then that is a whole set of different questions. that we should be asking as, prospects.

It is not my intent to make you sound like a used car saleman, and if my questions are to pointed, then you make ask me to stop and I will to so.

With Out Proof its all.

Voodoo

quote:

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Originally posted by hunterone


The 2 key points to trading are mental and how to determine if the trading signal you are getting from your method is a high probability trade or not. These are the 2 areas that almost no vendors have in their systems of teach.

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Hmm... from your statement I take it then that your trading style is completely discretionary ... and if so, I would doubt you could pass it on through training. Personally - the system I trade (of my own concept and design) I record each and every possible signal that it generates every day and base my statistics on them - I do NOT try to determine if the signal is a "good" one or not as I have discovered the hard way that I have no idea in advance of the signal whether it is more or less likely to fail. (Failure is determined as hitting my stop before my 1st target). More often than not - the signals I think are going to fail work.

By keeping accurate statistics - I have proven to myself that my best course of action is always to take the signal and follow my money management rules. It sounds like you have determined a way of "predicting" whether your setup is going to be successful or not.

If that's true - congratulations. Because I can't do it reliably - at least not more reliably than just following my rules.

bakrob99.

Well Hunterone is the only one trader that I have heard of that can tell when his system will give hime a losing trade and avoid that trade, thats why he is netting $267 per contract daily. Imho if you are able to avoid losses in asvance and then the market is all yours for the taking...lol

Now the last repley from Hunterone has taken a side disscussion of, mental toughness, being able to decide which trades will be profitable etc..etc..etc..adn the wo with me treat me like a used car salesman, when I am trying to help my fellow trader...lol

The thread was started by Greg, who asked a general question of profitability . Hunterone may of saw a profitable opprotunity of selling his system for 5K or what ever price he could get, maybe because the same scam had been taken on him or his other trading friends and they ended up with a bottle of snake oil and had no recourse.

Hunterone, lets see the proof of proftability of trading 21 lots and $267 avg. profit per contract?

To date we have not seen any evidence of trading sucess, just alot of jiberish...

quote:

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Originally posted by bakrob99

By keeping accurate statistics - I have proven to myself that my best course of action is always to take the signal and follow my money management rules. It sounds like you have determined a way of "predicting" whether your setup is going to be successful or not.

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Well if you take a look at what a signal is you could probably say that it's a series of filters applied one after the other and at discrete points in the day you apply your set of filters against the market. Those discrete time intervals may be in nano seconds or over hours.

bakrob99, I think what you're saying is that you cannot improve on your signals. The filters are as good as you can get them and they provide a signal that is right X% of the time which if applied consistently will end up with a net profit over a series of trades.

What I think hunterone is saying is that he also has a set of filters which generate a signal but his can be improved upon. Once a signal has been generated for him he then uses his gut/sixth sense/discretion to apply a further filter.

So it sounds like bakrob99's method is more mechanical and deterministic than hunterone's which requires discretion.

From my personal point of view, I prefer systems such as the one that bakrob99 is trading because those are easier to back test and ask what-if questions. When I put on a trade, every now and then I'll notice something else that happens once or twice that has an apparent impact on the outcome/result. I now what to ask the "what if I applied that 'something' to my filters?" If the entire system is rule based and deterministic then I can run that question through a back tester and see the result.

quote:

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Originally posted by day trading

[quote]
bakrob99, I think what you're saying is that you cannot improve on your signals. The filters are as good as you can get them and they provide a signal that is right X% of the time which if applied consistently will end up with a net profit over a series of trades.

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Of course - it tool me quite a while to realize this... maybe 9 months! Ha ha! It was a bit of a breakthrough actually to finally ADMIT THAT I HAD NO IDEA WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. And my only choice was then to take the signal regardless. Most of my entries are against my emotional makeup which are screaming to stay out.

I see many many other chances to get into a move ... but resist as I only trade my signal/filter combinations.

I believe very strongly in backtesting BUT it still is not the same as actual trading because when the market moves it often does so quickly and you need to make a decision in advance and stick to it without hesitation to get the best fill possible.

My point is: Teaching a non-disctionary "take every signal as and when they occur" system might be possible but if Hunterone's method is as discretionary as it seemed to be by his description it might be a different matter to try to teach it.

I consistently profit from futures/futures options, but it took me a long time to figure out the best way for me to do so.

While a set of trading rules is very important, I have found that it is just as, maybe even MORE important, to develop "trading callouses" from getting your butt handed to you repeatedly along the way.

Here's the thing: Any set of rules will only work until they don't. It is normal human psychology that there will come a time (again and again) where you deviate from the rules because A) you have had a string of losses, B) you have had a string of wins and now you have a loss and can't believe you're really supposed to "lose this one," C) you get greedy, D) you get scared for whatever reason, or E) any one of a thousand other things that will cause you to screw up.

I had ups and downs for many years until I thought I had it figured out and had a couple of years of really solid profits. I had my own private island picked out :) (not really, but I did have a condo in mind O/N an island). Then came the financial crisis of 2008 and I learned that while I had a generally good strategy, because times were good I had not developed an appropriate risk control system.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars later... (and that didn't take long at all!) I learned the hard way that my strategy was woefully inadequate when the unexpected happened. It took me a while to brush myself off, but eventually I did.

Since sometime in 2009 my cumulative returns are somewhere around 450%. Over the past 9 years I've found that proper risk control continues to be where I tend to fall short, so I've had some choppiness during this time. About two years ago I tightened things up some more to try to make for a smoother equity curve... this mean that, theoretically, my losing months should NOT be as large as in the past, but my winning months will also not be as large as they were in the past.

That's okay though -- even my cumulative success over the past 9-10 years, when averaged out by month, comes to < 2% a month. I suspect that 2% a month, long term, is about where I'll stay, but the ride should just be smoother along the way.

A return like that may or may not be enough for a particular person--it is for me--but keep in mind if you want to shoot for the stars there's a really good chance you're going to eventually crash land back on earth. It really does come down to being adequately capitalized and having a reasonable return be "enough" for you. By all means, trade even with a small account, because you need that experience to get to the point where you'll know what you're doing when you have the larger account. Just don't expect to turn a tiny account into a massive one along the way or you will probably be disappointed.

-PDG