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.

quote:

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Originally posted by redsixspeed

One last comment please. There is a trader in another room that is short esu9 from 1001.00.
I ask him yeaterday 9/16 if he was still short.; he said he was.
I don't agree with Mr. Martinez, but this trader may be one who would fit in the group
MM is speaking of.
So now the question is why would this trader stay short and lose this much? He didn't
say nor did I ask how many cars he was short.

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He is still short because he did not use a hard stop loss order to close the trade when the market moved against the position.

My guess is, he will or already has added to his losing position in an attempt to average out of the trade without a loss. This is how over-leveraged traders turn a small loss into a margin call.

This is part of the trader's educational process. The market is teaching him an expensive lesson. The trader's EGO would not permit him to admit his original mistake quickly. If he did in fact attempt to average down his loss then his EGO is still trying to "prove" the market was wrong and he is right.

Taking a small loss immediately when the market moves against the position is always the best answer. The ability to do this one thing can be one of the hardest skills for a trader to master, but is possibly the most important skill that must be applied 100% of the time to every single trade opened.

As usual, we are on the same page again, PT. From Reminiscences of a Stock Operator:

"Of all speculative blunders there are few worse than trying to average a losing game."


The main issue I have with the points mmartinez was trying to make is that the stats I want to see are how many fail when following all the rules, consistently, that professional stay at home traders follow? Hard stops, correct money management, never trading without an edge, never overleveraging (my own personal preference is to not risk more than 1% on any given trade, sometimes less, and I think the 'lower level' some traders use of 'only 2%-3%' per trade is just too much), not having their heads mess them up by acting emotionally, being correctly/well capitalized (none of this I can earn a big living on $2,000, $5,000, even $25,000 nonsense), and on and on. Tell me how many, on a percentage basis, after what I consider a minimum time to learn the craft of 5-7 years (and 10 years for minimal mastery), who are doing all the above and all the other professional aspects too numerous to list, are failing, and how many are not? That's the only useful number to me.

If someone plans to skydive successfully, and they jump out of a plane without a parachute, can we say skydiving can't be done, can't be mastered? If someone opens a business extremely undercapitalized and fails, does that really tell us much about the ability to succeed at that business? All it tells us is that people take shots at things in ways that don't favor much of a chance of success. That tells us about people, but not about the business. I think this greatly applies to trading as a business. Almost all our data is about people approaching trading in a manner that almost guarantees failure, and then people are drawing conclusions about the business from this data. This is so obviously not the correct data for the conclusions that are being drawn I never cease to be amazed why not one statistician has stepped up and pointed this out, laughing a little bit as he explains it, and then the correct data obtained, or better yet, the correct conclusions are then drawn. Something like: The odds of failing at a given endeavor, if you take an idiotic approach, is like 99%...

Here's a directory with information on Master Traders who have managed to beat the odds.

http://home.netvigator.com/~raymondo/MMD_main.htm

Originally posted by jimkane

The odds of failing at a given endeavor, if you take an idiotic approach, is like 99%...

quote:

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Originally posted by pt_emini

Originally posted by jimkane

The odds of failing at a given endeavor, if you take an idiotic approach, is like 99%...

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Heard a rumor today Simons is retiring...

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2009/10/billionaires-2009-richest-people_James-Simons_5GZ7.html

So if Simon's retires with his $8 billion of trading profits intact.... does this disprove mmartinez ???!!!

I have been reading Studies in Tape Reading by Richard Wyckoff(a.k.a Rollo Tape).
He mentions the two primary reasons for failure are:
1.Lack of capital;
2.Incompetence.

He then goes on to say that incompetence really deserves first place.
I couldn't help but laugh when i read this,it is all so true unfortunately.

I guess he's right in a way.

Trading from a poor capital base=incompetence
Taking on too much risk=incompetence
Overleveraging=incompetence
Trading without an edge=incompetence

and the list goes on lol.

Just want also to thank for all the post because it gives me more view and information about trading. But in my opinion, many people benefit from money trading futures. It just depends on their strategy.

i sure hope one day i do it consistently. on the right path now!

Can I just say that I'm only up to page 5 but I've already learned so much from this topic and can't wait to read the other 43 pages, not to mention the rest of the forum archive!

I'm just getting into trading and I'm so glad I've found a little community of knowledgeable traders willing to share. It's extremely helpful for me as I'm taking the road of "self-teaching" rather than paying any vendors to be educated. The free resources available here and on the other websites I've been linked to are fantastic.

I only hope I can eventually contribute myself.

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