Most of my followers likely know about
opentrader.com but if you don't you should check out this new site. I love the transparency it requires of all users and really hope that all mentors, gurus, educators, etc. (anyone selling anything to improve your trading) are eventually "forced" by the trading community to enlist with this site or similar. Currently there are only a handful of brokers supported: Fidelity, Interactive Brokers, Velocity, FXCM, and Forex.com but I'm sure that list will grow.
It's tough for retail traders like me to benchmark their performance because so few share their actual results.
James Meehan, who just did an open trader webinar the other day, has an impressive $350K gain over the past 1.5 years. He swing trades and day trades and I downloaded and looked at just his day trading daily results to see what his curve looked like ($192K from day trades). Looks like some big daily risks, and overall bigger reward. For what it's worth, here it is:
Posts
Thanks for the link MBA, is this similar to Profit.ly?
ReplyDeleteI had forgotten about Profit.ly - yes looks similar but profit.ly is only stock trades from what I can tell.
ReplyDeleteI spend a ton of time on BigMike's and never much on OT, but with Meehan's webinar and future ones coming down the path Ziad has propelled OT into a new level. Meehan stood out because of one reason, his ability to stick to his plan after his draw-down months (although his focus on thinner markets and the unique skill he has honed on the DOM is probably more esoteric than conventional pattern based TA)
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, an eye-opener!
And, oh yeah...heck of an opening round on this new method :) WTG.
ReplyDeleteI hope people who hear about Meehan's great performance also look at the equity chart. Big drawdowns are almost always part of the game when you are aiming for big gains. And most people cannot stomach much more than a 25% drawdown. That means many people would have quit before the equity curve took off.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing. I love the transparency. We need more of it in this industry - too many snake oil salesmen who have never traded out there.
Kevin, kudos to you - you bring a rare breath of truthfulness and credibility to the table. A rare and priceless trait.
ReplyDeleteI doubt there are a lot of successful traders that will go there to share the "Golden eggs goose" with the rest of the world. I would not do it on contrary I would try very hard to hide it even from the broker by using multiple brokerage companies, using bait trades and so on so forth.
ReplyDelete@ Sandy, how active a trader are you and do you share your trading experience in a blog or some other site?
ReplyDelete@ Paul, define "successful traders", what's your criteria to be considered successful? As for the Golden Goose and sharing, Opentrader charges customers a monthly rate for the privilege to follow the successful traders.
@Trin Cafe (nice nickname btw :D) True "successful traders" is a relative term, I can only speak for myself in to what I understand trough the term, I would consider myself "successful" (...enough to be very cautions in to letting the world know) if I would be able to achieve anything more than lets say 60%/year - of course story is long as the markets change and while I could achieve this kind of performance in a certain type of market for a few years I might fail when the market changes (for example today`s markets behavior is drastically different as compared with only 3-4 years ago not to speak about 10 years ago) so everything and anything is relative but still from my point of view if capitalized enough with lets say 100K for start (MBA has 50K from what I see so its not that 100K is a tremendous amount) I would definitively hide my ability from the world and maybe aim for a large prop firm to try my hand at a few hundreds millions if being accepted. Speaking about MBA and success I think he is right now much more successful than the vast majority of traders as I see a rolling up-down equity line instead of a sharp down line that most experience. So again success is relative.
ReplyDeleteExcuse my long text and the many parentheses I could debate this in a 10 page thesis and still I would not be able to cover everything.
I agree with all of the above, success is relative to the individual trader. For clarification, I see success as having the ability to live your life style from your trading income. Trading for a living does requires a substantial amount of money to have a chance. Those who have done it and are doing it have had other sources of income to subsidize their trading accounts (Day Job, Savings, Retirement, Spouse).
ReplyDeleteI can not imagine those who claim to make more than 100% annual returns having the time or desire to right books, or sell their guru services. I believe they are motivated by the additional income that's a lot easier to get than replicating large returns.
Paul, I'm glad you can appreciate the nick name, if you write your thesis, be sure I get a copy : )
@Sandy - Thanks!
ReplyDeleteTrin, not sure what active means. I day trade CL and position trade a basket of futures (including forex). 100% of my income comes currently from trading, and I don't have a blog, occasionally I post synopsis of some swing action on BMT. And that's her.
ReplyDeleteAs far as successful traders are concerned, I don't think there is such a thing - was Livermore a successful trader? In 1932 he was King of the world, in 1937 he blew his brains out (that one of the known famous stories - I am sure there are plenty of ridiculously talented, capable traders that have had great success only to end up destitute from the market's whims).
Each day I am more aware of the fragility of my "success".
Sandy, active is a vague, 100% of your income from your trading is very active. As for success, I hope we all will be able to avoid the tragic life of Livermore; a sobering reminder of how fleeting "success" can be.
ReplyDelete"biggest drawdown nearly $88,000... BUT ... recovered in 3.5 months"
ReplyDeleteok... now what if that random drawdown happened right out of the gate, from day one? what if the initial account balance drew down from opening trade to -$88,000 straight in the hole?
What would public perception have been for those 105 calendar days? What would followers and onlookers have said all along the way? Same man, same discretionary approach, same results in the end to now.
But what would "the masses" have said about him & his approach thru that stretch of time from open to trough lows?
It is relatively easy to calculate the error bars on this annual profit (for a given confidence level). A profit of $350k +/- $x is a lot less impressive and, in simpler terms, is only 3 losing days away from working in McDonalds.
ReplyDeleteYes I am being negative and "picking holes" but that is appropriate/beneficial when faced with the seductive headline profit.
L&W
austinp - I believe he started with $35k so I'd like to think his risk levels were different right out of the gate. But who knows. Fact is that he had confidence in his systems/approach and traded through it. Kudos in my book!
ReplyDeleteL&W - good point. I personally don't like the huge standard deviation in his daily results but 3 days away from a blow out may be a bit of a stretch.
austinp, you never share your Real Statemant, yet claim to be successful,like Al Brooks, and sell stuff..what are you?
ReplyDeleteI notice the guy from opentrader likes to short the ags and the majority of his trades are short. Holding time for opening trade from 3 minutes to 30, enough time for noise and for him to get in and out. He was using AAPL as guidance for his pair trade on NQ vs ES; nothing new since AAPL was 20% weight of the index;now 12%. He hints that he is a Convergence trader on high correlation pairs, works good for 20 out of 21 days with limited profits and much bigger losses on the days it doesn't work unless you cut out of the loss fast. To make good money at these spreads you would need to get costs down because the commissions on executing these spreads will eat up the profits. He is using TT(spreader) and he reads the market by watching the DOM which suggests to me he is doing a lot of spread trading (convergence again); however the only noticeable contracts I see where there is both and open short and long is the crack spread on HO/RB/CL and those trades weren't very profitable . He is making most of his money on ags, I'm guessing he is doing an opening order bracket and his preference is to always short near the open right off or wait for stop/spikes. He is right about the funds pushing ags a certain direction and hitting stops. It is much more noticeable near the pit close on the ags and there is definitely scalping opportunities there.
ReplyDeleteThanks HPT for info. Much appreciated. He must have member rates at CME/CBOT. Pairs/spreads can kill retail traders as you basically double your commission costs. I tried my hand at that once upon a time..
ReplyDeleteHow's the hedge fund world treating you? I recall you made that move in 2011 right?
I doubt he has a seat since he trades so many different products and doesn't do nearly enough size to make it worthwhile.
ReplyDeleteObviously I can't say what products I trade because I work for a private hedge fund, but trading has been going good. I've learned quite a bit and learned new ways to trade; I don't really use charts anymore; I'm a DOM trader that relies more on being able to notice aggressive bidding or offering and ratios between spreads that are off. Trading is less stressful. Trading how I trade requires a lot more capital and would be very difficult to do as a retail trader because of data and commission costs. Trading is a difficult job no matter what people say, we all work our asses off and have our bad days.
It's nice to see your still blogging. Most of the day trader bloggers from a few years back like myself, stopped blogging in 2009-2010. There are only a handful left. I'm thinking one of these days I will get back into blogging.
"austinp, you never share your Real Statemant, yet claim to be successful,like Al Brooks, and sell stuff..what are you?"
ReplyDeleteWhat am I? Well, I'm a middle aged man who day trades so he can live for a living.
As for showing statements, I'm not aware of any people in my field who do that. Not Don Miller, even before his $10k jelly program went belly up. Not the founders of opentrader... from what you can see the founders do not trade.
My personal results are irrelevant to anyone else on earth, but for amusement sake you might find next month entertaining, because I'm going to produce a youtube live-trading video for every single session of June... starting Friday.
Yesterday's and today's examples now online are merely warmups for that little demonstration of fun :)
@HPT, I re-posted a video of your "bad day" I think was back in 2008. I thought it was a great example/reminder of how easy it can be for a trader to let a position get away from them. If you want me to delete it, please let me know and I will remove it from my blog.
ReplyDelete@Trin, I don't mind.
ReplyDeleteis opentrader.com still open? looks like it is just a blog now. what happened to them?
ReplyDeleteYeah I see that now that you point it out. Didn't really follow the site but they must not have gotten enough traders to sign up...
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