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.

Hunterone,

Did you get any students from the last time that you did the room?

Yes and I won't be teaching again. I lost far too much money to teach again. One thing I have learned though and I am hoping to address it is this. The biggest problem traders have is pulling the trigger. You can teach them Gods own method but if they can't pull the lever they will have trouble making it work.
So to address this I am going to run the room for a week starting Monday. Now that my trading partner is going to work with me it is going to be the exact thing I do every day. Only we will be talking. We will only answer questions if the market is quiet or after the trading day is over.
People will hear everything. How we read the market at that moment,what we expect to happen. The trades we are taking ,our stops our trailers. You will hear when we disagree on trades. The works. I hope by listening people will understand more about actually taking trades. They will see how we handle a loser and how we reenter the same trade after getting stopped out when we are early.
This should give folks the chance to see what they have to be able to do if they want to earn a living trading.
We will not be teaching at all and will not take students after the week is over. There is no reasonable amount we can charge to make teaching a worth while endavor.

That sounds good hunterone. I wonder if you (or someone) can record the audio and capture the text chat with timestamps and perhaps post it here with a chart at the end of each day so that traders who were unable to make it in can review what you guys say? I think that there's a free audio recorder called Audacity that will do that and the text can be copy pasted...

day trading have I ever mentioned that I have the tech skills of a 3 yeard old? I will see if my partner knows how to do what you ask if not I would be happy for a volunteer.

You probably need the technical skills of at least a 4-year-old to do that. Maybe someone reading this can try and install Audacity and record the room for us. Do you think that you could save the text that is typed into the room to a file? I think that it's as easy as clicking File -> Save. I'll volunteer to produce a chart of the market at the end of each day to put the audio and text into context.

Call me a PAL TALK neophyte ... but I can't find the room under "ES Trading Today "

Is there a link or some instructions on how to find it??

Thanks

OK ... now I have found the room ... but I can't seem to add it to my Favorites on the PalTalk Scene ... is it just me or is this some sort of weird interface...

Anyway - here it is 9AM EST and the room is closed ... (unless I am doing something wrong using this Paltalk)

MY suggestion would be to have a less generic name for the room. (Like HUNTERONEESCALLS)

I should have been clearer. We are going to start this Monday the 14th and go for the full week.

Just my luck skills of 4 yr old. Just missed the cut off again. I am sure we can get something done. The audio will be better than text since we will be calling trades not typing them in at least not most of the time.

Typing the trades in or having someone else type them in (a volunteer in the room) when you call them out is a good idea in case someone that was listening in takes a break away from their computer and when they return they'll see that you entered/exited a position on the screen.

Hunterone,

So how much did you charge the sucker(student) to learn your method?

How much have they lost of there trading account sofar?

How much support are you giving them b/c its been less than a month and you are doing another room to troll for more students, nice hook in your stmt. regarding that no one can pay you enough money to teach, I am sure you will get more newbies?

Did you show the sucker trading account stmts. proof that you can pull the trigger?

Without Stmts. its

Voodoo

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