Return On Investment (ROI)
It Only Takes A Million
Planning to generate An 8% Annual Return
Do your own research but my findings show numbers from five to twelve percent return on investment accounts. Ten percent is considered a good return. Many articles discuss investing your retirement account into something that allows you to take a draw to supplement your (fixed) income from pensions and social security.
Why the nautical theme? Because I thought it might be fun to use a free layout with my DIVI WordPress Theme – enough said about that!
Our Boats (The Math)
Breaking it down
There are 250 trading days in a year, so an 8% return yielding about $96K, would give you about $400 per day (exactly $384, but we round for simplicity.) Since I am going to return that to my investor, if I double that number, I can take $400 per day as my pay for doing this work… successfully!
How I’ll Do This
Trading the futures markets is something I’ve been working on for years. Recently, I’ve found “if I think like a billionaire” I can easily generate a $300 profit in about an hour, by trading in and out of micro contracts on the S&P. Being a billionaire frees my mind of any imagined limitations. I suggest you try it.
An Experiment
Being way past overdue to try this, I’m now far better qualified by all of the losses and lessons leading up to this idea (imagined while washing breakfast dishes.) Experiments have certain components – hypothesis, variables, expected outcomes, etc. Variables include the markets and me.
Boat Features
We will be sailing primarily through derivatives, the ES and the NQ. While most of my navigation experience has been with the ES (futures contract on the S&P 500), I’m now beginning to see how I might navigate the NQ (futures contract on the NASDAQ 100), with its rapid currents.
Jim The MM (He pushed me to trade futures)
Jim is a generous and forgiving man, who is all too willing to quote scripture. An overall “good guy” he sees things his way, and often sees the good in others. Like me, has finds it difficult to reverse his position in a trade. To do that, you first have to admit to being “wrong” about your first decision.
Another way to say it is, “I’m off-sides” as they say in football. A flag is thrown and a small penalty is immediately taken by the team at fault. Key in on the word, “small”. Take the small penalty and continue the drive toward the goal line, where the profits lie. Accepting that pain quickly and drawing up the next play is done in seconds on the field, there’s no grieving, no time to feel guilty or stupid, no reason to cry, and no emotional response will help you score. Just go.
Morad Askar (aka FT71)
Jim introduced me to Morad (a.k.a. FuturesTrader71) and his methods of “calling the market”. FT (for short) can be remarkably accurate with his pre-market analysis. He will usually say, “these are not predictions” and then proceed to draw out one or two “scenarios” with explanations of what he plans to do if or when these conditions occur. Sometimes, there’s a third scenario. Often enough he nails it, in some cases, two scenarios combine to find price levels that are very close to the numbers he provides.
Of course, it is on you to decide what to do with this information. And, as with any attempt to see the future (no pun intended), there will be days where none of what was shown by FT will happen that day. The key to success is always to have a game plan for whatever the market gives you, and FT says that often enough.
Aaron Korbs (goes by Korbs)
Joining Tradeacc was a good move for me. Korbs offers a few levels of membership and of course, the most expensive level gives you all of the training they offer on trading the “Profile Method” he espouses.
Learning all of the terminology and methodology comprising his course helped me to understand what FT71 had been saying (back when I didn’t understand most of the language used to describe things like value area, low and high volume nodes, point of control, etc.) Although I learned much by working through this process, in the end, this trading style did not fit my needs, and watching Korbs trade some days was disconcerting. I always admired his willingness to put himself out there for his members to see how and what he was doing in live trading sessions.
You can see his trading and post-mortem analysis on his YouTube channel. Also, although there are many dead links on one of his websites, you can click this link to get to his sales pitch.
Finally TRG (Trading Resource Group)
What I mean by “finally” is that I’ve finally come back around to the way I used to trade. Some years ago, I had some success as a scalper. If you don’t know trading terminology, I’ll explain. Scalping involves taking very short-term trades and small profits along the way. The other courses and studies I’ve done were aimed at getting me out of that comfort zone and into longer-term trades. In other words, instead of taking so many small profits, I was trying to learn how to get into a trade I could “ride” for some time to collect maximum profit. This didn’t go well and hasn’t gone well for me, so I’m back to scalping now, and finally, I see the possibility of becoming a successful futures trader.
It is funny that the disclaimer, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” cuts both ways. My past failings are not indicative of what is to come with my future and my futures-trading results. Follow at your own risk, manage it well.
Trade in Style
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Daily Tracking Sheets
II’ll get better at this as time goes on, but for now, here’s a spreadsheet to show you how I’ve done today.
Why so many SIM accounts?
I’m testing for different times of day and for potentially trading NQ instead of the ES. Also, there are some accounts that are limited and some that are unlimited, like my Billionaire account.
What will we learn?
One thing for sure, if we are honest with ourselves about this, we’ll know (or have enough evidence to support the conclusion that) we can trade real money – whether my own or a funded account, or a combination of those. This is the ultimate goal.
And then what?
Then we sign up for an evaluation account, aiming to get it funded, so we can trade a large account and pull a percentage of the profits into my bank account – QED – I’m a successful futures trader.
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