The beginner results for May was a tale of two months really, the beginning of the month was absolutely horrid. These aren’t including any advanced trades or pro trades that I share in the training program.
The trades included in the analysis are for beginners only and assume fixed targets, stops, and only a basic knowledge of my congressive trading strategy. In other words, beginners just have to learn when not to take a trade.
It was almost as bad as the time that I got arrested while day trading in South Sudan and got arrested in the newest country in the world. Thankfully, my United States passport put the odds in my favor just like my day trading strategy. All day traders have losing days, I have even shared them on this site, but just like we can’t win forever we also can’t lose forever.
May Results Split Evenly
The first week and half of May started off alright and as soon as we entered the second week this easily could have shattered the confidence of any emini trader. This is why it is so important to have discipline and stick to your plan that works. I have done hundreds of hours of back testing and other emini traders have back tested my methods as well in order to make sure that they are tried and true.
Eventually we all gain an instinct for the market and are able to take more advanced trades bringing up our averages quite a bit.
I don’t post my exact results because I don’t want that to be the expectation of what someone can make right away starting to trade the eminis. Beginners, and even more advanced traders, looking for consistency are not going to make a high number of points every day.
I instead show my results and income statements from my own trading my group of traders. Click here to see my recaps & all beginner results.
We can however, expect to make an average of 2 points a day
It is one of the reasons that I have designed the training program to allow students to learn how the market works. The idea is to understand how the markets move and why they move the way they do, not pay attention to indicators.
Indicators change, the market never does.
There is great news as the monthly results are on an up trend, could be a sign for better things to come? The volatility of 2011 carried over into January early this year and then just jumped off the cliff.
The months of February and March were not up to my early expectations but I guess we have to have good and bad months right? Both Feb & March were averging just under 2 points a day while April& May were over 2 pts, respectively.
Potential Yearly Results
The results above are the potentials for the first full year after a beginner learns how to trade with my emini trading strategy. The idea is that even a caveman can do it! Once an emini trader masters the concepts their risks, or losses, significantly decrease their profits increase as well.
The good old boys at the CFTC do require me to show you this disclosure in regards to potential results so take a look.
David Kelley June 3, 2012 at 11:13 am
Great job Marcelo!
I really appreciate the honesty of this site and your willingness to post all results, including the negative. I hope you’ll have time to post a couple of daily summaries (along with your analysis) of a couple of the losing days where the stop losses were hit as well.
Regards,
David
Moritz June 3, 2012 at 11:31 am
Hi Marcello,
Been trying to access the curriculum this morning but I keep getting the “license key expired” site.
Chuck June 4, 2012 at 12:56 am
Am I the only one who thinks these monthly beginner results are almost meaningless? One of the hardest things to learn as a day trader is when NOT to take a trade. Is that support area strong or weak? Is there enough momentum to break it? What about MACD divergence – significant or not? And that price pop – should we worry about it? The list goes on. All of these things must be considered by the trader when a potential trade comes along, and beginners are more likely to make bad decisions. Not to mention emotions – beginners are notorious for overtrading and trying to recover their losses as fast as possible. In short, if Marcello is looking back at charts and guessing what a beginner might have done then the results are meaningless. Marcello is no beginner.
Another point is that there is no mention of commissions and no way for us to include them because we don’t know how many trades were made. This makes the results even more misleading. The only way Marcello can show us how beginners do with his system is to post their actual results, instead of pretending he’s a beginner and guessing how they might have traded.
Chuck
Marcello June 4, 2012 at 11:08 am
Chuck, that is the whole idea of the beginners results. There are a lot of people that ask me for these numbers which is the reason that I put them up. Beginners learn the strategy and when not to take a trade as I mentioned in the post. I set up a system where beginners have to the make the least decisions possible. These beginners results are according to all the valid trades according to the strategy and all the trades that were available. I send out daily recaps to everyone in the program and also have live classes so that is what they are based on.
Learning the strategy includes everything that you mentioned but isn’t limited to all of that. One of the weaknesses in your argument is that you never mentioned how the market works and understanding that which is the most important thing. Indicators don’t mean anything if you can’t read and understand the market properly.
Many people don’t feel comfortable sharing their actual results and I dont go out of my way to ask people to post them on the site because I feel that is an intrusion of their privacy. Instead, I have the LTD Project where I am training three people specifically to trade for me and will publicize their results. I did post two student charts in a recent recap to show how they are trading.
Last but not least, these are gross numbers Chuck. When you take a job do they tell you how much your going to make after taxes? After the benefits and 401k contributions are taken out? I have now found a way to avoid paying exchange fees and also have an agreement with a broker to start all my traders off at $3.90 round trip. That is well under $3.00 round trip after everything is considered. Commissions are meaningless when you are trading successfully at that price.
Let me know if you have any more questions Chuck.. it looks like you may be looking for consistency in your trade. Cheers
-marcello
Chuck June 4, 2012 at 10:12 pm
Thanks for your reply, Marcello. I realize that your strategy is more about how the market works and less about the indicators. That’s why I think your results are unrealistic. If it was only about knowing when to take a trade based on indicators crossing each other and so on, then I wouldn’t question your method. But we all know you can’t make a successful system built purely on indicators. If you could then it would be a simple matter of automating it and making 40 points plus every single month. Impossible!
My point is that because you are subjectively looking at how the market moves and subjectively making decisions based on that, then the results are from your point of view (an experienced trader), not from a beginner’s. It takes a long time and a lot of practice to become tuned in to market movement.
By the way, if a lot of people are asking for these numbers then why don’t you give them? The real ones, I mean, not the estimated ones (don’t give their names, of course). And why should they feel uncomfortable sharing their results with you? As their teacher you should know how each of your students is doing. It will help you improve your course if nothing else.
My main beef about the commission was that you don’t mention it. I know it’s not much, but if it’s say half a point a day then it will have an impact on your results. You should at least state that the results don’t include commission and slippage.
Well, we could argue about this all day, Marcello, and I don’t want to clog up your website with negative comments. So shall we agree to disagree and leave it at that?
Chuck
Marcello June 5, 2012 at 2:36 pm
Chuck.. thats funny you mention that because I am working on an automated system now to see how well that would work. Its going to be a work in progress because I feel I would have to review the results and update it as the market changes.
The results aren’t subjective because they are not from my point of view Chuck, there are a specific set of rules that we have for trade setups and those are the rules that are followed for the beginner’s results. I don’t just decide that a trade is included in the results because it won or failed, there are rules that I share with everyone in the training program of what a valid trade is. There are more advanced trades and pro trades that are not included in the results because they require a more advanced view of the market. The idea is to learn what trades to take and what trades not to take based on reading and understanding the market.
A long time would depend on the trader, I have seen someone pick up and run with my strategy in 6 weeks. Consider myself however, that took 2-3 years to become profitable. It depends on the trader, that person’s ability, determination, and discipline.
I know how everyone is doing but I am not in business to prove to you or anyone else that we can make money. The only reason why I started teaching was because traders from a previous company that I was working with asked me to help them which is why I started the site. Eventually they requested monthly coaching which is why you see the site the way it is now. If they never came to me I would still be traveling and trading around the world.
I can understand where you are coming from in terms of commissions but it really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things when the average win across the entire year has just above 2 points. In addition to working out a deal with various brokerage firms to start all my traders of in the 3 dollar range for commissions, I have recently discovered a way to stop paying exchange commissions which is going to bring down the cost of a round trip to the 2 dollar range. That is a significant savings.
We can agree to disagree Chuck in regards to publicizing the commissions but I do want to stress that I dont pick and choose what trades are valid and not valid. There are set rules according to my strategy of what trades to take and what trades not to take. Those are set whether I trade or don’t trade and that is what the beginners results are based on.
-marcello
Chuck June 6, 2012 at 12:04 am
Fair enough, Marcello. But I can’t resist a couple of parting shots:
1) If your trading rules are so objective then why are May 25th results so different? Your “beginner trader” had 3 losses (-3.75), your “advanced trader” had 2 losses (-2.5), but your May results had +1.25 for that day.
2) If your trading rules are so objective then it should be fairly easy to code them into an automated strategy and make money every single month, as per your beginner results. Well, that’s called the Holy Grail and believe me, it ain’t gonna happen! But good luck trying.
Interesting discussion Marcello, thanks.
Chuck
Marcello June 6, 2012 at 2:27 pm
We are going to have winning trades and losing trades everyday.. when you create a trading plan you have to have a stop limit and those days reflect stop limits being reached. We can’t control the way that the market is going to behave or what kind of opportunities it will give us, the idea is to identify that market and the react to it by being conservative or aggressive. Here are the answers to your questions
1. I am really glad that you pointed this out because this is basic premise of the beginner results. I try to publish the results with the same information every month and I assume all valid trades between 9.30am to 1pm est. Both of the these traders stopped trading before that time frame, one at 11am est and the other at roughly 11.15am est. Both also made mistakes where they took an invalid trade and also missed a valid trade which skewed their results and their emotions about taking the valid trades. You can see this reflected by the comment on the chart on the right “scared to take these” because of the activity of that day.
If both traders would have taken all the valid trades they would have closer results to the beginner results listed in the beginner results. Trading is often a mental game and they both missed winning trades because of the first losing trade of the day which made them hesitate on trades that would have won. There are other traders that did much better than the beginners results but I try to be fair as to what is possible. I am going to be uploading the results and charts of the live trading that we had today and yesterday which should be fun. I hope that clears up the results for you.
2. No trading system is perfect and since the market moves differently all the time it isn’t that easy to code a type of trade. The trades that I have in the automated trading platform under development change over time to account for the changing market dynamic. Unfortunately it’s not the holy grail since I still have to go in and review what trades are working and when and adjust the system periodically. Sadly there is no holy grail out there.
Let me know if you have any questions Chuck!
Imm June 10, 2012 at 10:34 am
I just found your site after being with the ________ for over half a year. I’m curious how different your system is. My impression is that their system no longer works especially looking at your results….it is outdated and since they go years without changing or optimizing anything and instead focus all their attention on training and selling the system, there is nobody making sure that it is still profitable.
Additionally, there is never any discussion of back testing, something I now understand is crucial to maintaining a good system and having the confidence to trade it. I manually back tested the their system going bar-by-bar (taking market environment into account) from several random samples/months over a year, and found the system to be very sporadic at best, with only a couple weeks here and there of profitability followed by much longer periods of either stagnation or loss. I’m sure it was a good system at one time but unfortunately the market is ever-changing.
I fully believe in the fundamentals taught there (proper risk/reward and 55%-65% win ratio, mental game, market environment, practice and review) however I simply could not be consistently profitable with their system after all the time I put into it and after following my trading plan to the T. I’m curious if some of the individuals you are working with came to the same conclusion.
Marcello June 19, 2012 at 7:20 pm
Hi Imm.. thanks for the comments.. shoot me an email at support (at) thedaytradingacademy (dot com and I’ll be happy to speak to you about that