Trading with Data

The begining

I started to trade after seeing some flashy ads about trading-for-a-living from a small capital, I even remember emailling my first course vendor and asking whether it was possible to make 10% a month form the small account that I had...

Just like many people, I was just being sucked into believing that it was possible to trade-for-a-living by simply learning some technical analysis... Poor me!

Is it possible to trade for a living?

The short answer is YES, absolutely.
Is it realistic for most people? NO!

I brought some evidence to show the results of some of the best REAL traders out there. Notice that these guys have verified track records, not like the ones from YouTube gurus...

As can be seen above, on average, people makes 30% a YEAR from trading - not the 10% per month that I wanted...

The challenges

Doing some basic math, one quickly understand that the biggest challenge in trading-for-a-living is the amount of capital required...

Also, we must make it clear that the few guys out there that do trade for a living have periods of drawdown that can be extremely hard to overcome, once you need the trading money to pay your expenses!

Systematic Trading

Like many other real traders, I only got profitable after learning to code and moving to systematic trading.

My evidence

For illustration purposes, below I show what I was able to achieve so far in terms of performance over the last years. It is not the best performance out there, but I'm very happy with it...

For the last years, I achieved a total return of about 112% on the initial capital, with a maximum drawdown of 17,42% in the period. These results give me about 30% of annualized returns.