Could not find Forum for Daily Income–so posting my questions here:
Looking at equity curve and detailed trades:
1) What is assumed margin per contract traded?
2) Max contracts customer is allowed to trade?
3) 60% drawdown–based on total equity earned–or beginnning acct size?
4) What was the beginnning acct size?
5) Detailed trades–all are 5 contracts traded/entry—was this the original trading size to generate the equity chart?
Pat -
From your questions, it sounds like you are serious about subscribing. You’d have to auto trade this system, so make sure you look at the return AFTER commissions. Many of this system’s trades are for 1 tick in the ES which is $12.50 per contract. Your commissions with autotrade will be close to this $12.50 value, or exceed it. This means many of the winning trades shown here will actually be losers.
Also, ask your self why the system has been here a year, yet it doesn’t have a ton of good reviews. There is a reason for that.
IMO, this system’s equity curve is one of the most deceiving on this site. Costs will eat u up alive with it.
Pat, good questions, however, with regard to Daily Income, the only question you should be asking is, What does this thing called “Keep After Worse Case Slippage?” It means that the Daily Income equity curve is fiction.
DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT TRADING IT!
Jim
yes, I agree the equity looks pretty “optimistic”–especially when I take a quick glance at the posted trades. —But all the “systems” look like they are missing the info to my basic questions–which should clean out the bad systems. One think I was not aware—that an autotrade would cost $12.50a turn. That’s a chunk–right now I pay $5 a turn with Tradestation–but I do manual orders only.–Looks like I’m just as well off doing my own thing
AutoTrade does not cost $12.50 per turn.
For Gen1 trading, there is no auto execution fee.
For Gen3 trading, there is a $1.99 per futures contract execution fee.
With OEC, I think the total for a single traded contract is $4.5, so $9 per turn, still high, but not $12.50. the $1.99 is the C2 fee that goes on top of the normal OEC commission rate.
Jim
It’s not just optimistic, it is really fiction. Nearly all those trades would not have gone through as posted, they would be worse by 1 tick per side or 2 ticks per turn. To asses the true return for daily income, subtract 2 ticks per turn per contract and the $9 per turn fee. Once you do that you are looking at a very nice tax write-off for 2009.
Jim
Pat, I think your chance of success is much higher here then trying to trade on your own – unless you have a track record of success. But, you have to do quite a bit of research.
Pat just for grins…take any system like daily income …or even one of mine…and personalize the chart…click on the pencil. Then change the number from 6.95 to …say 16. 95 or even 26.95 if you like and then look at the chart. With daily income a perfect ski slope for beginners after you click personalize and stay away from standard.
Ron
My naive viewpoint–Scalp trading Russell–currently, with $5k account, I can average $100/day/contract (sometimes lose $300 a day)–but it’s 100% manual–looking at many charts-all day long–every day–testing at night and week-ends. An exhausting venture. Came to this end by spending a tremendous amount of $/Time/Energy seeking patterns that repeat themselves (100% indicator based). --yet I’m extremely ignorant about the stock market trading–many times i can’t even understand the words being used. With C2–I figured–surely-- someone brighter than myself could come up with a really good auto system–and make more money by charging for it.–But then the obvious question–if their system is so good–why bother selling it–when you can make a million just trading it. Reviewing systems listed here–I can’t find anything impressive–anyone suggest something I have missed?
have you looked at the babson systems or starter system?
far too young for me to consider.
Pat, what criteria are you using to judge a system? There are some systems on C2 which have a decent length track record that have shown what I would consider very impressive performance.
These systems that have been returning on average 20, 30, 40% or more per year and have proven themselves (as far as that’s possible) over time, are in fact the best chance you have of making real money.
If you are looking for 100% per year or more then you will likely end up losing money instead. The reason there are very very few 100% per year systems (with reasonable looking equity curve, manageable trading costs and stomach-able drawdown) more than one year old is that the vast majority of “stars” crash back to earth sooner or later.
It’s what I’d call “The Icarus Effect” 
Notable recent examples, because they hooted their own horn loudly when only a few weeks old: [LINKSYSTEM_49375320] a.k.a. “aggressivefx up more than 1000%… its all about risk management!” or “Futures Wiz” a.k.a. "This is the best system on C2!"
And those are only a very small fraction of similar boom-bust stories that regularly pop up here.
Regarding your other question, there was a recent thread on the topic of why people sell systems which may be of interest:
http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl/board.mpl?want=listmsgs&boardid=9323885&threadhilite=8393&displayblock=22_7
Dean.
- my criteria is 2-fold: first is what I initially wrote regarding info on the Daily income, 2nd–as I mentioned before–I’m pretty ignorant/naive about all this stuff. --BUT—If I can make $100/day on $5k account–that’s a lot more than 100% /year–the trade-off is that I spent probably 60-80 hours a week doing it.—Then I imagine it is reasonable that an “expert” at trading should be able to do the same—otherwise-I’m am suberbly brillant at this work—which obviously I’m not.
2) Which brings me to --why don’t (or do they?) successful traders sell their successful systems. Yes, I read the posts you mentioned–but are these really the high-end quality traders?–Or is their real expertise in programming–and are able to squeeze out a profit–( and nothing wrong with that!). So the question is–with my limited resources–do I stick to my 80 hours/week of work—or do I satsfiy myself with 20-30%-40% return–and come up with the capital required to support this type of return (probably at least $100k-$200k). Matter of fact–the reason I was drawn to Daily Income–is that is the way I basically trade.
so basically 100$ a day on a 5k account is 2% a day.
100$ return on a 5k account = 2% . SO if you can make that a day you can avg roughly 2% per day, 10% per week.
So you basically want to avg 10% a week. But you don’t want to put in 60-80 hrs a week .
Lets see 10% a week for roughly 82 weeks is about 7million starting with 5k.
So 80hrs a week isn’t worth that to you?
Does this seem really plausible to you?
This is the problem, people have unrealistic expectations or only take in one small part of what it means to take on risk or execute a method in the long term.
I know you said you are naive to this stuff and I see it all the time, so I am not putting you down, just want people to grasp concepts about what it means to invest and understanding returns/risk tolerance/drawdowns, and reasonable expectations from the former.
why don’t (or do they?) successful traders sell their successful systems.
One reason:
Most traders do not sell their most successful systems. Paranoid or not, they do not believe in possibly revealing their edge to anyone.
I’ll give you an example: a hedge fund wanted one of my non C2 systems. First, they wanted all kinds of detailed trade info, and they also wanted me to fill out a 12-15 questionarie with VERY detailed questions. Basically, they could have reverse engineered my system based on the the trades and questions they asked.
So, I did the math of hedge fund payments to me versus trading it myself. Trading it myself was far and away the better choice. That isn’t always true, but it was for me.
Maybe other developers have come to same conclusion about selling their signals.
Kevin
Pat,
You claim to consistently be able to make $100/day on 5k – if true then you can add a contract every 2 months which would translate into over 100k profits in a year provided you did not increase beyond the first year contracts, if you continued to increase then that would be 200k+ by second year. Do you see how your belief in your ability to make consistent profits is hypocritical to your belief that no one would sell a working system? Essentially, that is what you are doing – selling your system for another.
You sound confused and that is reasonable because your ideas about how real profits are made in the market are not realistic. It is possible to make a lot but not the way that you think and not without taking real risk. You seem to have made up your mind already.
If you can understand these 2 concepts then everything should be clear:
1. The future is unknown. This is true for any hedge fund, any individual, anyone. Even a psychic, they can only know they were psychic in the past. There is no way for even a psychic to know that they could predict the future. They can only know predict the future in the past.
2. No profits in the market can be made without taking some risk.
To clarify, I’m not claiming the market can’t be predicted, I’ve claimed I can do that but I can only know that I did that in the past. Do you see the difference? Knowledge is something we know for certain. There is no way to prove anything about the future because it is unknown but fortunately certain knowledge is not required. The third piece Pat is that past performance really is the best measure of future performance we can have. This is the third leg.
Also, your perspective is very simplistic. I personally before I even came here had 15x predictions in a row and 48x out 50 predictions. But, I had no risk capital, no scientific model, and also I ask myself, why should I have to risk anything given my ability? If you think about it, most people in other activities that excel at anything get payed to do it. Take a programmer, the client comes to the life-long skilled developer with a project, the client takes the risk and pays the programmer for his ability. Despite having a qualified programmer and talent, the project may fail and the client may lose his money. It does not automatically infer the programmer was not capable. A top race car driver gets funded via a promotional tie-in… etc
If you think about it, it makes sense, if you’re not a trader you’re only ticket to the game is to hire one.
Pat, two points relating (roughly) to your two:
1) Most people here on C2 are not “experts” in the same sense as a surgeon or engineer. There is a diverse mix of seasoned traders, careful contemplators (new word for the dictionary?), amateurs and out-and-out gamblers, both as system vendors and consumers (traders). It is entirely up to the individual to do their research and sort the wheat from the chaff according to their own preference and style, for which C2 offers some tools to help and where forums like this come in as well.
2) As several people have already pointed out in this thread, Daily Income only appears to make money. In reality it doesn’t… unless maybe if you are a well funded high-frequency trader with access to super-cheap-and-fast execution, for which you’d have to pay a fat fee for a direct link to the exchange to even have a chance of making money long term.
These people do exist - it isn’t my style but I know one guy who has been doing this for a living in this way for many years; it is stressful long hours though, as you say. His returns are not 50% per month; if they were he’d be long retired! But he now employs three people and lives nicely off it.
Oh… okay, three points 
3) I know I sound like a broken record (for those old enough or cool enough to know what that means) but I have to repeat it again: look at people like George Soros or Warren Buffett - they managed “only” 30 or 40% per year on average. But that was over decades with low risk of a wipe-out event, and therein lies the key. Are they not experts??
Dean.
Pat,
You sound like you had a nice lucky streak. A lucky streak does not translate into a steady income stream with very little risk. It may take 1-week or 1-month or maybe 3-months, but not much longer than that to realize how much risk you are actually taking to gain the $100/day you mention.
How many 80hour/week weeks have you actually traded and made $100/day on a $5K account?
Jim
