More than 100% of my profit's are from market making. Overall, I lose money on my positions. For the firm as a whole, position trading might be slightly profitable.
I have a basic strategy that works, and I run a couple variants on that strategy on a decent number of products. I am always trying to tweak the strategy to make it better, and add more products to trade. I also put some effort into developing new ideas. Most of the time, new ideas are a waste of time. There just aren't that many fundamentally different strategies that work, and that provide the kind of risk/return profile that works in my industry. I know it is a cliche that you learn more from failure than from success, but in developing trading strategies I think the opposite is true. You can spend forever trying things that don't work. Its much more valuable to understand and refine an idea that basically works.
Thanks for the response. This is exactly why I tell everyone who thinks they should dabble in trading to stop it. The regular person who thinks they can beat the stock market for alpha has huge odds stacked against them.
Real professionals that work at true proprietary trading firms:
Are not paying stupid amounts of money on retail commission.
Have direct access to exchanges via having a seat at the exchange, no middle broker.
Are using true HFT (not just automated trading ) with collocated servers at these exchanges.
Market making for tiny tiny
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