And now comes the part you were keenly awaiting. You have a strategy with a positive mathematical expectancy and an annual return target very similar to the pros. How much capital do you need if you are an …?

Intraday trader.

* This depends on the base currency. For this example, imagine that the base currency is the EUR.

Do you think it is feasible to yield a 182.3% on average every year? How many traders do you know who have been able to do it for ten years? How many do you know that they have achieved it one year only to wipe out their trading account in the following?

After an ice-cold bath of realism, an intraday trader like you would need $ 54,832 and an average return of 182.3% if he wanted to earn $ 100,000 a year.

If your target annual salary were $ 50,000 instead of $ 100,000, you would have to divide this by 2 = 54832/2 = $ 27416.

If you wanted to yield a return similar to the pros, with an annual objective ten times lower, that is, 18.23% per year, you should increase your capital X10 = $ 548,320.

Do your calculations based on your location / lifestyle / degree of optimism but it seems obvious that you might need much more capital than you probably have in your trading account.

The purpose of this article is not to invite you to give up your budding trading career, but to understand that it is almost impossible to become a pro trader if you don’t have the” wand” that great traders possess.

Investor leverage.

Regardless of the capital you have in your account, as long as you have a minimum to be able to follow rigorous monetary management, the key to obtaining those $ 100,000 relies on how much investment capital your pure trading talent gets to attract.

As an example, and as long as you follow the industry standard of 20% performance fee, for every million $ of investment capital, one percentage point equals $ 2,000. That is, to get those happy $ 100,000, you would need a 50% return per year. It is still very ambitious, but you don’t need half a million in your account to get it. If instead of $ 1,000,000 under management, you had:

You have gone from almost giving up your dream of becoming a successful trader to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

What annual return is your trading strategy currently averaging? If you have this data, you just need to calculate the investment capital necessary to obtain those $100,000*.