Abandon hope all ye who enter here – Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
In 2014 I read an article by Andreas Clenow, Why managing your own money is a bad trade, that resonated with me because it elaborated on what I was already pretty much thinking myself. To wit, managing OPM (other people’s money) is the logical next step once you’ve put together a decent strategy. There are exceptions (Jesse Livermore for instance), but generally, this is how the big names in the trading/investing world became big in the first place: from Warren Buffett to George Soros or Paul Tudor Jones.
The thing I learned though during this year is that it’s practically impossible to branch out into OPM if you’re coming from the retail side, armed just with a track-record. Assuming it’s good or even decent, no one that counts is going to look at it – above the stigma that retail side carries with it, there’s a lot of competition from established professional traders who nowadays cater to individual investors too, not only to the traditional market of $1M+ net-worth people that can invest in hedge funds.
There are a plethora of firms that promise to connect home-based traders with investor capital – perhaps the one that appears most impressive being FundSeeder, which has Jack Schwager on board. Notwithstanding the sometimes persuasive marketing of these companies, my opinion is that it’s all a waste of time. Each firm has a slightly different revenue model and they might end up being profitable. But a trader hoping to access meaningful OPM through them will be sorely disappointed. Of course, there might be exceptions just as there are people who win the lottery twice.
I’ll finish this by saying that I don’t know a surefire way to attract OPM if you’re a regular Joe with no experience/acquaintances in the high finance circles. I do know though that what you find by googling ‘get funded’ or variations thereof will be a dead end.
If you have
* Beta under under +30% and above -30%
* Sharpe above 2.0 (calculated daily)
* Annual returns better than 10%
* 100K or more AUM
* 3 years trading history
there are funds who will bring money in.
The problem is that this kind of performance is absolutely cream of top. In the modern history probably only a dozen of managers demonstrated this kind of results – we all know the list, don’t we.
Doing it alone is impossible unless there is at least 10-20M of capital. The reasons are many – regulations, cost of acquiring clients, client relations.
This is much cheaper to run a scum.
… Another important thought. If you do have such kind of results you can easily leverage the strategy 1:4, cross 40% annual returns with still reasonable Sharpe and make 100K into a million in less than 7 years.
… and this is what I essentially do.
Of course, there are guys like this one https://peeptrade.com/profile;account_id=6414becbe770385c20fa0da92cdc141a
They sell 4SD puts on SPX making 100USD while risking 10K every week. Produces very nice, straight up equity curve, Sharpe above 3.
My humble advice is that if you see straight line equity curve and this is not HFT you shall ask lot of questions.
The link leads to peeptrade.com homepage, a site which calls itself ‘social network for stock investors’. As with the other financial social networks, I think it’s just a waste of time and possibly money as well.
In EU you can simply start PAMM account and show some results, enough for retail, non-soficticated investors. Leading one is Alpari (alpari.com, check for PAMM investments). Some PAMM accounts hold over 200-300k investor’s equity, while trader’s capital is often just 2-3k.
Another examples are FxOpen, AlphaForex, etc. More high-leveled are Dukascopy and some other firms. But I don’t know if they accept US traders.
For managing PAMM in EU you need to have license or you will go to jail or be fined in millions.
Agree with PAMMs and MAMs. As Mark pointed out, just double check the legal implications from your land of law for running one.
In my opinion, getting OPM is a relatively straight forward process, in trading and business. As long as you have some wits and a decent manner. The question is can you produce the results once you have the OPM and can you deal with the OPM on your back chasing you for results.
They key is to make sure you have a large enough trading capital for yourself and that you obviously know how to trade with good returns %. Then only, as an extension trade OPM, as an option if you wish to.
The fund world or getting OPM is glorified with most losing money or having less than spectacular results.
How to get OPM? Meetings, expos, followup meetings, registered financial advisor license.
What are other platforms apart from fundseeder to connect home-based traders with investor capital ?
I don’t believe such a thing exists. What is presented as platforms to get investor capital by various Fintech companies are in fact marketing gimmicks – the sooner one realizes that, the cheaper (time and possible money) it will be. Just like trading ‘educators’ sell the dream that you’ll be able to make a living off trading after taking their course or seminars, these platforms sell the dream you can be a hedgefund manager if you use their service.
Hmmmm…. you seemed to be proponent of Darwinex some time ago…. what happened? 200 000 eur allocation is not real?
Did you check https://psyquation.com/ ?
I was in the beginning until it turned out they’re social trading with a twist. I heard of psyquation a year ago, but as I said, I’m not interested in these type of platforms.