No doubt my approach to sizing up has been "relatively" aggressive. I think I am immensely lucky to be backed by two people who's attitude is, to not put any blockers in the way of my progress and who believe the same as me. I believe is it is nice to have money before sizing up, you need some cushion to be able to keep yourself in the game. But sizing up isn't necessarily a one way process, just because you sized up doesn't mean you have to stay on that size. My costs are big and I don't want to spend half the month covering them each month. Thing is soon I will need to draw money to live off as well and then it becomes tougher to size up, it becomes mentally harder too. Okay so there is no rush, I can do it slowly and gradually but I know people who are not sizing up who have been there as long as 4 years and trading my size or lower. Now why wouldn't you size up! you make money gross.. just trade twice the size and in a months time you won't look back, your "cushion" will increase relatively to your size and hey if you have a bad few trades on that size just size back down, you will have a worse month but so what you gave yourself a chance to make twice as much.
I think having played poker before it has made me really appreciate some things in trading more than others. In poker to make more money you have to improve and beat better players, in trading you just trade twice the size and you make twice as much as long as you don't trade differently and as long as twice your size isn't really big and then has problems being absorbed. I find that people who are there for a number of years really don't struggle to make money in the markets, they struggle to live of what they make pay £2000 in fixed costs and then pay their variable costs. I honestly think people are making a huge mistake and I find a lot of people disagree with my approach and think it's a little reckless. Why risk your trading career just to make more money, well two things EV (expected value, in the markets) is positive just abuse this fact and also secondly greed! and also you can do it without risking your trading career.
I am now at a point where I could go and get my account nice and positive before sizing up or try the next size for a day. If I size up and it goes bad I can just go back to the size I was on. Then try again next week. It's somewhat rare to lose money but when it does it's big, and it will only be 1.5 times the size, which seems well worth the reward. Pretty sure I am going to try out 12 by 15 on Monday, although Mondays aren't great because the big guys are whacking on positions but I'll be first to admit 1500 losses will suck so bad but my daily target would be 450 euros which to me seems insane!
Edit: After writing this I was reading an interview on Paul Rotter (aka flipper) the most successful futures trader, in fact he traded what I am trading now. He says:
Q: what are your strengths as a worldclass trader and where are the differences between you and other traders?
A: it´s the ability to get more aggressive in winning phases, taking bigger risks, and scaling back in losing times. this is against human nature. the best thing is to have somebody around who is neutral to trading, that switches the terminals off, when a certain loss level has been reached for the day.
Which is cool because its what I was getting at! If we were robots we should just be getting aggressive when we know we are profitable but because we are humans it's best to do it in winning phases because we will be trading our best then. That's why I think he says "in winning phases".
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