[glennki]

Mick, I think 500 pips per month on a sustainable basis is very, very good where people are trusting their money to someone else, blindly.

A good trader can do better, but it comes down to frequency of trade, and risk exposure. The "live" signal services claim better results, but they often trade when the market is moving really fast, so by the time one gets an SMS or email update, the opportunity has gone, and the risk:reward ratio has turned against you. So you will lose, unless your signals_ are correct FAR more often than they or wrong. I mean, if I could make 90% correct trading decisions, then a risk:reward of greater than 1 would be acceptable, but the spread and the pressure of a margin call ensures that most traders end up at a loss more than in a winning situation.

I believe that someone with exceptional money management could make money flipping a coin. But there aren't too many of those since most people over-leverage themselves.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the story of Long Term Capital Management, who were going bust to the tune of $1.3Trillion in 98/9 due to approaching margin calls. They had Nobel laureates for finance doing their trade moing, and yet they screwed it up. So the lesson is that we can too (or at least I can). They were on the right side of their trades, if they could just hold out long enough, but they didn't have the capital due to excessive leverage. They had to be bailed out by multiple Wall Street banks injecting MASSIVE funds in 98/9, at the Fed's request, to get them through the turn and back to a winning position. The banks did it with reluctance, but because they knew the fallout would cause them massive losses, and perhaps bankruptcy too. There's a book called "When Genius Failed" that tells the story - it's a brilliant read, and great education on the dreaded margin call and over-leverage.