this threat has gone a little bit out of hand.
I understand borth sides very well and their points they are trying to prove.
For the competitions Pipsharigan has mentioned: yes it is true, there are very often professional competitions held by influencial entities like market players banks and funds. these competitions (i participate in one every year) usually last 1 month and you get a fiktive depot (usually €100.000) with which youare allowed to trade. the person who makes the biggest gain gets either a prize of some sort (the one i participate a very expensive car, last year a Jaguar) and a job offer from the holding bank.
In such competitions people go all risk. all in on evry trade. and the outcome has a lot to do with knowledgebale made decition followed up with a big portion of luck. My own record in last years competition (commerzbank, october 2016) was a gain of 1400% in 1 month. so made a fictive 1,4 million out of 100.000.
But, this is not real trading. any instituion that lets you handle money from other people like this will be shut down by the local authorietes shortly after it fires the professional trader who is doing such things.
This is just a competition and for “fun”.
The usual life of a professional trader looks completely different. Depending on what field you specialize and what way of trading- and most important- for who you are trading, it is usually expected by you to beat the inflation+provisions (cost of money management) and have a healthy return which is higher than if the investor would have been placing the money o the bank or similar feature. It is expected by you to “beat the market” by a few percentages. So a annually profit of 10-15% is a average number of what is expected of you. on the contrary it is proven that the average managed fund usualy does not outperform the index in which it is trading shares etc.
There are star like exceptions which make a annual profit of 50-80% but those usually are starter funds with little capital (20-50 million etc). the more capital you have to manage the harder it gets to find growth potential.
Let me give you a example:
last year a new company rose by 200% in stocks value. sunds great? yes for the company, but for a managed fund it is not interesting simply because that company rose from 2 million in worth to 6 million in worth- but you as a manager of a fund have 1,2 billion to invest. so even if you invested into the “lose shares” (lose shares are shares that are traded in the market, most shares are beeing held by investors or the owner anyways) you had the possibility to buy shares worth of 200.000 and the growth of 400.000 puts absolutely no weight to your 1,2 billion you are managing.
On the other hand if you invested 200k and the company went broke, you will be held accountable for that “waist” and why you invested in a risky start-up.
If you invest in a blue chip like microsoft, verizon, ibm, Daimler, BMW etc- the growth potential is very low. A annual growth of 4-5% is expected (in good times) and in crisises a drawdown of 40-50%within few months is very realistical (depending on the crisis, for exaple VW lost 40% of its shares value in the Diesel-scandal of last year). if you have 200milion invested there, your fund is about to have a hard time.
Institutionals and professionals trade extremely different from what retail traders do. Some institutionals have so much money at hand that they dont even know anymore where to put it, and as a investor into a fund: the thing you really hate to see is- CASH which is not beeing used (invested).