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From my perspective, I most care about having the best setups possible - given whatever market environment we are in. Obviously we are all in "continuously learning mode" - especially these last few months. As an example, I realized after reading a post by @Kim that I have put too much negative bias into some of my trading decisions - whether getting in or getting out of various trades. Because I believe the market has been acting irrationally as of late, I have not taken part in anywhere enough of the uptrend as I should have. This is a bad practice -- one has to trade the market we are given and not try to MAKE it what we believe it should be. Now, that is easily said and having a bias is a natural human trait - and most of us have learned to trust in our hunches, wisdom, learned experiences, etc . . .but sometime they fail us. Now back to the subject of performance and portfolio sizes. I think the goal of a 10K portfolio is great, but I also wonder how many of us "goose" up the size of our trades to work better in larger portfolios - I do this all the time. What I do think is important is that if there are some really good setups that are a bit on the expensive side - would still like to ponder them. Maybe they go into the "unofficial" bucket . . . or maybe a "Big Kahuna" bucket that is kept separate from the 10K portfolio bucket. I'm not trying to add more work to anybody's plate - more along the line if you see some good viable setups - maybe discuss them and let the SO members know that some are not being taken due to size/cost . . . but they're still valid and here is where you go to see them. Okay, enough out of me . . . seems my "negative bias" is just starting to match the market a bit more . . . I feel like some more "reality" is starting to creep into the market. We shall see!

Negative bias is a real thing! I am just in the first 25% of this book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B085N3SZ1T/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0 It's just more "mental trading soup" for the brain, but I find I need to go read stuff like this every so often.

I have been using DRV, FAZ and EDZ for leverage index shorts. TVIX for a levered volatility trades. And UGLD, TYD for levered bonds and gold. I can't give specific recommendations on what you should do with your money. My positions are part of a larger plan of hedging long positions, momentum trades, risk parity allocations, etc. - Not a financial advisor.

The problem is that you never know how far the prices went in the past 15 min blind flight. By seeing the actual future price you can be sure that you don't place the order far beyond the offer believing that it's still mid-price. On the other hand I'm quite sure, that market maker software realizes orders stepping up in direktion to offer. Therefore I often suspend the order for some minutes before stepping up further. I' ve got the impression, that this procedure offers better prices. But maybe it's just an illusion...

It depends what data you compare. Belgium has the highest death rate in the world apart from a number of tiny countries. I'm surprised people don't talk more about that actually. I would compare Sweden to its closest neighbors, having a similar climate, maybe quality of healthcare system and so on. Then numbers don't look that great anymore.

I initially thought the stated performance goal of 5-7% a month was also likely in need of a reality check, until I signed up for membership and was able to start verifying all the trades and participating in the new trades in real-time and saw that it was definitely reasonable and legitimate. I only joined recently--just a little under two months ago--so my account balance for these trades has been more or less fluttering around unchanged since I joined, but even with that, the value of the knowledge I've gotten from the trade discussions and other resources on the site has been well worth the cost of admission.

An extremely high level reason, volatility... Our core trades do well when volatility stays around current levels or rises. That was the case in January and February where volatility was flat and then rising and giving large boosts to many of our trades. Once we got the middle of March, volatility started to drop and has been doing so ever since. This created some very large percentage losers on a few trades that had an oversized negative impact on the portfolio performance. We also had less trades on, which made the impact of those larger losses bigger. There are a number of reasons for why we had less trades: Lull in earnings season, and for those stocks that did have earnings their RV was orders of magnitude above normal levels which meant our typical analysis ineffective. Options became very expensive, so it became difficult for many trade to fit into a 1K allocation. For many stocks with moderate liquidity in normal times, now had less liquidity and very wide bid/ask spreads. This made then much more dangerous to use for options trades as slippage was a very large concern.