stop posting those 1% a day spreadsheets

[Shadow Trader]

Every few weeks a spreadsheet shows up with 1% a day turning $1,000 into something huge. It always looks great.

Run the real arithmetic. 1.01 to the power of 250 trading days is about 12, so $1,000 becomes roughly $12,000 in a year. Stretch it to two years and the multiple is about 145, near $145,000. Five years of it gives a multiple around a quarter of a million.

The sheet never mentions that the maths assumes a steady 1% every single day, no losing days, no bad weeks, and fills and liquidity that stay the same as the account grows.

Real results arrive in lumps. A 1% average with plenty of variance is a very different animal from 1% each day. The variance drags compounded growth below the simple average, and the path has deep dips the sheet skips.

A target is fine. A smooth curve sold as a plan is the gripe.

What daily or monthly figure would you call realistic for a scalper, and why that number?