You should be getting over 100% annual returns from your trading if you have aspirations of working your way up from nothing. Any top fund manager could do that with minimal effort. When you have a small account, there are a lot more securities available to trade. In lower volume markets, a fund is big enough to move the market itself with their own order. They can't buy low volume stocks without running the price up before the order gets filled. A small account is like a jet ski next to the giant battleship of a hedge fund. It's easy to be fast with no baggage. So just because you got a return on your account a little better than what a fund posted by no means makes you a better trader than the fund manager.