It's good to have a healthy balance of optimism and scepticism, inspiration, ambition, justification and realism. I'd hate it if things here were overly and unrealistically optimistic in a way that wasn't representative of reality.
I really see a problem here. How many people lost money or worse - YEARS of time pursuing some techniques, which probably have nothing to do with real edge? You all witnessed my own path through ups and downs. Streaks of profit, which were justifiable with CLT (statistically significant in theory). The truth seems to be: universe is so huge if you combine every event and every factor, so that ANY streak can happen randomly. Which catches many people in the trap of biases and ruins their life much like lives of those who try to beat the roulette with the difference that roulette never had reputation of respected business and thus much lower chance to dupe smart and hard-working people...
I am sure some of the claims are true, but most internet forum claims are not. Unfortunately we don't know which are real and which are fake. Even in mass market media these lies happen...... Big story now is a major US news anchor has been caught lying about his time reporting from Iraq years ago, trying to make himself into a war hero survivor. So lots of people try to pretend to be what they are not. One story I remember from another forum maybe 2 years ago. I was always searching for trading nuggets. THere was a guy in his late 60's keeping a journal of his daytrading futures. He was trading mostly 1 or 2 contracts and making 2k or more every week. I soon saw he was faking it. He posted screen snips of his entries along with his calls, but they never showed the time of fill..... just price and size and symbol. His exits were also little snips, so never a continuous blotter. After matching up his post times with the markets I realize he was posting the entries very late, sometimes 45 minutes after market was at that price hence his omission of time of fill. Exits were always timely. So he waited for the trade to go in his favor before calling it out. Also a couple of his snips were too wide, and I could see some of the prior trade on his blotter and infer what the trade symbol was. When I try to match that up I see it had gone against his position, and guess what he never mentioned any trade in that symbol. So he was just "showing the winners". Almost 70 years old and he was doing it that stuff. No one had caught on. He had people praising his skills and asking for advice. He then started an educational thread because he was getting overwhelmed with PM's for advice. The thread was a joke and he had no clue what he was talking about, vague and evasive as hell. I don't know if he sold anything or just wanted attention, but surely he could have sold mentoring to some had he wanted to. He was sloppy compared to some of the ones on ET and BMT, they are much more polished and professional...... and have their acts honed to perfection. Shows that stealth vending works. If a guy like that could get attention you better believe the more polished acts can pull much more.
Thanks for your discussion on poker, I have found it very interesting. I'm not ready to give up trading, but maybe poker is something fun to do on the side, like a hobby that makes a bit of money instead of some other hobby that costs money.
Before comparing poker with trading, an interesting comparison is poker vs chess. One of the key differences in these games is that you have full transparency in chess where you can see the position of your opponent so you can act accordingly. In contrast, you don't see your opponents position in poker (because their cards are hidden) and to make it worse they practice deception by bluffing. Trading can be more like chess or poker depending on your visibility into order flow. If you are a floor trader in the pit and you see large brokers coming in with buy orders, you are operating more like a chess player. You know what key market players are about to do and you decide to get long to ride the rally. Similar situation in HFT where they see buy orders coming in and they jump in front of them in a microsecond. But if you don't have this visibility into order flow, then you're trading more like a poker player. You don't know if your opponent (the market) is about to buy or sell and there may be iceberg orders or other efforts to hide their intentions.
For me...Poker & Trading "Feel" exactly the same: 1. Playing the best hands strongly (those very few Great looking set-ups) 2. Knowing when to play those bad hands when its effortless to throw it away ( Countertrend top & Bottom Fishing) 3. The CONSTANT Decision making ( Do i move my stop now or just get out?) 4. All the books that make it look SO EASY (after the fact) 5. The must have flawless money management ( Dumping those LOSERS ASAP) and #6. Having that "Feel"...that inner voice...that no book or Mentor can teach
I don't think this pessimism towards traders should be generalized. What you say is true regarding daytraders but there is a quite a bit of successful swing traders and position traders in the business.