Registered: Nov 2007
Posts: 274

"Easy" and "hard" are fuzzy qualifications. You need a reprentative huge sample to judge responses. What is easy for someone may be very hard for someone else. There are better questions to ask to satisfy your curiocity.

Registered: Aug 2009
Posts: 2685

It's hard IMO. If it was easy, like learning to ride a bike or drive a car, then everyone would be able to do it effectively. What's the success rate in trading? Very low. Is it 'easy' or hard to become a top athlete or business mogul?

Even passive indexing is not easy for most people, and that literally takes about 1 hour a year. Good investing and trading just seems to go against most people's human psychology.

Registered: Sep 2011
Posts: 125

it is easy when you find your style that fits your personality - impossible when you try to imitate others....

Registered: Jul 2008
Posts: 584

Trading aspects which I find "hard" (ie. I am performing below my expectations):

- identifying & validating possible edges
- programming setup ideas ... dealing with all kind of noise, variations, taking context in consideration ...
- testing ... reviewing 1000s of trades one by one (the only way to ensure the software does what it was meant to do, in all sorts of situations)
- thinking in probabilities ... managing systems through probabilities


Trading aspects that are getting easier for me:

- trade management rules & software
- risk management, position sizing
- discipline ... letting my systems do their job in real-time
- discipline ... no "spontaneous" trading
- discipline ... follow my R&D, validation & live deployment processes
- philosophy ... let go of the actual outcome of any individual trade, and focus on the long-term performance of my systems

Registered: Oct 2006
Posts: 1839

doing the analysis and putting on the trade is easy. Waiting for the setups and leaving the trade alone to work is hard for me. It might have something to do with the concept of what is "work" when I thought of trading as my "job" I felt obligated to do something. Now my outlook is that these accounts are like a garden and I just tend to them when they need tending to. You have to wait for those fat ass tomatoes to get ripe before you pull em off!

Registered: Jun 2009
Posts: 14

Trading is so hard, I could explain my edge to 99% of people, and they still wouldn't make money on it, let alone find the edge to begin with.

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