"Common?" Possible, yes. But "common?" Evidently, you and I live in different worlds. As an aside, I was also a market wizard before I started trading live with real money. However, it was only then that my real trading education got underway. What I find interesting is that people who are relatively new to trading are immediately reaching for the stratosphere. Not unlike taking your driver's ed exam at an Indy 500. No sir, no baby steps here. I wish you well.
I don't mean common as in a significant percantage of traders are doing it, and I didn't say I'm doing it now but I've been told by several people who are doing this kind of trading professionaly and not by random ET posters. Now, maybe it is some conspiracy that all sorts of unrelated people would privately give me similiar performance numbers.... could be. I'm not that new to trading.. I traded about 6 years ago when anyone could make money randomly buying and selling but soon came to the realization that I really had no edge so I gave it up. In the mean time I've been reading piles of research (read over 500 papers so far..), writing code, gathering data and testing theories. Believe it or not, there are ways to use statistics to test for predictbility and ways to derive theoritical max profits... I'm not talking about just gathering a bunch of 5-minute bars and testing millions of combinations of dumb TA rules...
How many professional CTAs/money managers make 100% a year consistently? Obviously, there are many, since doubling one's money every year is "common." Show me the names, the returns, and the sources.
Renaissance Technologies, Citadel, tradebot... a few more small operations. Why does everyone get so offended when it becomes known that someone is making money?
Having studied statistics in both my undergraduate and graduate studies several years ago, I have a nodding acquaintance with that discipline. I think you will find statistics to be a better post-dictive tool than a predictive one as it relates to the markets. The problem with the markets is that there is no known and constant probability distribution for what has not yet occurred as compared to what has already happened. Therefore, you are dealing more with uncertainty than you are with probability. As a result, I think you will find pinpoint accuracy even more elusive than when dealing with known probabilities. But why quibble? I look forward to your report of actual trading performance in due course. And I really do hope you knock everyone's socks off, but I suggest that you play a defensive game, at least at the outset. Going for 1% or more per day is far from defensive. Either way, good luck.
Stats are definately used after the fact and I believe most of the time stock prices are indeed random walks, meaning they have no known mean and infinite variance as the forecast horizon goes to infinity. However, I don't even look at single prices of stocks.. there are combinations of assets that *do* have finite mean and variance and thus are predictible.. these combinations are much more stable than the assets themselves. I'll definately start some sort of journal when I start paper trading in real time.. hopefully next week.
I would like to see evidence of returns. Anyone can simply list off names. I mean AUDITED returns, not from word of mouth. And I mean CONSISTENT returns. No one-ht wonders, It has nothing to do with being offended at good returns.