You dont have to choose. They go together pretty well, imo. I trade and play poker. Hasnt been a problem so far. You can always sit out a few hands if somethings going on in the market.
i hardly play poker, not good at it, coz i don't want to think too much when i play......so that means i shouldn't trade?
To the previous poster: There isn't much thinking involved in poker until you get to high stakes, where bluffing and counter-bluffing are commonplace... Because I want to play in a straightforward way, I prefer to multi-table mid-stakes. The only "thinking" involved is the initial few weeks of strategy formulation, before you start playing in any significant manner. There are only two ways to make money in poker 1) to play tight and aggressively 2) to play relatively loose (but not too loose) and aggressively The key underlying theme is to play aggressively -- the trading analogy would be to have liberal position sizing of say 1% of your account and to pyramid when things are going for you... I prefer to play tight (have a limited number of hole cards that I am willing to commit money to). Since I am multi-tabling and since I am playing the premium hole cards only, when I hit my hand, I often take down an opponent's entire stack. The problem with playing loose is that you must have good opponent hand reading skills, whcih is possible when you are playing 1 or 2 tables, but becomes impossible when multi-tabling... The way I play, I make lots of small losses, an equal number of small wins, a handful of big losses and a significantly larger number of big wins... in terms of distribution of gains/losses, this is not too dissimilar to how things were when I was trading... The beauty of poker is that it is more easily summarized in terms of $ per hour. I simply couldn't do that in trading, since I was at the mercy of market conditions, and would make most of my profits in a handful of months... and in the dry months, I would sit there, become demotivated and basically pissed off... What I do now is play poker 5 hours a day (including weekends) for income generation and put on perhaps 5 position trades a month for speculative capital growth...
Here is my recommendation for taking your poker to a higher level, assuming you understand the basics... it is particularly suitable for the tight and aggressive approach that I use: http://www.amazon.com/No-Limit-Hold...6602007?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1185872447&sr=8-1
poker involves bluffing. the second that comes into question it becomes easier because u cant bluff the market!!
Bearbelly Yes, for tournaments, Harrington's works are good. They profess a more tight aggressive style, akin to the likes of Chris Ferguson but diametrically opposed to the loose, wild, aggressive style of the likes of Phil Ivey. Personally, I don't play tournaments. I play cash games, since the equity curve is much, much smoother !!
I played for a living 7 years and made very low 6 figures. Poker allows for tons of positive expectancy bets a day compared to trading, allowing for rapid compounding and regular withdrawals on a small balance. But the games get very tough above a certain level, so trading is much more scalable. Poker also has legal and game integrity problems. Another big difference is the high level of strategy discussion and materials available. Compare this forum to the strategy discussion on 2 p 2 for example or check out the cheap training videos. The poker training industry is remarkable compared to trading.
Poker is much easier to become good at because the feedback cycle is so short. A hand lasts a couple minutes and then you can evaluate what you did right or wrong. Not always the case with trading, and it can take long periods of time before similar patterns and analogous cases arise that your pattern-recognition can profit off of.