When I say 95% traders fail, I'm INCLUDING PROFESSIONAL institutional traders, fund managers and the like! The top 1% of this industry takes from the 99% that lose! Those losers INCLUDE your fund manager, your below performing institutional traders and what not..
This whole website is also a very elaborate way to convince you to give up and drop all your money into their money management bucket. Everybody always seems to know what is best for you and your money!
Yup....I got the impression that it asserted that the best thing to do is buy index funds. (Through them ) Which after a couple of years of research, is exactly the same conclusion I came to for the AVERAGE investor. My advice to friends I know, who do not posses the skills, or have the time necessary to really learn about trading, is to simply buy SPY every month using a direct access broker with low commissions. But it still stuns me, just how much the fund managers SUCK What the hell do they spend doing all day long with their time? I hope it's not analyzing the markets, because that is obviously NOT working for them peace axeman
20 cents, I would think: Probably Harry's using Arcsine distribution (maybe Harry should re-post the Arcsine curve here again for our reference) to depict the distribution of all-traders' performance/wealth would be about right, just this time , and insightful as well . PS: Perhaps a normal distribution would be still applicable to the number/% of total traders (of whom the performance can be dicpicted by the arcsine distribution).
for my taste, your longer post in this thread is by far the best and most honest one. I 100% agree with you. Saying that 90% fail is a quite low figure in my opinion. But there are hundreds of users who would say that figure is closer to 70% and that a bit of learning and observing the markets suffices to make money. And others say that markets are inefficient and that one can make money by trading the imbalances. Seems to me there are lots of dreamers and people with wishful thinking. But......come on, its Christmas time, everyone should have some wishes ;-) Just hope that people sober up soon before losing it all and writing another check to their broker, and another one, and another one, and....................
There are some sure winners: the "Casino" 's owners, guess who they are in stock market : those who have an infinite amount of money compared to other players (especially when they are friends with those who have the power to create this money at the expense of public purse through debts, that's what happened in 1929, that's what is happening today, such things will be "discovered" one day when too late of course)... that's what my model takes into account: It is the so-called Big Money that drives the market for their own profits, it's so funny that people believe that it is them haha ! All the founders of TA said it contrary to the gurus of "modern" TA with the quants school. So throw all these gurus and rather read those who knew at the origin of birth of Wall Street. Then if one understands that it is a step towards getting a true edge. Without edge you can only count on chance and money management won't change anything about that edge although yes it can help you put this chance on your side but if you continue to count only on it you will get bad surprise - I've said I will make a thread about so called antimartingale rule which is a misleading name because it is still a martingale rule mathematically; once again I will have to talk about persistency's law but also about an other law.
It seems to me that a person with a superior intellect and emotional control can outperform the market... If there is luck in being a winner, it is that you were born a winner! The good news is that you do not know that until your life passes That's why in trading you don't bet on the market - you bet on yourself. I don't think that success in trading has anything to do with the market or its efficiency because actually the money you make comes from the pockets of the traders who bet that they are smarter than you, but they are wrong... This may be a little bit twisted, but I also think that some people get more money and success not because they are lucky but because they are simply more valuable to the others because of their talents. Market speculation is no different. And one last thing - even though the future cannot be "predicted" some people "predict" the future better than others and take their money accordingly. This is because the future course of events can be extracted from the available information and a proper analysis. The better the information and the deeper the analysis - the more precise the prognosis. Now don't sell me this crap about how efficient the market is, how well the information is distributed and how everybody is making the same correct conclusions. They don't. Even the toss of a coin is not purely random and you can predict the outcome if you have all the relevant data. Case study: When you go to a supermarket you notice that every queue is evenly long. You can't see a shorter queue and take advantage of it. But you see that there are a couple of cash desks with no cashiers... There are no people there... yet. Now there are three independent persons, waiting on the near-by queues. One of them hears on the loudspeakers that they call a cashier to come to the empty cash desk. The other comes to the supermarket often and has remembered the faces of the cashiers and just sees one of them approaching the empty cash-desk. The third one, notices that two other persons (guess who?) are moving out of their queues and heading for the empty cash desk. Within seconds the three persons are first on the empty cash desk and after another few seconds a queue forms behind them which is as long as the others. The question is - were these three persons that appear first on the new queue lucky to be there or were they smarter, faster and more decisive then the rest of the people waiting in the supermarket...?
Excellent replies...why not look at success rates in all entrepreneurial businesses...in comparison to that of the short term traders category? What is the average duration of restaurants..technology firms...retail shoe businesses...etc...etc.. Are not 90 percent of the jobs in the US created by a bunch of Americanized Cowboys that enjoy the quest of freedom....whose businesses probably will not be in existence in 5 years? If it were easy...would you really want it ....? Also...there are very few managers...manager styles...indexing...how many are on top year to year...how many are positive year to year...? Trading is one of the closest endeavors for singular entrepreneurism...and being in that wonderful chase for freedom and the quest for wealth...which has been enabled worldwide by the internet.... The Elite Trader is a great gathering spot ...for the brethren of the short term trading business...which attracts those who want to be in THE BIG CHASE.....
Johnny Carson once told the reporters that his long and successful career was mostly a result of luck. "But when the opportunity comes, you have to be ready." he added.