I'm always on a lookout for live trading rooms led by "real" traders. I've been following Dan's YouTube channel for some time, after he was featured in Chat with Traders podcast twice. This is a deal I just couldn't pass up. He (day and swing) trades large cap tech stocks (as I do) using TA and options flow. https://ps60process.com/gto50078693 P.S. Mods, if you think this is a shameless plug, feel free to delete this thread.
He was trading with Schonfeld prop, which has many successful traders. He makes a living trading. He is not a rich dude that made his money elsewhere and now trades (gambles) for fun with fraction of his capital. Checks all my boxes. What is your requirement for someone to claim to be a trader?
I looked him up, he doesn’t say on his website that he was with schonfeld and that would be a huge selling point if he was. He was at a day trading prop firm and the guy he said was his mentor was similarly a day trader. https://accessatrader.com/identify-breakout/ He’s trading intraday momentum and doesn’t realize it. I don’t think he makes money from trading, I think he makes money from his courses. There are no legit traders selling courses because there’s no incentive for them to do so. If you have a strategy that makes money then you are going to try your damned best to keep it a secret, as the strategy itself will make a sh*t ton of money. A good real life example here is @taowave who found a unique arb and traded it until he no longer could. He may share how he did it once he’s retired or if the arb is gone, but the price to participate in that arb would be something more like a 2 and 20 and less like a 99/Mo subscription.
This topic has been discussed many times here already. IMHO, this really depends on what type of edge you have. No discretionary trader will loose their edge by teaching it to others. Just like Michael Jordan would not be afraid to teach other players - Talent and experience are not transferable. From what I understand, your edge is actually of this type. Some people have what I call “hard” edges. These can be easily replicated and therefore deteriorate easily. This is especially true for algorithmic trading. He does realize it. Momentum trading is a well documented method of trading, I don’t see anything wrong with it. It’s basically trading temporary order flow imbalances. Maybe it’s not respectable, but why is it not acceptable?
There are 3 primary types of edge: informational, analytical, and behavioral. All are trainable and transferable. Alpha erodes quickly. Trading momentum is totally fine he's just doing it wrong lol. You're a smart guy, here's a paper that was published nearly a decade ago looking at intraday momentum patterns. There are hundreds (maybe more) of researchers conducting this type of analysis on a daily basis and the insights they draw are what can create a real edge (if you test the data yourself and find it still stands).
You sound like a guy who doesn’t believe in day-trading. How can you state that someone is doing it “wrong?” One thing I like about day-trading is that it’s very easy to separate luck from skill, takes no longer than a month.
why i think he's doing it wrong is because intraday momentum is not the profit center for retail; liquidity provisioning is: Barrot_Kaniel_Sraer.pdf (berkeley.edu) therefore, retail traders could earn more as short-term contrarians than they would by chasing high frequency momentum (which does not really exist ex-delta in volume, which sadly is arbed out very quickly). However, the "signal" for liquidity provisioning needs to be based upon fund positioning and additional data, and not just "stock traded below EMA!" due to the poor hit rate (a signal must have a hit rate of greater than 50% to be useful, where the excess return > error or standard deviation). let's put it this way. I believe that: there's little to no evidence that retail trading strategies work and in fact they provide a big service as liquidity providers to the market (without getting compensated for it) 16_malinova_paper.pdf (ucsc.edu) there are thousands of professional traders and investors who are conducting rigorous analysis before using a strategy... retail does not do this which is to their disadvantage (source: the ps60 website) retail can compete with pros if they follow the same analytical approach and identify strategies that have limited capacity (say sub $50MM daily) as those would be avoided by professionals due to how their research models embed transaction costs (and slippage) retail signals based upon TA have very poor track records, retail could enhance their returns by using better signals (there are plenty of very profitable retail traders -- they are just not your typical "day trader")
I believe most of research papers are to earn degrees, not money. Look, if you don’t believe in this style of trading, I respect your opinion. For people who are interested in this style, it’s a way to get a risk free look and make their own decision. I am going through the videos, and I think it’s a steal for $97. Not because it “works”, but because there are concepts explained that all day traders should at least understand, imho.
yeah academic papers are usually 1-5 years after private traders figured something out... real traders are not publishing their findings in papers. so if someone publicly published something 10 years ago, what does that tell you about where pros are today?