I see you are now giving advice to beginners...like the markets, I guess your self imposed week or two hiatus from posting here in the forum was something you couldn't control either: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=9897&perpage=6&pagenumber=49 10-21-02 09:44 PM This is Jasper I will be back soon, but I need to stay away from ET for a week or two and clear my mind of a lot of the negativity that I see going through this board. There are a lot of great people who give great support, but just as many selfish assholes who really don't care about anyone else but themselves. Here is the current screenshot of Jasper. I'm going to work on it for the next week while paper-trading and injecting another $1k into my account. I'll be around for those who want updates on Jasper, etc -- just PM me or e-mail me. Thanks for all your support. I'm taking a little vacation from ET. Man, you are so full of it. YOU, call others selfish assholes? You think you are in a position to be giving advice to a new person? You are as narcisissistic as they come.
If there is one thing I have quickly learned by practicing to control my emotions in the market, it is to ignore the stupid comments made by people like you. My natural reaction is to get angry but then I have to stop and tell myself that I can't control stupid people -- I can only ignore them. Everything I said is sound advice -- if there is something you disagree with then you can reply to that. Otherwise, you're just making a personal attack on me and that's just something I should laugh over and not get angry about.
That is your problem, isn't it? You can't control your emotions. You can't control you anger, you can't control your overposting, you can't control your fear and your greed, you can't control your need for attention. You indulge in your emotions the way an addict indulges in his drug of choice. You have no discipline. Without discipline, you will fail as a trader. Stay away for a while and work on yourself, and stop trying to give advice to others. You need to look inside for a long time and find out what is wrong. Find your wound, and heal it. You need recovery man, not trading.
A couple of points: (1) If you can finish your degree do it: its a lot easier now than later and will help you down the road. If you cant do so and you are very committed to being a successful trader you can succeed but not having any type of credentials will be confining down the road ..... (2) Undercapitalization will prevent you from being successful. If you have no capital you need to get in with a firm that will let you trade their dollars and train you ... (3) Academics are likely to be of little help with trading or with developing useful and profitable mathematical tools or techniques. There are however some basic ideas that you should know and they can teach these but useful financial engineering techniques are rarely taught correctly or from a valuable perspective.
Novicetrader, I think you should seriously consider finishing off your studies before you go any further. An education will broaden your outlook on life and provide you with more options. I credit much of my success as a trader to the research skills I acquired whilst undertaking my BSc, MPHil and PhD studies in occupational psychology, at a leading research university here in England. These multiple degrees contained no financial information, but the research methodology and statistics element are in many ways central to my current trading approach. A further personal benefit is that that if I was uneducated it would be unlikely in my opinion, that I would be able to assimilate as much of the trading literature, and certainly not with a "critical eye". So obviously an education can assist immensely in both trading and non-trading areas of your life, if undertaken at a sufficiently high level. A lack of education wont stop you being a trader, but wouldnt you rather have a fertile, trained mind as opposed to am untrained one? Andrew
... Before I went to grad school I did think along these lines. Unfortunately, after studying at some of the worlds premier universities and with some very famous researchers my conclusion is that many - but not all - of these people had no special skills. Many of them were not inventive or insightful researchers and a lot of them had poor moral character. Some were indeed very talented and creative people: the majority were not. In my opinion you can develop a fertile and trained mind with some basic training and continued hard work: IMHO obtaining a PhD is not a necessary requirement for developing critical and creative thinking. In fact I believe that many researchers are biased: they do indeed have trained minds and thus they have a difficult time seeing the broader picture of connections outside of their core studies......
Particularly, aphexcoil a/k/a "aphie." Aphster, taking a break from that stressful experience know as "ET?" Sheeesh! What did you last 12 hours?