I have written over 200 trading strategy programs over the past 15 years. All of them have been profitable at certain times in certain markets. A few of them are still profitable. The trick is to choose which system to use and when. For example, I have been trading one of my systems since November, 2018. I'm up 31% (60% annualized). I tweeted all my trades BEFORE I made them in live trading. Still do. I back tested my system over the past 5 years. It worked. It's still working.
How can one convey his entire experience through words, books, presentations, etc.? Please show me one profession where an experienced professional industry person (any industry) could just replicate his/her experience and just hand it over? Only in trading, people want the entire "cut and paste" strategy while not appreciating that sometimes you can not hand over something called experience. No one is hiding anything. It's either they don't know OR don't know how to convey the most important elements of a thought process. Some educators are clueless who just know 1% more than their students and look smart to beginners. There are those who have good experience but not enough to make some successful, and there are those who are good at what they do, but these guys have at times a problem to teach in a simple manner. Your solution to trading is just following the trend? Great, put it in a course and sell. Your first email from your customer will be "Are we in a trend"? The second email "should I get in at X?" The third email will be a Paypal refund request for your course and an ET post that your approach is wrong. Like all else in life, nothing replaces hard work, dedication and making mistakes along the way that at times are very valuable for your long term experience.
You are very correct. In my case cause of an individual who in some way has proved to me in years and not days or months, having interaction with me, not daily or even weekly but upgraded my life in some ways outside of trading. I give them snippets cause I don't know if they will run with it or leave entirely. If after few years and I see they generally have been working hard to understand, I share much more to degrees of entire systems. Some have been invited for visits and come back or I visit them eventually trade with me for weeks side by side. They have become dear friends. People in general wants instant everything, and to be profitable you must have overall concepts seep into your brain, this can take years. I am not going to post my edges, for the one's who think they be able to understand, it will fly by them, they will try whatever three times and it will fail for them as they don't have a clue what I said. And the more experienced trader will add to what they have and I have to compete against them on my own methods? It be like Einstein telling how he spent his day in a new math he developed, you might think you can understand at least some of it, but 2+2 does not equal 4, and not until one has manually done a thousand occurrences will they start seeing the light or not. I think many should quit and start a different business. I have bought hundreds of books, some much better than others, thicker they are become door stopers or scraps for starting my fireplace, we are not examining the human body as in Grey's Anatomy. Books like under 150 pages usually have offered ideas for me to back test, but let's talk reality, do you think any book is going to give you a million buck system for $68.95? As I have aged, I think back of all the hours I have worked in learning more, I find it disrespectful of someone been trying for less than 3 years to think he is going to ask for help and I should be happy to hand out my years for ??? There is no amount of money anyone can offer that I would take, I can't be bought off. Almost everyday this forum, many give advise on what we see, you take pieces, backtest them, either keep or discard. But it still comes down to the same shit has worked for over hundred years, the difference of making adjustments is volatility, either stay away, increase protective stops, hedge when volatility increases. There are more vendors now than any times in history of trading the markets, most are vultures just waiting for snippets to go on youtube and make it as they discovered it for their students. Another huge reason to not share as much. How come people can not use "SEARCH" in upper right of screen? Go to pre-2009, I think much of the best was written back then.
Well said. My engineering education did not make me a successful engineer. No class I took gave me an engineering AHA moment. Why should it be any different in trading.
Only because you specifically mentioned Warrior Trading as an example of your contentions, and because the broker who he trades with and is well-respected here responded specifically regarding whether his stated PnLs are real: did you see the following recent post by Robert Morse in the "Is this real?" thread? (My own disclosure: Not an endorsement of WT, and I'm not a sub or affiliated with them in any way.) Also along those lines: I believe a lot of the systems that are taught are not entirely amenable to algo trading. They (and the traders who teach them) rely too much on contextual factors that would be extremely difficult to code... even more so if the coder himself only has two years of trading experience. (I have seen some of these teachers/trainers trying to develop algos for their systems, though -- which makes sense.) Removing the human side seems to be one of the benefits of algo trading... but also one of the challenges. Hard to match or beat the human brain when it comes to handling complexity, or modeling things like experience, intuition, etc. When it comes to developing overall bias, trade selection, or knowing when to break rules, many successful traders seem to rely a lot on subjective experience and decisions that can't easily be coded into an algo.
I had to chuckle a little reading the OP’s post. I dont mean to belittle but the premise of this thread is as such: “ I picked up a magazine and replied to every small ad in the back. They were all BS.” Dennis Gartman might have a bridge he would like to sell you. Naiveté can be cured but as you have found out it is expensive. Consider it your tuition. PS: trading is not a great business, just like gold prospecting. Best business model related to such is selling picks, shovels and prostitutes. Thus Tastytrade. Those guys know what they are doing, yet would rather put their money on the picks and shovels. (might i add ‘supertrader mary’ as the “prostitute”? I kid i kid)
Agree. Also, when I've asked various teachers why they'd want to share their edges, several have said that there's no particular proprietary "secret" to their particular edge (e.g., reading PA/patterns), they're not a "Holy Grail"... and that regardless, the vast majority of students will not even do everything they are instructed to do, but which are integral to having the edge play out properly ("you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink"). For example, I've heard a teacher of a well-known system often say how even though their system requires you to develop a written trading plan -- roughly 85% of the students will not do so. Of the remainder -- a very high percentage will develop a plan... but then won't follow it. And it's not like the few who do find success will pose any direct threat to the teacher (other than leaving and founding a competing trading/trading education service... which I've also seen a lot, lol). Where many services do go wrong, imo, is how they market themselves -- sounding as though they *are* teaching something proprietary, a Holy Grail, and that if you learn it you're virtually guaranteed to become a successful trader in say, 6 months to a year. But that's somewhat understandable, because not differentiating yourself, and being honest about about how hard trading is, don't sell.
The truth is that nobody will teach you the winning algorithms, neither in books nor in video courses. Who is winning doesn't want others to copy the same strategy because in most of the cases it won't work if tons of people do the same things. My suggestion is thinking out of the box, don't follow the approach everybody is doing. The most important thing is the backtest. It's 95% of the job. It must be super accurate. You have to consider everything, to be >97% the same like live trading. This means you have to consider ask/bid prices when you simulate trading, otherwise every result is fake. This was for me the biggest challenge and I had to create my own trading simulator to be that accurate. Everything I tried wasn't accurate enough and lead you to false expectation and then losing money. Once you have a simulator you can trust, it's just a matter of experimenting. Every idea, every intuition has to be tested in the long run. Doesn't matter testing for many years, some of the strategies won't work anyway in the future. Maybe they work for a couple of weeks, a couple of months of years. Algo-trading is a never-ending job on studying results and try something else. Every day after the live trading session, backtest that day and check that the backtest was 97% close to the real trading that day. This is the only way to be sure. This is fundamental. Also, your algorithm could make, let's say, 1% a day as average if you trade with $50K, but once you try to scale up with $500K it couldn't work in the same way for a lot of reasons. Try, test, try and test. Never give up. Until you have found something reliable in terms of profit with different market trends, trade with paper money. Then start with little money (like 200$), and raise the money up if it's working. Don't be eager to gain money thinking you're losing opportunities. The market is always there, but you need to don't be broken if you want to continue. Somebody is making a lot of money, and tons of people are losing. Don't give up, but be smart and be patience on using real money until you're confident that it's working. At the end of the day, this is the greatest online game. You against thousands of people, every day. Not only people but large organizations with unlimited resources. It's not easy but it's doable. Good luck, Luca
As far as options, the only set up that worked for me is double ratio spreads which is a non directional play. You will have a chance to win in 3 out of 4 possible outcomes. The holy grail will be what to do with your threatened side. There are many adjustments that can be done but you have to come up with one that fits your needs. It will not make you rich as you are only collecting premium. It is as good as your adjustments are. A one losing trade can take down few months of gains which is true of any option strategy. This is when sizing of the trade matters too so you do not get wiped out.
This is your problem. You are trying to use the skils you learnt outside of trading to "resolve" trading as if it were a math problem. Before doing this - your first step should have been to validate if that was a sane approach. Your 2 years work was based on the assumption that trading is mathematical in nature right? Now - I know the results of trading can be expressed numerically. That means that the EFFECT of trading can be charted and mapped and analyzed to infinite degrees. Trouble is - no amount of analyzing effect will give you cause. Take this week - any basic model built on charts will have not taken into account the driver of volatility which was the China trade news. Your assumption that "price is always right" is 100% wrong. When big news hits a market - it can move up or down all day. It takes time for price to move from one place to another. The idea that price is always right (the efficient market hypothesis) flies in the face of sell-offs and other big news driven moves. Perhaps trading isn't a science. Perhaps it's a skill. If you try to fit trading to what you knew before trading - you will likely fail. Pilots, engineers are notorious for it.