darktrader, have you ever back tested a strategy? Or at least have you come up with strategies that at least appear to work when looking at the last 3 years of data? I may be mistaken but it seems to me you are reading books, then just diving into live trading without studying past charts and coming up with high probability set ups and exit rules.
Zenstudent - excellent post, one of the best I've ever read on any forum. Thanks for your directness, practicality, and obvious impartiality for those of us trying to get to the next level.
No trader that is doing day-trading needs to backtest, its just a complete waste of time. Backtesting is designed for investing and position trading and I don't believe there is a single trader here with an account large enough to position trade effectively... Most traders on here are trading off of either one or five minute charts.... ps position trades are done on fundamental analysis.....
Al Brooks is aka Nodoji. He is pretending to be a woman on ET, trying to sell his books. Anyone who can trade won't write books. Writing books is a sign that he fails as a trader. Nodoji, aka Al Brooks, posted "her" first posts several years ago on ET, claiming "she" had just started trading. But, but, but, "she" demonstrated a large trading vocabulary with all those fancy terms, such as support/resistance, moving averages, fibonacci, lamboginni, stochastics...... These terms are clearly a sign of many years of reading/trading/writing. Definitely not a sign of a newbie. That is something Nodoji has failed to offer an explanation for. She could, as a newbie, threw all kinds of trading terms at whatever scenario other mentioned. Isn't that strange? I hate book writers/scam artists. I glanced at the Table of Contents of one of Al Brooks books on Amazon.com, it is garbage, full of shit.
ssrrkk, basically i did what you said, and this is how I lost my money, actually half a of that money was wasted with bad investments in stock but my losses with daytrading affected my decisions with my long term investment. anyway I tried with a few, putting a lot of effort to program etc, but then abandoned as I had the first drawdowns, you know the classic jumping from one method to another, but it was testing sim live not backtesting, I backtested some stuff to understand what kind of exit is the best in general, trailing or not trailing, risk reward stuff, etc... anyway now I know that I have to give a strategy the time to really understand if it could work, but before starting to come up with new ideas I need to understand where to look for without wasting anymore time, I mean I have to learn something that is really usefull to build a methodology that could work, you know I can't spend 1 year on Al brooks if he is not for real, market profile make sense to me it seams something based on a logic premise, so I'm going to study this stuff, currenlty I'm reading Van Tharp anyway.
If he/she/they is/are not profitable, it is really not encouraging because if someone have spent so far so much time and efforts to learn to trade and still fail, really we have no chances....
The auctioning theory and profiling put up by MP gurus like Steidlmayer, James Dalton and etc is fascinating. However, it would take your months and years to absorb, just as difficult as the price actions by Al Brooks. More importantly, the application is the weakest link. I like JHM. Unfortunately, the minds of most people here are "fixed". Good luck.
Okay, I know you've already got 14 pages of replies, but I'm a big believer in psychology so I'll offer this up. With that much money I know it's not appealing to "begin small" and very tempting to put in more money. But here's the appeal to starting small. If you trade a small position size then the "position size" to "broker fees" ratio will put you at a disadvantage. It will take a larger percentage win to break even. This may sound counter-productive, but it's like Skywalker running with Yoda on his shoulders. It's harder, but it makes running without him seem easier. The smaller account holds you to a higher standard. If you trade a smaller account, you'll almost guarantee that you'll lose during your "training period," but, there's a 99.9% chance that would happen anyway. But because it's a small account, it kind of doesn't matter. If you can break even or win with this kind of disadvantage, then trading a larger account will actually be easy. Giving yourself the "advantage" of a larger account is tempting, but, really, who can break even, let alone win, with a $2000 account? Break even with that and you'll kill with with a million dollar account when you get there.