Backtesting is what got me over the hump. I found strategies 18 years ago that still work just as well today (adjusted for volume and volatility). I continue to test to verify everything I do. I can't know the outcome of any particular trade before I take it, but I can know the performance of my next hundred trades. Seventy percent of what I learned, I learned from backtesting. No optimizing. All stats. Pure math. I won't trade any methodology that doesn't have numbers to back it up.
Spoken from the mouth of a wannabe vendor. There is no such animal as a retail trading operation. Every person that puts on a trade is doing what the futures mkt expects from all of the participants, to partake in accepting the risk that the "others" are wanting to lay off to someone else. Win or lose, we are all speculators in the future price of "something" putting labels on the industry users is silly, simply silly...............we transfer money around, where and from whom it comes from is MOX-NIX. When i go to a KROGER and buy some groceries i am not asked if i got the money from another speculator or a bonified commercial hedging his/her business risks to maintain a profitable business. It all comes in and goes out without signatures from the lender.
I've been trading profitably for a for over 12yrs. At the beginning, was very lucky to have found a group that to be a member you had to prove consistency. Their mantra, one stock can make a living. Today I trade only GOOG(traded POT before the 3:1 slit). This last week it had swings of 10.56, 6.11, 5.52, 7.77, 7.12, 5.82, 5.49. Using weekly options and only buying ATM(when you get good try synthetic L/S's and your ROI will skyrocket), assume you can capture 50% of each swing and with your ATM option you'd net 50% of that. So 49pts X.50 X.50 = $12.25X100= $1225 per contract, and GOOG ATM contracts average $500 over the week. And, every turning point was a CCI divergence...it doesn't get easier than that
This is not a challenge nor a rebuttal to your excellent description above. However for any potential trader, your excellent advice becomes a confusing factor in terms of descriptive generalities. Perhaps, it would at least help me to understand and grasp the core of trading for a living better, if you would at the same time delineate just what you intend to mean in terms of emotive balance.... Just what do you intend to mean.... qualitative assessments lead to ruin.... Do you intend to say to other traders that crunching numbers, such as backtesting and such.... are much preferred over microscopic analyses of your daily trading outcomes....? And do you intend to mean that those long time established traders who can not or would not do quantitative analyses, are lacking of math skills? Would the traders' math proficiency level at Stats 101 be considered as suffice to trade? Or should they go on to complete Stats 810 at the doctoral level in order to trade successfully? To help readers, followers and other traders such as myself who is not too bright nor savy yet, to understand further, we would surely appreciate a little more specificities here and there.... which would be very much appreciated. Thanks much for your narrative opener which makes good sense in different areas.
Why does every one give the game away?If you do enough reading on E T , one discovers the snake oil team which encouraged us to give it all to the market.
Write a trading plan and follow it , go on sim with trading plan until it works consistently for 3 months
Oh really? So the at-home trader working from his/her wi-fi laptop and single charts is on equal ground to the prop-trader with $5 mil buying power and faster locate who is equal to the hedge fund desk trader with $50 mil buying power and faster locate still? We ain't all the same anything as traders... that babble could not be further from the truth. Like saying small college football players are the same league as major college who are equal to arena league who are equal to the NFL. Hey, they all toss a football around, right? Must be equal opportunity and potential for profit amonst them all. Anyone at home who fancies himself on perfectly equal ground to the insider pros with 1,000x the buying power and 100x speed of execution would be a big-ego donator to the markets.
no one alive ever encouraged anyone else to give their money to the markets. only inside ET and nowhere else on the web do struggling traders argue with and refute successful traders. you eschewed Dustin's advice and comments in dismissive fashion when the truth is that for years he's enjoyed the trading success you would die for... as would all the other bigpretenders in this board. Spout off less, listen more and further yourself towards where you want to be. Or rant away in a public flog where blind & deaf routinely lead the blinder and deafer. that's your choice... so choose wisely
If you read some bird cage liner I got in the mail this weekend we all should be making 7 figures within a year trading cl, but that has nothing to do with luring in stary eyed noobs to a vendor. BTW, I do not subscribe, they send me that trash.