Tips are welcome! I've been trying my hand at trading equities this week and have been getting my arse handed to me! Been trying to implement lots of ideas given to me, but none seem to be working. (Mainly patterns based on gaps, and also trying to trade stocks that are stronger/weaker relative to the market) Luckily I have my ES trading which has more than been making up for the losses
I posted ten sessions' worth of blotters in the P&L thread that show profitable results. The approach I use to take money out of the market was developed and has evolved over the past six years or so. And that was after my first several years of trading where first I had to learn how markets work AND how human emotions work in that process. Said approach consists of several intertwined but simple components. It takes all of the moving parts combined to create the simple edge. But to use the term "easy" would be wrong. I was able to pull $6,000+ net after costs from the Russell 2000 futures using no more than two contracts per entry, no more than -$200 risk on a stop per trade. I'd say that ain't too bad for sitting at home, on a computer, working on my own with no commute, no employer or employees, etc. To reach this place in life took all those years of trial, error, losses and setbacks along the way. I have logged tens of thousands chart research hours from real-time and off-time combined. Without all of that extensive experience and exhaustive research to create what I have from scratch on my own, I'd still be nowhere at all.
Most aspiring traders aren't willing to work for years and years in research & development to build a functional approach that works. Matter of fact, most aspiring traders who glean free information and/or purchase information from others who prove it successful aren't willing to invest the time involved with learning their own individual curve for success. Which for everyone using anything known to man is a curve of months if not years in length to navigate. If it wasn't this difficult to accomplish, the opportunity to pull $600 or $6,000 or $60,000 in two weeks from whatever chosen symbol would not exist. If indeed there was an "easy" approach that anyone with a smattering of desire could quickly exploit, nothing at all could exist for anyone.
I posted that string of profitable results here for a reason. Next week I'll post more, and the following week continued, and I'll keep posting such profitable results from trading at home until I lose interest. One of many such points to make? Most aspiring traders are not willing to invest in themselves what it really, truly takes to succeed. You need a real, defined methodical edge that works over time. Whether you spend years of your life putting that together or whether you expedite the process by paying someone for such, you still have a lot of personal work to do. Anyone can assemble a defined edge approach like I have, like I used to take money away from less skilled traders' accounts and transfer it all to my own. But it'll take years of trial & error and losses and setbacks and more trials until the parts are all in place. So yes a lot of simple edges exist out there for traders like me and anyone else here to exploit. But no they don't fall into your lap for free, and no it's not easy to go out and start making consistent money day one without a lot of personal effort and time invested in yourself from the start point of procuring a real, proven successful method, then onwards.
If you're compounding your profits, you should be a millionaire by now, as you've been talking about this stuff for years now. Remind me again. Did you make it on any of the Combines with TST that you attempted? Nothing personal, but I've seen you many times talk about your edge and 'how the market will tell you in advance where it will go', but I don't get the impression that you're raking in cash. Are you? Thanks.
I second this post! Surprise's commentary demonstrates only that he hasn't discovered the powerful edge retail traders can exploit in both calm and volatile markets using the technical analysis of price action combined with the trader's mindset described in Mark Douglas' 5 Fundamental Truths of Trading and 7 Principles of Consistency.
I did not pass any combines with ZS/CL or CL attempts. Probably for the same reasons nobody inside the now-dead CL Thread here ever did, either. As for markets telling where they'll go in advance on a statistical basis, they do. But each and every price move is not predictable on its own. Recent example? CL projected to 100.20+ zone yesterday hours before it ever made it there... and price was still near 99.20s at the time. But the movement from there to eventual target reached was so raggedly chopped, it was impossible to stay in that trade and hold stops. You are verbalizing the same mentality most traders have. When you scoff at the idea markets can measure and project where price will go way more often than not... it means more often that not over a series of similar sequences. Yesterday's CL move predicted to 100.20 while at 99.20s meant nothing to that specific, singular event. Could as easily have plunged to 97 by day's end. The same ten or twenty or fifty sequences? Most would go from 99.20 to 100.20 as the market predicted. But some of them would do so in such erratic fashion, you cannot aptly manage that trade. You see, these are the things that take years and years to figure out. There is one helluva lot more to trading than take this pullback here, and my gut feeling tells me to enter that trade over there.
As for "raking in cash"? The VIX is in low teens and has been pinned there for a long time now. Nobody is raking in huge cash, anywhere. Go ask the guys here with skills to book multi-million $$ annual profits like many of them did before. Are they "raking in cash" today relative to then? No... because the market volatility doesn't permit that right now. On the other hand, there are my real-time, real money blotters from two weeks of essentially chopped-up price action more days than not. Go add those results all up, and tell me what you arrive at. If that is a net profitable finish, it's been said that 90+% of all traders across the spectrum lost money. Where then does that place my performance posted there? Next week, same results. Following week, same results. Only a matter of time.
FWIW I do believe that the back test boys (and girls) can make money. And I started the thread to poke fun at them. Some interesting posts in the thread you linked. One from intradaybill. -ras72