Notice my initial post didn't state that joining a firm was the ONLY way to become a professional consistently profitable trader. I merely offered my opinion as to what I believe represented the best chance of success based on my experience. If you think new traders will do better by losing 'real money' trading in their pants at home then fine. The way you wrote you post implies you don't think people who trade at prop trade 'real money' or a 'real market'. Anyway enough of this, I think you are just trolling, I am off my 'real' positions in my prop account, in the real market lol wtf
The bottom line is you can drastically shorten the learning curve if you align yourself with other successful traders. It does not matter if they are prop or at home. But if your personality type is one where you have to around people then that stacks the odds further against you as trading is a lonely profession and if you aren't wired for that type of environment then you will struggle with the isolation. That is why ET is so popular since it acts as a way to escape the isolation and drag you back out of the numbers word into reality.
Smart PhD's like Al Brooks dumb down mathematical compulsion to the simplicity of ... requiring TWO reasons for taking a trade.
Other than calculating what percentage of your TLNW you could lose on a given trade, there is no math required in trading. Trading is about controlling risk.
there is some math , but as I indicated, it's just calculation of what you could lose. Everything else is unnecessary and TMI.
And finding edge. I implemented strict risk control and sizing in the past, and slowly lost money until I learned how market mechanics work
Any body having finished their primary school have all the math it takes to trade profitably. Like in "if my stop is 20 ticks away and I am trading 2 lots, what do I stand to lose if the market goes against my position, given that a tick=10 ?" Can you do this math? Then you just passed the math exam for pro traders, congrats! Lol! (My) problems in trading are elsewhere: impatience, greed, fear, revenge trading. Don't buy into the math-stat-computer bs, at least until they tell you how they compute the feelings and the egos. This is what killed LTCM.