To whom it may concern, allow me to introduce myself. While I do not know everything there is about trading and have embarrassed myself at times to get to where I am in my career, I have in depth knowledge about the markets that I am willing to share for free as a way to help traders find themselves. I will answer any and everything I can, I will admit when I don't know something but the only thing I cannot do is reveal the IP that I am using which has allowed me to become a profitable trader. If anyone wants to know my view on the market, for example, I will happily say if I think you should be long or short etc... If anyone wants an opinion on a strategy, I am happy to discuss as well. Other professionals who can add value to the mass of traders seeking guidance, please feel free to add to the thread. In terms of my background I worked on a premier bank dealing desk, two multi-billion dollar funds as a junior pm and senior pm, and currently in the process of launching my own fund. why am I doing this? bc I believe in helping people, genuinely. if I find that the thread has helped someone, I will continue to run the advice, indefinitely. requirements -respect and honesty by all contributors. I will only help the posters who come across nice and are not a-holes.
for small size, you are better off going cfd if you have access to them. If not, you need to first establish what your risk thresholds are, then just do a cross asset analysis on product tick value and volatility for that given product and match that up with your own risk parameters. questions like this which is pretty much common sense, I will not respond to in the future.
Do people have a chance of making consistent profits with just charts alone? (price action/TA etc) Or do we require access to much more prescient information.
Yes you can, but you have to know how professionals trade, and probably you cant becouse of limited accounts
personally, I believe yes you can....but only if you get your TA to a point where you can execute it with a rule based approached.....achieving that is very difficult however. as I was explaining to someone in PM the other day: the reason i mention john murphy, technical analysis of the financial markets is bc of the beginning of the book goes into dow theory and general market behaviour - however, you can get this info anywhere..... these are things you may know already but, imho, the markets behave the same way they did 100 years ago. All these people who say mkts have changed are full of shit. the only thing that has changed is how we execute. The model I use looks to capture one thing, price action linearity over different time frames. This is what most models try to do. For example, if you take a channel index over a certain period, think of the channel index technical analysis indictor as a mathematical slope for that given time series you are referencing....but the bias is to go into the direction of that slope. My model that i use is just a different technique to quantify and execute a channel index as I measure my stop parameters using daily ranges as an input value..... All these fancy cta's or quants who create models are just doing the same thing but in different ways. so how do i wrap up that advice: if you are flat price trading, it is good to take a market view but we live and die trying to predict the market. to be an active trader, do not have paralysis by analysis, come up with a risk defined methodology that you can execute like a monkey. Once you do that, you will see that trading is much easier than what we all think. My suggestion, start off drawing channel index on any market across various time frames....ask yourself what you see in terms of patterns, and ask yourself, what is the best entry given the slopeness of the channel index. Generally speaking you want to get into the bottom or top of the range of that time series. Then wrap aroud some risk management around it.
ballsofgold, Knowing what you know, if you were starting out with a $50,000 trading stake, living expenses taken care of, with respect to instrument and trade duration what type of strategy (or strategies) would you adopt? Good wholesome thread, thanks.
THAT IS a chicken or the egg question do u find the market you want to trade or the strategy? given what I wrote above about channel indexes, which is the major technical indicator I use to pick tops and bottoms when I look at things on a discretionary basis, I would find the market that has a price behaviour that fits this approach - whether flat price, relative value or cal spreads. I don't have a market bias. I care about price action, and how I can risk manage it...I look for some form of price linearity.