[little duck] I did an edit on my initial post. Sorry I have a tendecy to post and then re-post. My bad.
Duck person, Thank you for posting all the additional information. My views stand for the same reasons previously stated. There is nothing personal or negative in my comment that I would not add you to the list of people I track. I am on a quest, sort of, to determine how to prevent failure and to find out the critical period a person goes through when his physiological status will not allow him to recover from repeated failure. You do not stand out in any way for me to consider you as you proceed. Neither negatively nor positively. Not many people like what I post and I am often riddiculed for my peculiar views. What I post is not usually a mainstream view it turns out. I am much more risk adverse than you are for example. Like you, I never took any formal financial courses. When I say a person such as yourself should make a multiple of his original stock investment capital before he goes into commodities, it is just a standard I feel is practical based upon my experience in seeing the results obtained by other practices and other people. Presently, you have no basis for comparing any advice or comments from anyone on mostly anything. My comments to you are also in this set so they do not count for much. There is no point for you to be alarmed by what I suggested. To become a good investor in stocks or to trade stocks or to trade commodities is something that emerges informally rather than formally, generally speaking. Background, training, etc,...do not count for much. The path a person follows does, however. It must be chosen well and time should not be wasted in making money not learning to make money. You feel that I "suddenly" posted...blah balh balh..... My posting in this or any thread is not a sudden effort on my part. I generally pick where I post based upon the value of the thread that is running. I have not started any threads for example. It did not appear suddenly, in my opinion. You understand that I posted to benefit myself and especially at your expense. Well, I'm sure many many others would agree with you. That is how it is in ET most of the time. My view is that there is something of value in each post that I make and, for sure, I post for a reason. I am particularly interested in unloading what I have learned over time and I do it at the time and place the particular topic is on the table. MY runon copy is just a set of comments based upon 50 years experience. It is possible to copy down (print) what I write and black out what you think is crap. Then you might hilite in yellow anything that you have never read before. To avoid using a lot of black ink , ignore me from now on. If you don't pick up the yellow hi-liter when reading my posts, then put me on ignore too. You can see by now, for most people, there isn't much reason to read what I write.
Grob. I understand you are of an older age and from a different generation as your method of communication suggests. I'm sure you have a lot of information on the trading business and you enjoy unloading your thoughts here on ET. Would it be possible for you to cut down on the length of your posts to a few high impact sentences, maybe even in bullet form? Just a thought. ozzzzzzz
i second that. i'm sure there are many here on ET desperately trying to understand him - but what in the world should they try to do so? i'm serious - how can Grob's language be learned?
I have read portions of this thread: Here are my comments: (1) We always used equities as the prerequisite for new traders prior to entering the futures markets ... in our experience it works well as a predictor. (2) I really dont know who this person / alias "Jack Hershey" is ... I find the rambling 1 page responses to simple questions nearly indecipherable. Better advice is to go to work for someone as a traders assistant and this way you will receive valuable training from a legitimate source. (3) The statement that "professional traders find it next to impossible to make money..." should be a clue: why would anyone want to trade a market where its next to impossible to make money ? ... not that I necessarily agree with the assessment but ... the best way to figure out how to make money is by getting some on the job training from someone that actually makes money .....
duck....emini trading takes your money....90% of time at least....are u smarter than everyone else in the world....if u r then quit now...u will lose your friend's money....if u are not and will be very careful and don't mind working like a trojan for a very long time , u might keep some of it....and if u r an anomaly, u might make money....
hmmm ... i dont dought that, but in equities you have to put up with the mm & specialists games .... surprise news, earnings, upgrades/downgrades ..plus a whole truck load of scanning and research if you want to have a change of making $$ ....its taking up all my time...all my time. I was thinking that with e-minis i could have some time freed up.
I think the most glaring difference between trading equities and futures is the fact that you can easily blow out your entire account with a SINGLE transaction. Perhaps a bit more difficult to accomplish with eminies and the vol of late, but for just about every other futures market that possibility exists each and every day. In equities, you might go on tilt for an afternoon but the damage will likely be comparatively limited; with futures you must bring your level of discipline to a much more stringent level, they just give you far more rope than you need to hang yourself with. Good luck.
lilduckling, just start trading the eminis, its a good learning experience. I'd rather learn from trading the eminis the true methology of TRADING instead of stocks where there are external bullshits such as market makers/stock upgrade downgrades/ etc.. In eMINIs, There is nothing but TRADING, high volume, low volume into resistance, large panic buying, large euphoria buying, how to spot them , No volume at highs, head fakes, fades, why there are fades. the TRUE essence of trading. Once you learn the ins and outs of trading, I Guarantee you, nothing can stand in your way when you trade for the longer term in stocks, you can spot them out from a mile away from tape reading/ volume and price. It'll take awhile, but I'm sure if you work hard at it, trade in 1 lots, keep stop losts to $50 or less per transaction (quite important), and have enough time and not give up (very important) you will take trading to the NEXT level. I believe you can do it! lets get going and get on the work bus. Thanks, any question feel free to ask.