By your answer we look at the markets and trading different. There is a first for everything! first time i have ever read or heard someone not understand what an edge is. When you get one you will understand it better
A lot of the time I trade based on discretionarily trying to interpret the order flow and because of my experiencing and good risk management, it works, definitely no silver bullet, and I find it analogous to the way you claim to use common sense and critical thinking. However, sometimes - rarely, but sometimes - I see a raw pure edge, some stupid free money left on the table where I am the only person understanding the way the algos in a stock interact and can trade with really, really high accuracy... not being right 40% of the time and holding for 2:1, being right 90%+ of the time with 1:1, where if I posted on elite what I was doing that would die down. One problem I've found, is when I get that real real edge, and it lasts a few weeks or a month, I tend to give back way too much of the money I made trying to re-learn to trade the old fashioned way - without an edge - with critical thinking. Perhaps you have never experienced an edge in the form I described very vaguely above, but I suspect Szeven has something stupid like that... like he noticed that in stock XYZ whenever some program that shows 700 on BOOK ECN refreshing, but flashes pulling (i.e. you don't see the quote for a brief second but it comes right back, long enough to get the twitch scalpres out) with a certain unique time-signature, the program gets filled on shares, pulls for 3 minutes, then jumps back in on the the bid 10 cents higher than before... so if he notices that, he buys the shares after the program leaves, probably a ridiculous amount, all he can below 10 cents from where the bid was t he first time, where he doesn't really have a safe out, but he's relying on that program coming in, and because he has an edge, it does, and he can sell all he bought at a profit, and he only loses when the program comes back in but gets immediately filled by a seller, or when natural market activity pushes the stock against him to a point where he can't manage it. I have no idea what the fuck he does, I'm just speculating out of my asshole, but it does seem like a reasonable explanation for such consistent P/L
If you pay me enough, I will teach you how to be profitable in ONE year. Trading is not that fucking difficult, every fucking idiot treats it as a myth. Trading is not rocket science, OK?
Unless you're dyslexic, the OP's point is centered around a trader that in 3 years was able to hit 1 million P&L for that year (2007). Unless you did as well as Szeven did in such a short amount of time, I'm pretty sure the OP doesn't give a flying fuck what you have to offer.
thanks for responding Szeven.........there maybe better traders on ET.......but you're the only guy that posted blotters from day 1...........and i don't think any of the other guys hit the ground running from day 1 like you did can you breifly discribe mnx's strategy for millenium ATS arbitrage....now that it is widely known and it no longer works (assuming) i wonder if mnx has any regrets about disclosing his edge...... i think he has admitted that after too many guys started trading it, it (the edge) weakened and then it dissappeared............but that's the case with all arb. stratagies
I love it when you make it sound simple...really i do...gives a dumb little Cuban like me hope...peace
I heard that he credit trades google, you should try it, free money. One tip though keep your stops tight its gonna take a lot of credits to make up for a dollar loser, i learned this the hard way.
Maybe i can start selling T-Shirts and get a Facebook group, start to really capitalize off my handful of fans. There might even be a free T Shirt in it for you EricP! lol... Miln Arb when i did it consisted of sending a bunch of 'test orders' to the miln ats on the bid and the offer. When an order was filled, you would go to that stock, and see that the miln ats would be, say, buying the offer. So you would buy the offer and flip it out to the next offer. Then buy the next offer and flip out to the next offer. After a while we started getting better, buy a lot, drive the price up, keep testing with 100 lot sells, buy more till you found the edge of its range, sell all to miln ats buying the offer, flip short, wait for price to retrace, rinse repeat. It was retardedly easy. After a while they would no longer buy the offer, they would just buy the bid, or half the spread. This was more difficult to find as you had to keep losing the spread testing with mkt orders. It also sucked when you were loaded long and the order stopped buying. There were some spectacular gains and losses from a lot of people in a short amount of time. As for mnx, hes just a genius who saved swifttrade from turning into shit. when i started 1500 bucks could get you in the top couple traders company wide for any given day. When i left, 5k wouldnt get you in the top 5. Also when i started in may of 2005 a trader at my branch made 18k and got 9th or 10th in the entire company. When left, i think 9/10 people were over 100k in the top 10, and the top 3 or 4 were over 200k. He showed people that 1k a day wasnt the limit, just like Rearden Metal shows us that 20k a day isnt the limit. mnx continues to do very well to this day, cause hes a smart innovative guy that i owe a lot to. Without him working at swift and the entire company stealing his strategy, i might be working at mcdonalds! I guess thats the reason why companies shouldnt let traders look at riskware. I love reminiscing about the past. Theres been some crazy situations to make some crazy money. Of course in hindsight i would be a retired billionaire, so maybe i should stop posting on ET and spend more time researching the next big thing!
Those are serious numbers. Just curious, when those guys had a bad day, how much were they known to lose?
Im not really sure they had that many actual bad days, more likely just loss from top. Stop outs at swifttrade are designed to shut you down fairly quickly. I recall hearing of a few 10-30k down days, and several "I was up 20k and ended red 1k", but the success rate was so high on that strategy it was only once or twice a month. My worst day during this period was -6500 when i went a little crazy with pipeline on BNI. At the time this was devastating and seemingly career ending. But it wasnt, i had some great days too, but barely anything over 5k. I normally did the lower risk piggy back type style where i knew i could pull out 1-2k a day.