Doesn't take a lot though. Don't need to be smart to trade successfully. Just need to have discipline.
Are you deliberately baiting me? It's not what I said. I said I learned how to trade, what does that mean to you? To me it means being decently profitable. Thread has been hijacked by B1S2 generic garbage. He posts his "rules" in every topic just like a broken record, whether it's off-topic or not.
I agree, Trading is forward-looking...you need vision and foresight and intuition, with a certain degree of logic and rationale behind it; ...I make this judgement call of where or how the market will move or behave...every morning before the market opens No amount of backtesting or looking or staring at past charts will make a difference in how I make this prediction for the day ahead
As patterns in the markets repeat themselves all the time, the easiest way to start is looking in the past to find these patterns. Only when you have found them you can start to trade. So backtesting is essential and far better than jumping in a trade and find out what will happen. On top of that it is less time consuming as you can backtest or analyze 1 month of data in minutes. Without backtesting but going life, one month of experience will take one month before you have it. In backtesting you can test dozens of different setups in a short time on the same data. You can even compare which setup is better as you use each time the same data. In realtime trading this is impossible as each setup will have other data as you trade in realtime. In all domaines research is based on past data, as future data is not yet available. Why would trading be an exception?
Nothing wrong with backtesting, but the problem is 98% of people won't learn how to backtest properly without "getting in and doing it"
This confirms that backtesting is not the problem, the trader is. If you have a hammer but use him wrong, what should you do then? Throw away the hammer? Or learn to use him correctly?