False analogy fallacy. Trading the markets is not the same as playing roulette. Roulette has a negative bias of 1 or 2 numbers ( 0 and 00) that works against you. This is not the same as commission. There is a probability theorem that "there is no system to beat the roulette". I am telling you probability theory is wrongly applied in this case. I have beaten the roulette several times but each and every time the casino people realized what I was doing and using various tricks stopped me. There is no perfectly random system in the world. Every physical system has a slight bias due to its construction and dynamic state. If you can figure it, it is your edge. It takes a lot of work. Do not think that by having the edge figured out you cna make money easily by sitting in front of a roulette. No, it takes a lot of effort. Same with the markets. All market at specific periods of time may experience certain forces. If you can figure out the dynamics, you can estimate a filter to use as an edge. It is very difficult but it can be done. Few do it because it takes a lot of effort and knowledge. 99.9% of people cannot figure out edges because they cannot think outside the box.
I acknowledge that every system has some bias, some non-randomness to it, including a roulette wheel or a dice. But how do you find that bias? You need a huge amount of observations to determine a bias and rule out random results. And yet after so many observations the system may change, or the edge will be infinitely small or if it is big - it will quickly attract competition and disappear. The market, because of its reflexive nature, is a much more complex system than existing physical systems, which makes it impossible for a human being to understand and take advantage of.
No, that is why people invented statistics. There is no just one edge. There is multiplicity of edges applying to different situations. Too strong of a statement, in the dognatic side. The market is no different than any other complex physical system. People that complain they do not understand it do so because they do not have the knowledge required to study it. The same peole I assume won't be able to understand how an airplane flies,why a rocket lifts off the ground and, my favorite one, why astronauts float in space. I propose something to you. Take a little survey. Go out in the street tomorrow and ask 100 people why they think astronauts float in space. I bet you that 90% of them will respond that they do so becaue there is no gravity in space, which is wrong of course. Even worse, maybe 1 or 2 will be able to explain why. Guess what, it is the same percentage of people that fail trading. It is people that try to deal with subjects that require a lot of specialized knowledge using just their ego as their only tool. They still live a medevial style of life. They believe in final causes and other supernatural things. One of them is that they can trade without having any knowledge of what trading is.
I wish it was as simple as classical mechanics When I say impossible to understand, I am talking about complex adaptive systems - things that change as you analyze them. For example, answer a simple question - what will be my reply to your next post ? You may have all the brain and computing power in the world, but it will be impossible for you to solve that problem, unless you are able to simulate the functions of the billions of neurons in my brain as well as every stimulus in my environment
Did a quick google search... astronauts don't actually float in space... they do have gravity in space... and are falling
Sorry... but I couldn't disagree with this post more. Say I had 100k sitting around... which most people don't. If I didn't know what I was doing, some good trader (maybe yourself) will come and take all my money away. I might blow the account all at once... or maybe little by little. There was another post about Jesse Livermore... this guy started out at bucket shops. He made it pretty big... with many ups and downs in his life. Not sure it's true... but heard he committed suicide. You should really ask yourself if you're willing to keep failing... and get keep going.
Do we really need another one of these "why traders fail" threads?.. there are a million of these already. Whats funny is how popular they are each and every time.
The high failure rate of individual traders is not because they become overwhelmed by news and data such that they cannot keep up with it all. However this factor might be one that adds to the confusion of some or a few. The high failure rate is because it is simply beyond most new traders to become successful or in particular to make themselves rich. The popularity of this thread and the many others on the failure of traders is simply because new traders or traders who haven't made sufficient progress want to know why traders fail just as they want to know how to succeed. They want to, if they can, reduce or end their flaws just as they want to, if they can, add more aspects that might make them successful.
The three moves are dominant, non dominant and dominant. Then at that time the market returnes asymptotically to the prior situation to the news. In the days of telephoning to do trades, this order of events was played largely using odd harmonics. Someone envisioned that period and said "you dialed all the numbers but one". that was true. Today those To trade news you use he timing from a place like briefing.com. I draw a vertical heliotrope line @ that time. I also have significant news calibrated by using my experience of manny many ears (a couple of generations.) A standard was a "Greenspan"of 150 points on the DJXX. During the telephone era doing a dominant 300 poioints, then a non dom 300 points and finally a dominant 300 points on the big contract was the way it was. today, elsewhere, a peron learning with critical thinking orientation is going through the process of discovery about how the order of events plays out. She took a trade and held it throeugh the dominant. she kept holding until it retraced 50% of her potential profits of the move (the net ws 7dollars a contract). She exited and waited. Then at the end of the retrace she reentered and netted 162 dollars. She trades from a vertical orientation instead of a horizontal orientation. he took two dominat trades and made money trading in the dominant direction. she gave up profits by holdinf after the dominant endied and and went halfway through the non dominant (50% back from the end of the dominant). What does it take to break a habit? A lot. More than it takes to get into that habit. Here is a humorous habit to look at. a guy is posting in all the places I post averaging 1 post repeated seven times and one change of alias. When he starts he is doing a search then posting the same thing in each place I have posted over the lasy few days. The habit of others is to put each alias on ignore. ET bans each alieas and deletes some of his posts. The failure of traders comes from one thing. Neutrino points it out. Most traders cannot become clones of successful traders. To be a successful trader you have to acquire,by transfrence, the "inference" in the mind of a successful trader. Knowing how to do this depends upon being knowledgeable about how the mind works. then a person has to be knowledgeable about how learning takes place. For example if you can drive a car, you have been through the process of acquiring the mental "inference" for using your sneses to drive and constantly be successful in having the perception that affords being able to drive in real time. traderzones became the posterboy for not having trading inference. He posted his empty mind portions that prevent him from following the order of events ofthe market. A person has to have a horizontal orientation to follow the order of events. Most people learn failure by learning a vertical orientation. Driving a car involves a horizontal orientation. Reread this thread and use a steno pad to note each poster's orientation. mostly everyone is vertically oriented. This is habitual for most trader who are learning failure on the way to the exit in trading. notice also what happens when a potential trader runs into something he has no inference for. It is called fear and anxiety. read Talontrader to see fear and anxiety. Read the alias guy (T28 to see fear anxiety and ANGER. Read T666 to see ANGER, anxiety and failure. Below I am making a statement. read is over and voer and over until you get an aha. The order of events in a market is counterintuitive. Opposites do not prevail in analysis. The inductive routine used by the vertical people on your steno pad is called OODA. Look it up and find out why it fails in trading and leads to fear, anxiety and ANGER. The market does trends. Trends have three parts. Read this 50 times. dominant, non dominant and dominant are the three parts. The saimple names of these three parts in the oder in which they occur are: reversal. retrace and resumption. Associate thee names with the order of events: dominant is reversal nondominant is retrace dominant is resumption. dominant is reversal non dominat is retrace domminant is resumption. Above you see two trends that are opposites. Each has three parts. horizontal people can see the three parts. what is is like for the vertical people on the steno pad? they screw up all the time. Here is what they fail to see by the way they look and have no inference. they see three market happenings: dominant is reversal nondominant is retrace dominant is resumption. dominant is reversal non dominat is retrace domminant is resumption Anyone treating (psychological repair) these kinds of professionals has their work cut out for them. These vistims see noice and randomness. these people look for "edges" which are places where they think the market is out of balnce. These people think that edges are just temporary. The first recourse of learning traders is an inference that is definitely screwed up. So you asked the question of what happens with news. It is always the same thing. we worked over five years here to show people how to learn to trade using just one technique. we did drills in an order that allowed a person to build his mind to be able to have a fully differentiated inference that would be available as a first recourse. So it happened to many people over that period of time. Some OCD's also appeared. All dominant moves in their parallelogram containers move from right to left. All non dominat moves in the same parallel of gram container move from left to right. In the thrid and last move the trend fails. The trend fails because its RESUMPTION could NOT traverse the parallelogram. No one is going to learn anything from reading the facts of trading trends stated just above. A reader doesnot have the inference to understand the words even though I stuck to just CW words. Trading is NOT going to work out for any of the peope on the vertical side of the steno pad. These people ar just going through spending time and NOT building their "inference" correctly. the local beginners (now advanced beginners) in Tucson have passed the 50% increase in capital this month. This means their first year will be compounded to 500% this year. Four quarters of 50% is 500% a year. they are NOT vertically oriented. they are horizontally oriented. they do drills only as a way of trading. EVERYTHING THEY DO IS A PURPOSEFUL DRILL. So attached is a hand drawn chart they began with. It includes scoring, (See P, V and A/D three measures. See the shrot three moves on the left (R2R 2B 2R) and see the long on the right (B2B 2R 2B) Alo see the DU becoming FRV becoming peaking the three columns of the "Unusual Volume chart" which is used as a leading indicator of price for PVT trading. these people have been using four documents to get started. reading the documents is a nice pleasant thing so they do it over and over and over. each time they read them they are different in content. they know this is happening, too. Now they are beginning to teach others who have asked them if they will teach them. They know that as they teach, they will really begin to have differentiated minds with complete inference. What they expect most is to be asked questions by the learners. they have determined that a learner goes through asking a sequence of questions that prove he is learning. As anyone learns questions come into the picture. ET shows precisely how potential traders learn repeated failure on their ways to the exit. We put in five years plus here. The polls still show that 4 out of 5 reject what we talked about and demonstrated. that is never going to change. 80% reject this orientation and more people than 80% fail. the sample of people who use this paradigm are selvf selecting. This November, Traderzones is going to get to talk to a bunch while they are on break during their global get together. Will he get any inference? No, that is not how a person gets inference to be able to be fully differentiated for taking the offer of the market continually. As I mentioned about anyone can learn to trade successfully. I have met very few people who couldn't do the learning. The human mind is very capable of using the same ooperators invloved in driving a car to learn to trade successfully. going from point a to point B is done by building the mind. Making an ATS to simulate the mind is a very simple short process. Usually it is done by starting with a core and adding sheels to the core on about 5 or 6 levels. About 70 degrees of freedom are involved. Logic is what is used for the coding. The theme of the signals is an orthogonal set. the parametric measure is binary vectors. By reading this pargraph, you can see why neutrino didn't get it. The bar for getting into trading is as low as any in the world of work. somewhere between fifth grade and jjunior high (US) is about the formal training level required. I haven't met any fourth formers or better who couldn't do trading successfully as a class activity backed up with an S&P full brokerage service (before PC era).