I can only answer about actual trades I took. Only they can show what I really "would have done". I don't have any trades this week, so I can't post anything.
Dude you obviously don't hang around the CBOT do you! There are successful traders in every corner. Just because You are giving up doesn't mean you have to write ultra negative posts discouraging other people!
The 'game' is multifaced, layered, geared into segments of size....no one is interested in you. Just don't get involved if you don't understand the whole picture.
I don't believe this... I was looking at some older threads and I stumbled on the thread "95% of traders fail???". And almost exactly five years ago this is what I wrote in that thread: I can't believe how overconfident and arrogant I have been Edit: I checked my performance at the time and guess what - I was up 75% for the year when I wrote that
I just wanted to put these quotes next to each other - they are fascinating. By the way I made money daytrading almost everyday for 5 years and now I don't really have an edge strong enough to trade full time. Markets are far from efficient. Nasdaq 100 had no earnings when it was at 5000 in 1999. Where is it today. How can that be efficient. My hypothesis The market "attempts" to efficiently allocate liquidity based on flawed relational models and aggregated beliefs. The oil market - that was all about hedge fund liquidity and their belief demand would be high enough to keep their piled in money safe. Nothing efficient about that. Hedge funds had too much money and were looking to hide it.
The spread is much higher, but while it may be 10 cents at a typical book, it's often 0-2 cents (0.5% to 1%) as a market, and the market is less competitive. Betting exchanges are okay but you'll only get the lowest spread by having using a good variety of books. I had thought about moving to the financial markets for a while and I have to say I wish I'd made the move earlier. I wouldn't say the advantage is easier profit, but the number of opportunities and ability to use much greater capital. Back to the topic, no market is perfectly efficient since price is created by humans and based on opinions. To assume the market is perfectly efficient is to assume it is always right. This is in an environment when the individual will often be wrong, so by chance alone the market will occasionally be wrong. Throw in emotion, ego, different goals and flawed thinking into the mix and it just becomes more of a mess. If the markets are so efficient, why the booms and busts? Why would price fluctuate so greatly day to day, month by month, and year by year? When we do understand the the markets are not efficient, it isn't a stretch to assume that many are taking advantage of that inefficiency.
To jem and Mr J : Efficient does not mean rational. You don't need to prove that markets are not rational - everyone knows that... but only in hindsight. It's easy to say that the dotcoms were ridiculously overpriced in 2000, but then they were overpriced in 1999,1998 and they could continue to be overpriced for many more years. Or as Keynes said - the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Same with oil - it did look like a bubble at any price above $100, but how can you know. We said the Chinese were buying. And when it broke the trend at $145 you could expect it to go to about $100 and find support there, but down to $40 ?!? And now its easy to say that hedgies were liquidating, but again you never know, may be there is some fundamental force at work and it will stay below $100 for a very long time. Efficient in the context of the Efficient Market Hypothesis means unpredictable - that you cannot exploit any irrational behaviour or its result - mispricing of certain securities or the whole market. At any trading time horizon you have millions of competitors and the price moves so that it hurts the maximum number of players in that timeframe. This shows up as drawdowns on your equity curve and day-to-day volatility, and if you keep those fluctuations close to the market fluctuations, you will receive a comparable return minus commission costs. That's what the EMH says. But I no longer agree with it and I wrote why in the other thread. Simply put, I cannot expect very high returns above the market, but at any rate that's the best I could do, because in every other business, although with much less competitors, there are correspondingly high barriers to entry.