You are right completely. That TraderZones troll posts a lot, he is not a trader, he works for a broker, he keeps posting and telling the forum that all traders are terminally ill patients and will eventually lose all their money and disappear. But he may be right about it. If he is right, all traders are doomed, right?
Some traders have their systems fully automated, which only requires monitoring , have a lot of free time.
Jose Cuervo hit the nail on the head when he observed: "Only the mediocre are always at their best" (With apologies to HLM!) LOL
jack hershey: I completely agree that traders will discuss their profitable strategies.. but not with random people. Professional traders will help other people get rich, but those are acquaintances... Contacts my friend. You think I can go to Goldman Sachs, and the guys there will be like "lets train you exaltedangel!! because we love to do that".. yea they'll do that with their kids, and kids friends, but not a random guy. I take it you've never been / worked on the New York stock exchange before. People know how to make money, but they won't tell the sheeple. Even then, if someone told you something, how would you know it made money? Knowing that 95% of traders lose within 5 years, isn't it better to DOUBT what people tell you about stocks rather then ACCEPT them as the ENTIRE truth? If traders are wrong 95% of the time, and the stategy has a stop loss of 5% on each trade, then your ROI on the strategy would have to be 2000% to get a 1:1 ratio of reward/risk.. a 3:1 of reward to ratio would demand a strategy to yield 6000%.. [ignoring nondiscretionary trading] And yes, if everyone does something it dies down. Look at the U.S economy. In essence, we blew up because everyone was overlevaraging. Look at dark pools 2 years ago.. before you could make millions.. now not anymore. Speaking of inefficiencies, if everybody jumps on an inefficient market strategy, the market is made in a way to make it efficient.. bam no more strategy. Point is, yes, theoretically some strategies only works for so long.. I know strategies used in the pits. that I can't say.. but that will die down too. When everything went electronic.. boy a lot of strategies were wiped out. The market was made more efficient. With dark pools, the old strategy of following market makers is impossible.. the markets more efficient. it will always be like this !!!!!!!!!!
Great post, Exact, and others who countered OP's ridiculous claim. I come here at nights and off times for comradship with others who are in the same game as I. As for sharing secrets I am usually subtle when it comes to the core of my business. To everyone who wins they have to do it at their discovery and their own perils. But I am also not treacherous to mislead. If I see dangers I will point them out, and consent if what I know is the right path.
Thank you for the follow up. I have been classed as an amateur all my life. But again, for a while, I did participate in and around NYC, etc. and money and information changed hands. In the era of white papers, I had four specialties: paper, textiles, pharma and machine tools. I liked the cyclic high beta world. So I was offered a position leading to a partnership within a specified time. (This grew out of the Greenwich cocktail circuit during the holidays). I chose to be a critic @ portal to portal, plus expenses (low three digits/hour early 60's) This was still sought afterwhen I moved fron Greenwich to Zurich. I associated with UBS beginning in 1966. I have yet to see a bonafide approach outlive its usefulness. Marginallity is the watchword of GS, etc.... Following has never been my custom and I endured many citations from the SEC for "insider trading". They were all withdrawn when it was determined no single individual could be in so many different and diverse people's pants over such a short period. (The SEC did not understand technical aspects of market trading for many reasons). My accounts simply looked like insider trading to the new computer monitoring of the SEC. Thus, even as an amateur I had contacts in NYC from the regulators. I played golf and skied with Bill Carey for many years since we had similar holiday home locations and memberships. Whe way to know if something told to me would make money, would be to simply slot it into the spectrum of money making ways and test its receptivity to improvement by adding the next step of improvement found immediately to the right of the given performance level. The spectrum is generically measured by multiples of the ATR of the market traded. Most stuff is bunched on the left side and well below 1 ATR. The scale on the right ends above 7 ATR. The stop loss factor is not an aspect with durable, deductively determined robust methods. The Black Swan stuff only applies to inductive methods (see Black Scholes, et al). I thought about that NYC stuff for a while. Living in Greenwich with summers free and sailing rampant, I basically just settled for racing during the summer. This precluded hopping the train to NYC unless I were attending an institutional investor's type luncheon which I was simply paid to do to size up things and write out Q's to be anwered. There was never a moment that I wasn't "protected" by those who paid me....LOL.. What a place NYC is. I was the guy wearing the Deauville diagonal pin stripes....LOL Working long hours in the finacial industry would be termed "spinning your wheels". Look up the DU list on TN. Print VIT on a 30 minute chart. Notice it came off DU and had an IAS average of 4 days hold. See that red bar beginng the fourth day? There is a one pager (Unusual Volume)that anyone can use to do 60 turns @ 10% each year. Punch up a list with one click. Set the trades for the week ahead. "Putting the Pieces Together" shows this in 77 pages with frequent snagits (30) for the next day. Anyone can do this anywhere in the world. It takes very little time in the evenings and one button pushing brief period during RTH's daily. In NYC raising 1.1 to the 60th power is simply not heard of. Doubling 7 or 8 times a year is not what they talk about at GS. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256........ Lets say you are not random. Maybe someone will put up an IAS sheet for you. Maybe they will give you the one pager. Maybe they will give you the 77 page illustrated .pdf. So you get it and use it and pass it on to others once your mind gets differentiated. Maybe it won't happen and you will stay where you are. 4 out of 5 people pass. Others do not pass. It is fun to watch a person become a millionaire. I've seen it happen for four generations. It is a lark.....
One thing I was a bit confused about is this "Look up the DU list on TN. Print VIT on a 30 minute chart. Notice it came off DU and had an IAS average of 4 days hold. See that red bar beginng the fourth day? There is a one pager (Unusual Volume)that anyone can use to do 60 turns @ 10% each year. Punch up a list with one click. Set the trades for the week ahead. "Putting the Pieces Together" shows this in 77 pages with frequent snagits (30) for the next day. Anyone can do this anywhere in the world. It takes very little time in the evenings and one button pushing brief period during RTH's daily" ... I'm definetely spinning my wheels, but my boss has been to NYSE and boy do some of the bankers take it easy. There's a movie room in some of the investment banks in Wallstreet, where some people go there everyday to watch movies.. LOL.. I've also heard of them throwing paper planes around shortly after the open.. Other than than, some of them take 3 hour lunch breaks.. your right..some are relaxed and do have a lot of time [apparently].. and a lot of money because I see it all the time.. They throw their money when hedge funds place orders on wrong inefficient electronic communication networks.. of which it's possible to take this money away from them.. I hope one day to get that '.pdf' or 'phone call' Who doesn't! I mean goldman sachs.. jeez.. who knows what they are using but boy they're making a killing !!!!!!!! Have any idea? Thank you Jack, others and myself can definetely learn a lot from you [now, and in the future].