I remember hearing quite frequently about big firms announcing downgrades on stocks, but immediately starting accumulating positions on the dip and upgrades to distribute shares...this was over 10 years ago. This isn't the case anymore?
This is now nicknamed "The Conspiracy Theorist Thread". There is a lot of misinformation being disseminated here. The fact remains that pro traders are not receiving their news before you do. ===And even if they were , it really doesn't matter. You don't need news feeds to be wildy successful and that's the larger point here. Too much focus is being directed on "poor me".
Back to the original question from the OP. I stand with my earlier statement.------- "Initially no. You will lose money and perhaps a lot of it, but this is tuition and if you work on controlling risk and reap full benefits, you will eventually be a very successful trader."
I don't think anybody is saying "poor me", I think we just want to make sure we're aware of the "games" being played in the markets...that's all. I think comagnum, sle, surfer, and myself are doing just fine.
Find the one commodity that you can grasp some of the fundamentals of. Then research that commodity and gets basic understanding of what drives that market. Read the logical trader by mark fisher and use that knowledge along with your fundamental knowledge to trade that market
I think Surf is actually right that institutional traders, in this context, have the advantage of better information. With commodity futures, the information provided by their highly qualified and experienced research analysts is something not fully available to independent/retail traders, and individual commodities are more news/information-driven than many tradable instruments. To an experienced industrial economist, that may not be so significant, but they're a small minority of traders. That's not necessarily to say that you can't make a living without it, though: undeniably there are some independents making their full-time livings from trading commodity futures. (And equally undeniably, some of them are ex-institutional traders.) I do trade CL a little, but for myself, I find index futures (and even some currency futures) generally quite a bit easier and more approachable to the an independent trader - and I wouldn't be at all surprised if many others feel the same way. That's probably true, but was there ever a thread here (of this kind of length) of which that wasn't so? Casting no aspersions, but when I see forum threads like the first 15 pages of this one, I can't help wondering what proportion of the respondants are actually retail-trading commodity futures on a daily basis.