Hard work alone is not enough, in my losing developing years, I was putting in 100 hours a week for three years and that proved what I couldn't do right, I know many people who been at getting profitable for over 20 years and never get it. I been trading 30 years for a guy when he gets low, he starts the year with $25,000 and see how long he can keep it till it gets down to 5k and tells me to start trading it back, I bring it up to $31k so I can get my 20% and he all happy again, I have told him if he needs help, let me know, but he wants to do it alone. And no I don't want to trade for small accounts any more, lack of time for the effort. I have three different data feeds, guess what? They all different, many of services don't send a certain point of repeating prices, and those who do send all the data, some of it slows down cause transmission gets bogged down, can't win. The best you can do, have your platform on someone's server within a block of the exchange, perhaps then have T-1 going into your platform so as not to slow down internet going into home computers. People who make this statement live like sheep, just following the sheep long line of sheep. There are still many avenues untouched to be used in trading, just cause you have a closed mind to them does not change the fact that there are Holy Grails where there are 99% profitable trades and you keeping close mind, you won't work to increase knowledge. You are in your happy zone, and that is ok. I bet every decade people say the same thing cause other sheep have no clue on how to expand knowledge, I know traders who trade in 1950s told me trading would never change, and when old big blue, IBM, arrived 1960s with banks of computers to do simple moving averages, people saying "there is nothing new under the sun", the arrival of home computers in the 80s, so was that the same "nothing new under the sun"? 1980s Jim Simmons brought science into the markets, he averaged 35% and after 11 years an eye-popping 2478% cumulative, his hedge found had one third of the employees with Phd's. Late 90s HFTs started, and that certain has changed the game for most they say unless you learn to adapt. Dark pools, trading via cloud, servers rented out to general public has increased speed. And charting has changed as well, in the 90s I thought I knew well of all the patterns and 18 years later I have identified over 100 patterns never written in books, patterns within patterns, I use to decode languages long ago-have a gift of seeing what most can't see, yet shoes laces often untied, ROFLMAO and you following tradergod who can't program nor uses it to do any testing? like living in dinosaur age.
And in each of those examples they all basically used OHLCV plus range and volatility measurements. Like I said nothing new under the sun. People who delude themselves there is something new are the sheeple. Just like the tech wreck buyers led to the slaughter believing it was going to be different this time.
As far as I know, no computer can do inferential thinking at anywhere near the level of a human. There's still herd behavior, which when it turns lead to the best trades. Most recently there were historic levels of long Euro contracts held by specs going into April. Fear and greed, fear and greed. And fear of missing out. Next market crash the humans will be pulling the power cords to the black boxes once again.
The new urban myth seems to be there's lots of above average PhD's running around with above average computers taking all the money out of the markets.
I am not daytrading and tight time intervals is not priority. For retail traders it should have minimal effect. And if does, the strategy is to granular and mind bending. But each to their own...
In professional sports, one of the key factors in winning besides having better players is the ability to capitalize on mistakes made by the other team. Same in trading. The equity markets are full of mistakes, the ones in currencies can be epic.
Resist the urge to chase. When you see others doing the same and getting trapped, you'll see that there are some pretty juicy setups which come from this awareness. Be willing to miss moves. Some of my best trades come after i think it's gotten away from me and I shut down the platform for awhile. Truly strong moves come in waves.
Beware moves which have become obvious, especially the shorter time frames. If you're already counting the money in your head, it's probably an overly traded move. Standing aside is also a position (L. Raschke)