"If there is one little hole to find an edge in trading futures intraday.. it already would of been plugged by some Harvard or MIT PHD's sitting in front of cray computers at your local hedge fund shop. Or probably by the thousands of ET traders looking for chart patterns with trendlines drawn on there 1,2,5,10,15,30,60 min charts..." That could not have possibly been done, yet. Otherwise, they would have moved onto "plugging the holes" in the game of chess and publish the winning strategy (for white, or perhaps it's black)
I may read the book but it does not seem to apply to the point I was making. I meant to say geography within the U.S. i.e. people living near big commercial centers is one variable, age of the bread winner was another. And again, these breakdowns were all done in the 90s. I had to read them back then. All I was saying everyone could argue with the data. Because age and proximity were such strong factors. then you have education. Some people made arguments that asians did show a propensity to earn money when you subtract out newly immigrated asian groups. Someone would say well the Japanese are very successful due to their culture and someone else would say. They are old and live near n.y. and san Francisco.
No one would doubt that the Industrial and other revolutions that have given rise to cities creates wealth from "top to bottom." However, I understand what you are getting at. There are ways (good ones?) to normalize for these things that hilite a propensity of one set of values as espoused by a given culture to get the highest paying jobs e.g. even within San Fransisco/Silicon Valley, or to show that an inordinate number of it's citizens go into high-tech/scientific fields in a given society/culture inspite of their geographic closeness to cities. In other words, there are other jobs to be done other than software engineering in Silicon Valley One could also argue that people that seek wealth/high tech jobs also seek it where the getting is good (if you want gold, go west young man.) In other words, it is no accident that Japanese etc migrate to cities. Television has shown the lifestyle that cities give and pumps it into living rooms everyday - it is no secret anymore (was it ever?) and yet some people choose one way of life over another. I claim that choice is 80% cultural (and so does Max Webers book), and mostly has to do with what is aspoused by parents and the support of the clan into it's group, for which in the Japanese and Jewish case are based on traditions that are thousands of years old and passed on to each generation. Get and read "Guns, Germs and Steel" - it is a fascinating book and perhaps one the best books on sociology ever written. nitro
True, seems like the best way to take the very high probablity trades which require a wide stop(I am assuming this is what you mean by " large loss") is to cut down the position size so your max dollar loss as the same as most trades.