Brilliant post Jack. $64m question: How does one have no associated feelings when viewing trades that affect personal wealth?
Great Post!!!!! lilduckling is presenting the key to successful trading here! Successful trading has as much to do with learning and understanding yourself as learning and understanding the market. I firmly believe studying books by Mark Douglas, Ari Kiev, etc. will greatly shorten the road to success for most traders. lilduckling it is really refreshing to read an intelligent (and I believe accurate) post after some of the babble garbage I see in the "Zero Sum Game" thread. Thank You
Buttercup, Understand that I took exception to the post which suggested "feel" as being predominant over any objective rules. If you believe that predominantly "feelings" can guide successful trading decisions, then please be sure to let me know when you get past the stage of starving ARTist. It may be a while, but I'm patient.
It can't all be natural, you have to learn how to find better deals and faster news, and you have to know what the numbers mean
I agree with this statement. If trading is a 'skill', much like any other skill, then it is acquired by steps: Hearing -> Understanding -> Practice -> Mastery -> Habit Hearing, understanding and much of practice is mechanical, yet when the individual is reaching the 'mastery and habit' skill level it becomes more of an art. There is no way (IMHO) to reach the mastery and habit 'art' level without first passing through the more mechanical 'understanding and practice' phases. Good luck!
This is a great post, with good application to the topic: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/truth-about-interviewing.html Think of programming as trading, and "the market" as the company conducting the interview. p.s. I have no affiliation to Steve Yegge p.p.s. An interesting parallel in the comment section of the post: "Thereâs something weird about software development, some mystical quality, that makes all kinds of people think they know how to do it. Iâve worked at dotcom-type companies full of liberal arts majors with no software experience or training who nevertheless were convinced that they knew how to manage software teams and design user interfaces. This is weird, because nobody thinks they know how to remove a burst appendix, or rebuild a car engine, unless they actually know how to do it, but for some reason there are all these people floating around who think they know everything there is to know about software development." p.p.p.s. I was a liberal arts major
If it could be taught, then I could take an innumerate illiterate mental defective 3 or 70 year old and turn him into a great trader. It it was pure talent, then every currently "great" trader would have been equally great the first day they started. Whereas almost all traders are mediocre or worse when they start out. Clearly it takes a combination of natural skills and learned experience, like any other skilled activity.
the right tools and an 'apprenticeship' with someone having battle scars will go a long way vs. a born trader (if that exists)
Trading is a combination of right and left brain. It almost inevitably has to be. If you take a backtest of a system that a real life trader used over the last year, programmed in all the rules and ran it over the same time period you would - in all likelihood - find differences in the results. Why? Its very difficult to go purely mechanical without noticing something going sour at some point. That's how traders learn and tweak (improve?) their plans in the first place. IMO you definitely need to start with a sound set of rules to build on. The building on part is the artistic side. There will always be outliers. Some people can count how many toothpicks fell out of a box on the floor at a glance, some can only build a model from the instructions. Everyone has a different level of visualizing things. Its what makes us all different. Why do some successful people have messy desks and others have immaculately clean desks? Both can find whatever is asked within seconds, but their brains obviously operate differently. This is probably my first and lst post on this thread. I wanted to let Batterup and Thunderdog know that I got a great laugh out of the "blunderdog/buttercup" exchange. LOL. -ace
As much as you want to believe it, real life tells otherwise. There are simply people that just have it and pull off the unthinkable. Such as coming hungover at 10:30, pulling off a bunch of big trades with 5k-10k blocks and leaving at 2pm. I'm talking about a guy with 3 years of experience, half of which he was part time. Life isnt fair, some people just have it that much easier than others.