I think they both post useful stuff: "A second wasted on this site is too many" "One moment spent on this site, is one moment wasted."
Most of the times I feel the same way, but I know that I occasionally find good threads and interesting / useful ideas. So I continue browsing ET using both my ET ignore list, and my mental ignore list.
Winning and winning big continually can be learned. I am not telling anyone this; it is just a suggestion based upon profound experience. Over time, the money velocity of a trader going from novice can be doubled about 8 times. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256. Again this is just the way it is based upon profound experiences. Lets look at the ES and ET performance. Polls indicate that the average long term daily profit in ES is 1 point. Lets put that on the scale of the 8 doublings. I see it in comparison to a person who has gotten started and is just past breakeven trading. Just past breakeven is a level of 1 tick a day roughly speaking. It is just the smallest value I could think up for ES. One point a day is about 4 ticks or two doublings of the minimum. 256 ticks is 64 points as the level of daily trading that could be expected from the most effecient and effective trader on a daily basis. Were this related to the ES daily range on some basis it would appear that several means could be used to characterize this level of performance. It would mean an expert would be 64 times better than the current average of the ET membership. By my standard and using the above it would take a H-L spread of an average of 21 points day in and day out. Based upon looking at the performance of people who post on ET who know what they are doing to get to expert, I would say that 4 points a day is their norm and this has taken the person to the 16 level (4 doublings) and they will reach the 256 level (four more doublings) in about two years. Now they are at the half way point and they can now add to their quivers the remaining stuff to get the rest of the way. So there is more to deal with still. You speak from the vantage point of "traits", dubiousness, and Gurus. Not my choice of where to stand and contribute. Lets think from a neutral vantage point as an alternative. Lets also take a look at the losers you speak of. I will agree with you that these losers have had a look at the scene and have not made it to the place to begin and be successful. There is a place to plant your feet. you plant them and begin and be successful. I have found by tracking people over the years that some get to a place where they have done sufficient damage to themselves and they no longer can expect to become successful. I name them irreversably damaged. There is not a viable concept for reversing any damage of any sort anyway, in my opinion. A newbie has a real advantage over such a multiyear loser. I ought to make up a self evaluation sheet for any person so they can find out their current prospects for wealth building. Your score on the sheet in low because you can only mark down stuff for one third of the questions on the sheet. You fail to be able to go to the place and plant your feet. Can you reconsider where you are. Nope, you can't. QED on you. Now lets look at the losers you know about. They fill in the knowledge sheet sucessfully. Good for them. They do not do well on experience. But there is one BIG important thing; they have built pathways in their minds that are there already and those pathways are possible to repair by subconscious means that they do not even have to proactively handle. It will happen in their sleep it turns out. They did get some credits in this part of the sheet. The third part of my sheet they are doing relates to skills. There are no trait questions and there are no motivation questions. It is divieded into four sub parts however. Each is separate and unrelated to the other three. Here is the breakout. Part One Q1 Have you ever seen the market? Q2 blah Q3 Blah etc... Part Two Q1 List all of the truths you know about the market. blah, etc.... Part Three Q1 How frequerntly do you compare the data set of part 1 to the truths of part 2? blah, etc. Part Four What percent of the time are your decisions timely? blah, etc... So the losers come up with scores and now have a starting point where they have placed their feet skill wise. You get a score here and we give you a name form the list of traits. Any name you have is not useful though. A person needs to know where he is and where he can be. Going from one place to the other is a case of designing the path for that person. Since, from my viewpoint, a person can not "erase" stuff, I feel a framework and strong pathway around it has to be built to move forward. Naturally, from my place where 4 out of 5 people know I am full of shit, this is not going to be their approach. But I believe it is possible to get to 256 for anyone who is able to undertand the three legged foundation that is required. building the mind is the way to do it. I use drills to do most of the foundation building. I know from profound experience and the literature that the mind is built strongly and rapidly using drills that impart knowledge and essential skills. Building is an experience that is done largely during off hours and practice of those acquired skills takes place during market hours when the acquired skills are used. You are fucked at this point because, as you say, you disregard experience and knowledge. Knowledge is where the truths lay that are required for comparison with data sets for decision making. A person does not, in fact, use traits to decide real things. What that person is doing, in fact, is taking risks instead and betting on the belief that he is correct. The belief is not necessarily a truth (knowledge). What is belief? How are bets actually made by trait labelled persons? We know. There are not many, if any, unknowns about how people trade. we know that those who are experts are knowledgeable, skilled and expert. They also can qualify and quantify what they do. Fixing a loser comes down to making a beginning which requires that he understand the three aspects of trading include knowledge, skills and experience. He begins from here. He steps on the four layered map at beginner which says minumum captial only and no risk trades (See rockets, for example). He does four sequential tasks repeatedly during market hours: monitor, analyze, decide, and act in a timely manner. After hours he does the drills to build pathways around his bad experiences and mistaken skills. Truths accumulate mostly in the adjacent cells of the map near and about the the no risk part of the map. At some point his equity curve allows him to begin to operate in the adjacent cells and the equtiy curve begins to steepen by a couple of doublings. Concurrently he has walled in his past ill chosen mental pathways. It is very difficult to get to them by this time. As the map is expanded he is keenly aware of the sequences that the market performs and he is asiduaously annotating his monitoring screen which was set up properly form the get go . this screen set up was the FIRST TIME he ever saw the market it turns out. Lets say he is approaching intermediate (more than 4 doublings). What is his horizon and his vanishing points. He does not see the world like looking down a RR track having one vanishing point. He has two and he sees the breadth of the opportunities. Nailing two more doublings is on the table now. He has to build four mental processes to the next levels of activity. He sees that the percentage of the time he is in the market is where the answer lies. He has defintiely gotten beyond the enter and exit sort of world. He is getting insynch with the notion that the P, V relation is written in stone (knowledge) in a Boolean form that has a "continue" (Hold) portion and a "change" (reverse) portion. How does the money velocity change when a person is reversing right on the mark time after time? Lets say you have the ability to see that place(figuratively and otherwise). There is a great deal of money there abouts, it turns out. It is the place where 100% of the edges would take place if the person using the edge had it straight. That is a nice scoop full of stuff. Well that is only half the story. It is also the place where 100% of the exits lay for for 100% of the edges used. This thread about winners and losers is a little different that the originator thought. The list of people who cannot realize their potential because they are myth bound and do not have the knowledge of the truths of the market is a long list. Losers are just people who have not begun as yet. The other group who do not have it straight are beneath the losers on the scale. They are stuck. It will turn out winners are people who are in a process of building. you will find out that you can improve all your life and from time to time you are just working on different refinements. Refining iteratively is the name of the game. Eight levels. A good drill is to read my posts 10 times each. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256.
I think they both post useful stuff: "One moment spent on this site, is one moment wasted." --- areyoukidding? "A second wasted on this site is too many" --- hairdresser These two signatures above from hairdresser and areyoukidding can be found here: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/printthread.php?threadid=62408