"The market goes where it can f*ck the most people"

Discussion in 'Trading' started by Amnesiac, May 17, 2006.

  1. I love my style of trading, because if the market really does go where it can F*ck me, it can't get really far before I'm already out and/or reversing my position or waiting for a better entry.

    I've made an 8% return on my demo (100k) swing trading account in the past 3 weeks though. I'm just happy I close dout all the trades before the market started going down, otherwise I could have been in trouble :p But I could see where the longer term traders could be hurting... thank god I know how to day-trade.
     
    #11     May 20, 2006
  2. Keynes was a famous economist, but for as far as i know not a good trader.
    So his quote has the same value as a quote from a doctor in medicines on the the way a nuclear power plant should be built.
    On top of that the quote is more than 75 years old, markets have changed enormously since 1930. You cannot use his quote anymore, things have changed too much.
    Another fine example of these kind of statements is the statement from Microsoft only a few decades ago that a computer would never need more than 640 Kb RAM.

    The market NEVER cares about the position of a trader. If the trader is hurt, it is because he runs with the mass. And the mass runs always behind the facts (like an MA).
    The smart money takes position and tells afterwards to the mass they have to reverse their positions. Smart money needs the mass to make money, because the mass makes the trend.
     
    #12     May 20, 2006
  3. mhashe

    mhashe


    What you call the "smart money", wyckoff termed its as CM. The CM controls the markets and only they have the holy grail of trading. They're the only ones who are able to sell the tops and buy the bottoms, while the rest of us fight for the crumbs in between.
     
    #13     May 20, 2006
  4. Ahhh!!! the secret is out.
    The market is made up of a small number of people who know what they are doing and a large group of people who THINK that they know what they are doing.

    The small group feed from the large group ....nothing personal
     
    #14     May 20, 2006
  5. I don't care who "controls" the markets (what's the CM?). I trade different from the mass and make good money because the mass does what i do, but there is always a delay between us. This delay gives me the opportunity to take position and let the others do the work.

    If you can visualize what the mass will do you only have to be ahead of them.
     
    #15     May 20, 2006
  6. Cheese

    Cheese

    The market goes where it can f*ck the most people
    Complete horsesh*t which forms the manure base of the loser mindset.
    The market f**ks no one.
    It does no more than provide a service to the different categories of player.
    But, sure, countless novices and would-be players royally f**k themselves up the butt trading or trying to trade the markets.
    :)
     
    #16     May 20, 2006
  7. What about the futures market? There is one long for one short so the winners and those F'ed up are equal in dollar size :p
     
    #17     May 20, 2006
  8. Pabst

    Pabst

    Spike: you're off base and missing the point. Hugely.

    For starters, John Maynard Keynes was a tremendous trader who generated millions in profits for the endowment fund of King's College Cambridge.

    The Keynes statement "The market will do what it must to make the most amount of participants wrong", will ALWAYS be true. Markets are two sided auctions. If we possessed information that everyone who is a likely long is already long, then we'd know the market's about to break. If one is max long then what's their next trading action going to be? Doesn't matter if it's 1547, 1929 or 2006, those who are longs are the next wave of sellers. We're about to see this pricing phenomena in housing.

    Certainly things change. However the concept of positioning and how it effects prices cannot change. It takes participants to bid or offer and those participants and their motives aren't manufactured in a genies bottle. EVERY TRADE effects prices. Even a one lot.


     
    #18     May 20, 2006
  9. mokwit

    mokwit

    From the Taleb article cited above:
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    NT: I left Wall Street for the first time in 1991. I was obsessed with price formation. I couldn't understand from the screen how prices were determined. It took me six months to be able to read prices in the pit. Locals basically read information from the order flow and squeezed the weak party. There's always a pack of five or six dominating locals who abruptly change the prices, who bid a lot higher than the previous offer and have the guts to do it, and the rest of them follow.

    DS: How did that knowledge change the way you trade when you went back to trading from a screen?

    NT: It is the most enriching experience for a trader. I learned more about market dynamics in my second six months than from years on a desk. I learned that traders' income is not the bid-offer spread, but the micro-squeezes that take place. Markets move from squeezes to squeezes. Traders make money on stop losses and other free options. It made me interested with information economics.
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Also I would suggest that looking in the index for "stock markets" in Keynes and then reading the page and a half it references will teach you more about markets than reading most books devoted to the subject.
     
    #19     May 20, 2006
  10. Thing change, the market does not change.
    The market is only a concentrated display of human irrationality. And human nature does not change, whether they've ate the apple and started wearing clothes, or when they get a so-called university degree.
     
    #20     May 20, 2006