The reality of "over-trading"

Not bad trades, less than optimal trades. If you take trades that are 51win/49loss, you'll loose $ over time due to commish and slippage. Being selective is very hard to do if trading very often for a swing trader.

 

Having an edge doesn't have anything to do with arbitrary time frame settings. The longer you hold, the more you're entering into the world of "buy and hold". If your strategy produces returns that are not in excess of a buy and hold, or reduce risk exposure, you are wasting your time trading.

What does personal conviction have to do with possessing a mathematical advantage?

 

So basically what you're saying is, make good trades, and avoid bad trades?

 

No. If the setup do not check all the conditions then don't trade. To have all the conditions, you must be patient and trade less. Because good setups are not so frequent.

 

So if the set ups aren't good, then don't trade?

 

There is no edge in trading other than capital and the prudent use thereof.

 

Trading is like a box of chocolates... (cheese statement, sorry), but it's true though. Nobody knows when *exactly* the next big move is upon us, neither does anyone know where *exactly* to place stops not to be shaken out. It's all done in pursuit of a profit, get real folks, we are speculators and a speculator is all about greed, which has to be controlled of course, otherwise you would never see profit. Overtrading is not bad, as long as there is a valid reason in your view to take that next trade.

 

Looks simple and obvious for noobs.

 

Nope, it implies negative expectancy trades. HFT algos are not overtrading and yet they make millions of trades per second.

 

If 90% is noise you should start to develop a real trading system, because you apparently see a lot of noise that is not noise at all. You classify it as noise because you don't understand it.
If you trade ES based on a strechted RSI 14, you can hardly speak about a trading system. You should try to build a real system.

Virtu financial's result for the first quarter of 2015 are: net profits $87.9 million. That is on average $11 per second, which means that with a assumed average profit of $11 per trade, it is about 100,000 times less than even 1 miion trades per second. And you speak about millionS of trades. Even if you take the 5 biggest HFT firms together you will never reach the numbers you speak about.

Very simple logic but, and because of that, you forgot a small part in your statement: profit per winning trade and loss per losing trade. If profit to loss is 2:1, your statemant is completely wrong.

I will not join this discussion any further because I notice that more and more discussions on ET have the same charateristics:

1. a lot of nonsense or at least uncomplete statements.
2. too many bashing.
3. too many discussion end in a fight to prove that the other person is an idiot.
4. the same subjects come back over and over again without any interesting result.
5. .......