Were a person to take a look at he years from about 1955 onward; it would be possible to conclude that there has been considerable growth nd diversification of markets and their instruments. We are way past dealing with sustained levels. the growth in every dimension is quite refreshing and demonstrated that there is an opportunity for more and more participants. Consider just how electronic communications draws more and more participation. My list has been made for about 50 years. Then I read the back page of the WSJ; today i press a button on a web site and the list appears. Try to understand that the list is just from a few markets. There are web capabilities all over the world now for pulling lists. We noticed that people are trading commodiites markets all over the world these days. It still may be, that in the ET chat room there are contributors who think methods are market based only, but for others it is possible to trade in any convenient market and get the same results. It is not the nature of markets to not sustain trading. It is the nature of markets to grow in concert with the economic growth of the world. Luckily this sustained growth is making the capital pools so large that it is easy for families to invest and trade to their hearts content and not affect the operation of these pools. Betting ended as the de rigour method taking money out of markets long ago. The values change as huge tides of capital move. Taping what is available has absolutely no effect on what is available and its resolute defined character. Imagine using the power of the computer to extract money out of the markets just according to one's desires. You can take out of the stock market or the commodities market as much as you like any time you wish. Individuals have never affected the markets and as they grow there is less and less likely hood that they will. Want 50,000 a day? Take it as part of a 20% move in stocks or part of a move in commodities. Watch the T&S for a while and see it happen all of the time.
Don't be chicken, turn your computer on and step up and play. All it takes is some money to play and some knowledge, skills and experience. Some people lack one or more of the above; if you have what it takes its there in the room to take it. If you are in the room and not taking it that is your decision to stay on the sidelines. If you can see it, it is there for the taking. If you see it and can't take it, then look around and see others taking it and be entertained. It is there everyday and getting better every day.
You can pick any color you want right after you see the elephants. Your choice to take a look and see what's there.
Another thread killed by the Hershey Kiss of Death. Maybe you should start HT or something. Once you own all the threads, there will be nobody to trade against. You are good... not necessarily at trading but certainly as a modern day Pied Piper.
Did he just say DUH? At first I thought he was just another pseudo trader... but then he said DUH and I knew he was a professional
Most people confuse the word math with arithmetic. The status of math genius is frequently attributed to anyone who spends the day looking at and working with numbers. Arithmetic knowledge is helpful but not 100% necessary in trading if one is prepared to commit one's very first trading profits to the immediate purchase of a calculator. However, I do believe that some innate understanding of the relationships between numbers, patterns and so forth is helpful in trading. If you don't understand how the rate of increase differs from the increase in a series of numbers, you might have trouble understanding trends (or you might not, if you can instinctively see the effects). A trader who doesn't understand the process and purpose of calculating a percentage rate of return, for example, is somewhat handicapped. That's why there are so many arguments on ET about whether it is preferable to achieve a higher win% or a higher avg $ win per trade. But IMO these topics are not mathematics, just arithmetic. Or perhaps rudimentary math. Or maybe just rudimentary intelligence.
My custom is to respond to threads of interest and I'm sure you recognize that this doesn't happen until about page 10 (in ET pages) as a practice. For a thread to have any interest there has to be some substantive content that is related to the paradigm I advocate. You see that that aspect is recognized among the four related responses that were drawn from my posting. Responses that I induce are either substantive or related to me or my viewpoint. I paint pictures of the theme of the OP that encapsulate what is on the table for any person who wishes to deal with one thing only: making money that is availalble. The OP theme is dealing with the pros and cons of making 25% a year. Poof. You chose the crayola response initially and now it is the fact that the thread has beeen killed, yet once again , by one post that drew 4 responses and your fifth response where the coffin is nailed shut, almost. Today the capital pools of the markets are huge, located all over the globe in piles beyond imagination. The instruments used for extraction from the pool have definable extraction characterisitics as pipelines to your account. You can simply choose the size of the pipe and how fast you want the flow to be into your account. This is the elephant in the room. A trader is not going to affect the huge pool in any way. All he does it select a pipe, open the valve and take the flow. The 25% a year pipe is a small and slow flowing pipe. This is a mouse that the Pied Piper collected and wasn't paid for the job. The OP was a mouse. I posted A, B and C. QED. Anyone who wishes can toy with the mouse and ignore the C (the elephant). 100 people who make 25% a year is not a sample to use to determine how to make money nor how people make money. The reason is is that the markets offer a lot more than 25% a year as the pipeline flow rate out of the immence capital pool. If a huge pool exists and it has leaks @ 20% in 15 days and @ 50% of margin daily in commodities, there is no point in looking for a 25% a year leak or the anomolies of the quants with the magnifying glasses. Or the mutual fund or the hedge funds performance. Attached is what the ES elephant looks like. The numbers in the cells tell you the money (in point values @ 50 dollars a point) collectable in 5 minutes. The bar height per five minute bar spans the horizntal distribution from smallest (.25) to largest (many points). The vertical axis is a stack of volume ranges (10) that go form low to high. The sample is a month. The months do not shift appreciably. Scans rows and scan the columns to learn how orderly the ES mearket is. For a 2,000 of margin contract to make 25% a year you have to make 500 bucks. 500 bucks is 10 points a year. That is 50 dollars a point times 10 points is equal to 500 dollars. A PhD is saying that in one year, all psychological considerations taken in to consideration, that a person should be able to trade enough bars to make a sum of 10 points over 250 trading days as a pro working full time and getting psychological advise from the PHD. My answer to this is, have the PhD blow this chart up as large as he wants and have him buy some darts and find out just how many trades that is in one year by throwing darts until he gets 10 points as the sum of the throws. I don't know any SCT traders who aren't making 10 points a day and they do not need darts, either.