Dear All, I'm a newcomer to this game, and have only been trading for about six months now. I'm now trading full-time, all day long. I am finding it to be EXHAUSTING! Don't get me wrong--it's a good exhausting, and I wouldn't have it any other way, but it's still exhausting! When I had a full-time job, and was on salary, I would play around a lot more: maybe stay out until midnight on a Tuesday and have a couple drinks. Why not? Not so now! I can't afford to play those games anymore. Early to bed, early to rise. I get up in the morning with the sun, go for a good hard run or hit the gym for an hour, have a healthy breakfast, and I'm at my workstation well before the opening bell. Like many of you, I work very hard at it all day. Taking notes, giving everything I've got to make good picks, and researching as best I know how. When the closing bell sounds, I literally stumble out of my office and collapse onto my yoga mat for a quick nap, utterly exhausted. I come from a Computer Science background, and would often code from 8-5pm, often later. I would be tired at the end of the day. I sometimes thought, "Why is it that the market closes at 4pm? Jeez... must be nice for those lazy traders... they get to keep 'bankers hours.'" Now that I'm actually doing it myself, HOLY Mary, Mother of God have I changed my tune! Today at 3:35 I was ready for bed! Thank you for reading. A bit of a rambling post, but from the bottom of my heart.
I know what you mean, When I first started trading...I would get So stressed out at the idea of my money/account going up/down on a daily basis...that I would see hair on my desk...my hair was literally falling out Things have definitely calmed down since those nervous, scared, rookie days of mine. Have other outlets...like joining a gym, buying a dog or dogs and having long walks/jogs, cutting junk food completely out of your life, etc etc healthy life options. Being indoors staring at your screen all day is definitely not healthy for your body and mind and soul.
Nice post and I completely agree. The mental drain is pretty extreme when you're firing on all cylinders. But at least trading doesn't create the kind of exhaustion you'd feel if you were on the back of a shovel all day. That's a whole other level.
So what was the nature of the coding work that you did before? And have you been able to successfully apply your computer science background to your trading activities? (i.e. automation).
Never met anyone who writes code for a living working 8-5 in fact they work their balls to the ground, weekends included...I've also never heard a Comp Geek use the term Holy Mary, Mother of God and definetly they don't jog or do yoga.....making good picks? What the hell is that?
You have not found your comfort level yet, your rhythm. Try to work towards it... Don't trade too much different titles, because that means too much analysis, news, preparation, trading, monitoring etc., ie. too much work...
When your trading day becomes mundane, you're on your way. Learning new and complex things can be exhausting. And I agree with lugar....incorporate some regular physical activity into your life and watch your diet.
That's when you need to see the AMP's and get a good massage and H.E. Dude, you are totally stressed out. That's your "big problem".
Great question! I've done both front-end (JavaScript) and back-end (C++) work. C++ is particularly powerful and useful for trading applications. I have spent many hours noodling on ways to leverage my coding skills to my advantage in trading. I've come up with these so far: 1. Real-time analysis. Example: stuff tick data into a FIFO array, and compute mean, median, mode, standard deviation, moments, over a time period t. Pattern recognition, crypto decoding... Use your imagination. The big problem here is something called "non-display fees" from the Exchanges. Example: to use NYSE data for "display," such as piping it into Ninjatrader, it's $16 per subscriber. For "Non-display," with an API, it's $20,000. It's been a real nail in the knee for me. They really put the pinch on this after the 2008 crash. To remain in compliance, I haven't been able to do any of this. 2. Filters and searching. I can find equities with all kinds of weird, custom characteristics, that are hard to extract in Excel. 3. Integration of non-standard data. For example, I've been rating companies against Christian values, and making them available in JSON format. That's not even available in Bloomberg Terminal: http://www.overus.org/ratings.html 4. Automated order placing, via the Interactive Brokers API, based on all kinds of custom calculations. 5. Advanced simulations. Example: I wrote "Usain," an ultra low-latency tick generation program. On my less-than-$1000 rig, it generates 2ns (nanosecond) ticks. Not only does it generate Sanctum Sanctorum speeds, but also allows me to write algorithms forbidden by the non-display policy: https://github.com/kmiklas/usain/blob/master/README.md 6. "Scanner" programs. Generating alerts when certain market conditions exist. Example: Let's say that you want to be alerted whenever an equity downspikes by 1% or more. Blood in the water! 7. Data retrieval from all sorts of sources. 8. Side jobs. There is demand for algorithm writing for other traders. I've been working so hard that I haven't had time for any of these. By the way, great forum. Thank you for founding it. It's been a Godsend for me.
Problem with this option is : all of the completely different platforms and API's. My gosh, to understand each of these complex auto trading platforms is an ENORMOUS undertaking.....Quantopian/Python, Tradestation/Easy Language, Interactive Brokers/API, Sterling Pro/API, Ninja Trader/Dot-Net, etc, etc. My gosh, you must be a genious like Bradley Cooper in the movie "Limitless". Do you have that drug ? I wish I did !!!