Is that all you do - spread negativity? What a waste of bandwidth Hey - thank you for your 'concern' - but other traders are doing just fine
The first piece I wrote in this thread was for newbies and learning amateurs who compose the membership of ET. Harmony, calm, etc of adopting more certain methods was my suggestion to replace the anxiety, anger etc of faulty or incomplete methods. Grob chose to misrepresent this. Also I donât use stops. I donât use targets. I donât use set-ups. I donât (knowingly) consult my feelings while trading. As an amateur Grob has been outside the loop all his life. He is stuck with embedded impressions of how he thinks the world of trading works from his 50 years experience. He doesnât know sufficiently his mind and doesnât know why it has shaped and honed the apparent deficiencies he displays. If he doesnât know, stops in daytrading CL are impractical. He would need to progress from âsports memoryâ to âace racing car driverâ to play as I do the sharp tops of spikes or sharp bottoms of reverse spikes, along with often extremely fast forming tops and extremely fast forming bottoms, which punctuate CL .. LOL Blockages in the mind can become large. I think Grob (Jack Hershey) has not yet considered the rigidities of his mind and then progressing the mind to professional player. LOL..
I'm certainly an amateur and you are a pro (I think from what you say). Im my amateur opinion, I would expect that you as "the ace racing car driver" are definitly contending with many more dimensions than I do. For me "sports memory" is a description of my mental mode where everything just flows along unconsciously and carving the turns (in what ever patterns or formations) is an infrequent (20 to 40 times a day) rather gentle action over 6 and 1/2 hours. My emotions are either feelings of comfort, support or confidence which arise from knowing that I know. I'm sure that CL is a heck of a lot of fun to trade and you must really enjoy it. I just frontrun the ES because it has leading indicators and is very liquid and partial fills work at about 5 times the market capacity. For a while I felt that the thread might get involved in how the mind can be improved for trading really skillfully. Now, I realize from what you said you were just addressing the type of traders you characterized ET as being. I'm sure that you would use a different set of emotions to describe "the ace racing car driver" than you recommended the ET traders use in you prior post. I've never seen the ace racing car driver set of emotions as you well point out. For me, its just 20 to 40 trades and I know I will have four pages of logs. As a practical matter I can fill out the pages roughly long before the market rolls out the turning points. It seems very smooth and orderly and by operating in the space a little bit ahead of NOW and just doing the turns when NOW comes around, it is kind of like touring around an track where the turns come up one after each other the same way on each lap. Have a good one. The "trading is bad for mental health" subject isn't my cup of tea as you point out.
To become not only profitable but to actually make a living from trading after only 6 months is fairly remarkable.
The answer lies in this sentence: "Feast or famine pay schedule. Good months, bad months, Good quarters, bad quarters." Translation: got lucky first during the dot com bull market, made loads of money (after 6 months)=feast, then the bull market was over, lost a bunch of money=famine, started to learn/change/adjust/struggle=bad months, was not consistent=good quarter, bad quarters, finally after several years, became consistent=grinder. So he is now a grinder=a good sign of consistent money.
yeah it was kinda like that. I made money like everybody else in the last couple of years of the 90's. To be honest I never did much momentum, technical, or daytrading so my returns develop over much longer timeframes than most of you guys talk about. You could say that I am a fundamentally oriented position trader I guess, though it is a little more complicated than that. I use hedges and market neutral strategies, options spreads, and lots of other tools to implement/complement my strategy. I guess the style is probably closest to Hussman's amongst well known investors. So yeah I can see an inefficiency and maybe not get paid for months once I put on a position, or go through periods like last July, where I took a hit like most of the quant funds who tend to long value and short expensive. So the times that are meager for me are either when some of my legs go against me, or when the market takes time to come around to a normal state. I tend to run a ton of positions at the same time too, usually 25-50 at a time. And I don't know what you guys are getting but an average solid year for me is like 25% with of course lots of average variation around that. I do a lot of trading throughout the day but it is more like gardening, trimming positions here and there. I have zero techincal analysis skills whatsoever and am probably the worst short-term trader ever. But yeah I know all about the mental issues, I can have long flat periods and 20% drawdowns which because of my style of trading involve periods of months usually. To answer another question, I was one of those kids who had a few shares of KO and XOM as a kid so I started watching stocks early. Also I have a finance degree and did five years of credit in a bank. I bet I have read the annual reports of maybe 2,000 companies between work and managing my little portfolio.
A profession is invalid because it involves uncertainty? I guess actuaries, insurance companies, weather forecasters, and anyone in the military is shit outta luck then. Please, think a little before posting next time. As for a serious "edge", what about the performance of successful speculators using public information on a long-term timeframe? Or what about the advantage of simply following the order book for a security more than anyone else - won't work on the S&P but can easily work in small caps, less liquid ETFs, and so on. As for how productive trading is, liquidity and price discovery are both socially useful. In any case, the only objective measure of productivity is how much $$$ you can make from your work - by that measure, trading and investing is rated higher than almost any activity on the planet.