So the market just opened, and I'm already bored enough to be posting here. Let's face it, we're now entering another long-term volatility drought, circa 2003-2004. Last time I switched to online poker, but the easy money dried up from that game long before Big Brother started hammering in the final nail. So if one has the kind of mind that excels at activities like trading & poker, and has far more time on his hands than interesting activities to fill it with... what the hell else is there to do?
"POKER RULE#13 Occupy yourself while you are not playing... It is critical that you learn to enjoy yourself in the cardroom in ways other than in the game itself - by constantly staying, and playing... The fact is, if you are playing correctly, you are going to be doing a lot of folding. So you need to think of ways to fill this time. If you hate this period of time - when you're not playing , and some do - it will have the effect of throwing your game out of kilter." Wikipedia is a great time killer fwiw
What about trading outside the intraday timeframe, or in slightly different areas of trading? I have about 10-12 promising strategies I need to refine and test but just don't have the time to work on more than a couple at once as well as my normal trading, let alone do all of them. They all rely on the typical pattern recognition trader skill set, and several are still quite short-term (few days to few weeks timeframe). For example, in 2003-04 vol dropped and it sucked for approaches that relied on lots of movement. But 03-04 was an amazing time to be doing value investing in emerging market stocks or commodities, or trading market leaders (Apple etc) on a medium or long-term timeframe. IMO sticking to one main area of interest an expertise is much better than hopping around. The beauty of trading is that there are so many different approaches that can work.
most blokes with money burning in their pockets bet on SPORTs. In fact legal and illegal sports betting is bigger than poker and other casino games put together... Good luck.....
I got killed by a Jane Street trader 3 months ago when I visited NYC playing Bridge. I'm not that bad playing poker and was net positive while we were at it. But once the dudes mentioned Bridge (nitro mentioned about Options trader playing Bridge like 6-7 years in ET and I learned how to play), which I agreed to... There's not much dinero moving around in Bridge as much as Poker in public but it got me back into re-studying Bridge. Off topic but I'd be honored to play cards with Ayn "Rand".
you could always take the Durrr challenge http://www.highstakesdb.com/challenge/durrrr-vs-antonius.aspx 50,000 hands will keep you awake for a few days