u gotta be dumbass to be a rich trader, smartasses go broke

Discussion in 'Professional Trading' started by chewbacca, Mar 24, 2011.

  1. buy and hold
    a dumb-humble trader will just buy and hold........no reading the news, no trying to make sense of world events........just every once in a while buy a good stock that presents a good VALUE.........whereas a smartass trader is reading the news and blogs all day long trying to divine the meaning of every event and constantly changing his mind based on the events of the day


    HFT
    a dumbass trader will just wait for the right opportunities and go into each trade with a OCA order and get out with a quick scalp............a smartass trader will not use an OCA order of if he does he will constantly change the sl or the pt order based what he 'thinks' the market 'will' do - on each down tick he is moving the sl lower out of fear and on each uptick he is moving the pt higher out of greed.
     
  2. NoDoji

    NoDoji

    You got that right! The more I dumb down my trading, the easier it gets and the more money I make. All the unnecessary stuff and micromanaging makes you feel better inside, but it doesn't necessarily help your P/L.

    Shortly after I found a trading style that produced consistent profits (for 4 whole months), I connected with a trader in a chat room and decided pretty quickly that he wasn't a very smart trader.

    First, I thought he wasn't very smart because he was waiting so long to get into trades instead of just getting in while price was at a bargain entry. "If the price of ABC goes above 45.26, I'm long; if the price of XYZ drops below 38.72, I'll sell short." I mean, how dumb is THAT?

    Then I thought he was really dumb because he'd let price comes within pennies of his profit target and reverse all the way back to a stopped out loss. Can you get any dumber than that?

    Well that year ended and his account had produced a return of over 150%, and I had taken several large losses and was diligently studying tactics like his so I could learn how to produce consistent profits with actual risk management in place.

    Turns out he had a very concise and simple method of trading with exact rules that placed both a trading edge and a money management edge in his favor. By not messing with his rules, he was consistently profitable, even though he might have a day with 5/5 losing trades.

    The reason trading is so hard and so many traders lose is because you have to accept sloppiness and "wrongness" on a frequent basis and we're brainwashed from an early age to seek perfection, certainty and security.

    If you get a final grade of 48% in a class, you fail. If a surgeon does an operation correctly 48% of the time, the career's over and malpractice lawsuits pile up. In trading, it's common to have a simple method that produces winning trades only 48% of the time and be incredibly profitable year after year.

    Here's to dumb and simple trading!
     
  3. Eddiefl

    Eddiefl



    Holy crap, i think you just let the cat out of the bag. KIS, is the motto. But people want to make it "complicated".

    KIS your pnl goes up, make it complicated your pnl gets complicated

    EF
     
  4. ES - buy dips - hold until you've made a good few points on the trade. Repeat over :cool:
     
  5. Did someone say that for every IQ point above average, you add six months to your learning curve?

    If you have an IQ of 130, your learning curve will be 30 x 6 = 180 months=15 years.

    note: Now I know why Nodoji has such a short learning curve. She started making money after 9 months. That put her IQ at 101.5 :D
     
  6. note2: Isaac Newton had an IQ of 190. 90 x 6 = 540 months = 45 years. Newton started trading at the age of 40, and he lost 2.7 million in trading during his learning curve. He died one year before he completed the learning curve at the age of 84.
     
  7. NoDoji

    NoDoji

    LMAO! I lowered my IQ by banging my head against my desk and getting my face slammed into the sidewalk so many times. Now that my IQ has been lowered to absolute average, my trading is really taking off :D
     
  8. Coudy

    Coudy

    NoDoji: Do you use the same method as puddles+geez for exits?
    I mean, do you have fixed target (2R) and fixed stop (-1R) without exception?

    Thanks.
     
  9. lol
     
  10. cvds16

    cvds16

    rofl ND :D

    on a more serious note: it's simple that works !
     
    #10     Mar 25, 2011