I'm surprised noone suggested econometrics yet. Statistics is good, but it often is too theoretical. Econometrics knowledge with good skills in using econometric software is crucial for testing strategies etc.
To Jack Hershey, Welcome to this forum! I was reading many of your post onMIF and I am happy to see you here . Walter
Absolutely agree with Jack. Schwager for the possibility. If you are going to get a degree (which is fairly worthless for trading), I would say stats for system trading, or, if you are the "winging it type", psychology. I was an econ major in undergrad, and it was pretty much worthless (although I always know why the Fed is raising or lowering rates. Has this knowledge made me money? No.). Jay
Aren't econometricians the ones saying that they can't make money trading and therefore nobody else can?
NO! You just seem to have some vendetta going on against me, trying to find faults with anything I say even if there's absolutely no point in what you say. It's b/c of people like you that I'll quit posting here altogether one day. Have you ever met a single pure econometrician? Do you know what they are doing? Apparently not. Checking to see if markets are efficient is close to the bottom of their agenda. The tools they develop are used in finance to check EMH, yes. And there are studies that show you <b>can</b> make money. Most are just not there for you to peruse. But I have a feeling you wouldn't get their message anyway. I was just giving someone a piece of sound advice. What your attacks contributed, I still fail to see.
psychology: help you to control your own mind --> very useful (if you could do it) statistics: help you to design trading systems and risk management --> useful econ/finance : try to understand and explain what the market does --> shit! accounting : help you to understand the (bogus) a/c reports--> shit!
Above you see some subject areas in formal education that are the conventional wisdom from the looks of the rest of this thread and several others you have begun on your quest. There is a possibility that a more informal route could well work for you. The subject you want to study is making money in the markets. and it is a combination of several things. If you set forth on this you will have to winnow out so much to get to the very basic key ingredients. I started in 1957 with the WSJ reading. Then went to TA immediately and never changed. (Magee 4th ed) I also found the P, V relationship. A Boolean expression in two parts and I added a corrolary. (Granville). In 1957 I made brownline charts to fill in with pencil. (HLC and volume). With 300 dollars and part of my salary for 3 years, I made 10% per month and then in 1960 took all my original capital out to go to Europe and buy a sports Mercedes (190SL). Thus I have always invested only profits from themn on. This is an attitude adjustment that is a big time thing. With the invention of Xerox, PC's and software. it gets much easier. I leaned to score the stock cycle using three variables. The score goes 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 and repeats. I use P, V, and A/D as variables in that order of significance with Boolean values of 1 and 0 which i reevaluate in base 10. 0 to 7 is the turn of the trough 4 to 3 is the turn of the peak. You will notice that the sequence is elegant and symmetric. for price and volume increasing is 1 and for accumulation (A) the score is 1. What you know from this is: where you are; what is next; and how fast the market is moving. This follows the P,V relation perfectly. It is nicknames by those I mentor as "Tomorrow's Newspaper Today" I moved into commodities futures indexes using my paradigm from equities trading. With the advent of software and the PC, it is much easier to make money. There are eight separate ways to double your performance in investing and trading. When anyone adds each to where he begins, the eight doubling are very significant for making money. They are: 1. use natural cycles. 2. enter on BO's anticipated by FRV from DU volume. 3. Use trend following stops for protection. 4. Exit on the "away" side of trends. 5. rotate capital through threads of money where you have one thread a day to focus upon. 6. Select a universe of quality stocks that obey all of your paradigm rules, use no others. (EPS and RS> 90) 7. optimize trading by cycle compression. 8. practice anticipation by using pair of fractals (trade the slow and anticipate on the fast) Scoring is a small thing so it doesn't make the list nor does keeping lists of indicator signal sequences which allow you a very fine monitoring calibration. The sequences form a tree where the branch points are where a flaw terminates the possibility of the other branch proceeding. The tree is best seen as a matrix of cells whereby the market operating point moves by migration from cell to cell; there is no jumping or skipping it turns out. You may never unduly influence the market. I never hold more than 100,000 shares of one equity (think 25 to 30 dollars a share) in a thread. And I never trade more than 10% of the cummulative volume at any point in the day always using blocks that are smaller than the T&S blocks running at that time. The entry/exit block ratio is about 20/30 for the limitng case. The above is not found in college courses and if you sit through it in an MBA setting it is because a person like me may be a guest lecturer.