Until recently, I mainly traded Matchbox cars. Started small, just one car, but worked my way up to 10 before the bots caught on and I lost my edge. I've been sim trading marbles and was ready to go live on Monday, but I appear to have lost them all after reading this thread.
I don't think I could handle another course in analysis - tedious beyond belief. You said you enjoy Topology? Yikes. You need those discrete math courses if you want to take some of the more interesting applied math. You also need abstract math (ring theory, group theory)
Since you are getting started in time you'll recognize the info you're missing, ie:tick files and a large database that you'll never have $20k to buy. I'm telling you where to get it, but you're a trading masochist and are really hurting yourself more than you know by not listening to a knowledgable third party about that. If you think you have to have screen time without trading strategies, I'm sorry. You'd be better off buying stocks than trading forex or futures. Unless you know you have a distinct quantifiable advantage there's very little chance of success. Watching CNBC will get your jargon down to at least a somewhat knowledgeable level of what moves markets than the assumption that charts themselves have anything to do with it. They are the result, not the cause. Apple earnings $8 billion above market moved NQ 25 points. You're right the Fed expectations had something to do with the move I made 10 points in TF on, but there wasn't any new macroeconomic expectations out of it. When noise comes, if I haven't seen it on TV you're liable to expect the worse, fear sets in, and you get out of your positions. On May 6th if you have playback capabilities it would be a good excercise to watch your reactions in real time. Mostly all that did was assure me having a stop in place is best no matter what anybody says about it. I have widened my stops, but increased my hold times from 1-2 days to 5 days, so with wider stops there should be additional profit in time from the more lengthy holds I use in my pairs trades on Covestor. Incidentally I was long TQQQ at $79.75 where I sold before it went to $53 in the next week. That's not untrue, and if I hadn't had another system signalling a lower high my track record would be an even bigger joke than it is with a 1.12 times leverage loss of 36%, and if you don't see the need for systematic trading algorithms use your knowledge. There are systems, particularly at wl4.wealth-lab.com that can be good starting shells and even if you can't compile them, coding them to see their results is well worth the effort it takes to do. I don't know why you prefer to trade without having an advantage. Until you have one, there's not going to be any way to ever make money consistently, and that's the plight of numerous traders without the requisite knowledge and first hand experience of what moves markets. You're mistaken that the Euro is why we're up. It's not. Earnings in the US are coming in remarkably well, and while you may not get the television news coverage, particularly CNBC or Bloomberg you're just not ever going to have any chance of pulling profits from the market.
"You're mistaken that the Euro is why we're up" I never said that! ... Up first because of AAPL, sold off and then continued up again after the FED interest rate announcement. You're right about good earnings. However, disappointing GDP numbers today. Finch added itself to the EURO region rating downgrades. However, Euro still went up. What I see is a balance/counter balance going on. I simply don't believe you are going to see a huge drop in the EUR that won't be countered with a move from the FED. ___________________________________________ I say again, Beau. Please give me time to pick up a few tools first. A bunch of data is useless without those tools. There are also many, many sources of data when I am ready to make use of that data. Patience, my friend, patience.
It's in the Feds interest to see the Euro fail. Dollar appreciates, Treasuries keep going up. Win/win. The politics may not be explicitly that way, but at the Fed they'd like nothing more than to see it go to zero.
I don't agree. A high dollar kills the trade balance. It is also deflationary. You don't want deflation when you're carrying a huge debt. Just the opposite: you want inflation. You want to devalue the USD since your debt is priced in USD.
If you haven't had modelling experience or realize the most difficult part in all of Econometrics and Empirical Analysis is data, you haven't learned much from your econ. We can be split about it, but just having data is probably more than 50% of the issue people have in analyzing datasets. If there's no datasets, you're not going to learn anything, no matter how much time you spend staring at the screen. Data is not useless, it's empowering, and believe me your claim that trading without analysis and learning price action is better than the average trader who does do that, is wrong. Analytical traders eventually get to systematic trading and automated trading. You're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't get the fact that without data you don't have any useful way of learning your tools, then all hope is lost. I'd think more than twice if somebody told me how much data I could get in an easylanguage portfolio simulator because that's a no-brainer. If you're admittedly coming from inexperienced prop trading, then it's clear you have no advantages and you won't know you have an advantage unless you analyze on a mountain of data before you even place your first trade. Your approach will take a really long time, and it doesn't have to. Without models, there can be no consistency, and I know you want to make money because we all do, but having tools is taken care of with Multicharts, however, without data it doesn't matter what you try to do you've got nothing. I always recognized I didn't have enough info but once I got my info and my systems the way I wanted it the only thing to do was to start trading professionally. You may have better algo programming than me, but the theories governing trading are as subjective as the time you're spending in front of the screen. Look into trading theories. Ignore the market until you have something to use. If you spend your time on the screen just glancing at it every 15 minutes is all you should be doing. There are e-mini currency futures in the database I'm talking about, so you can change your symbol mapping to trade forex if you want to. I didn't ever put a trade on after my first 10 "trades" in college until I'd done a compartive, quantitative analysis that included collecting data, using statistical analysis software packages, and then deciding what I'd like to invest in. If you're skipping that part maybe we're just different, but if I had your background, I'd still handle it that way. I figured I had "enough" programming knowledge after 3 comp sci classes that I didn't need to pursue the whole major since I knew a lot of the programming was not applicable to what I was going to do other than to maybe improve my computer programming problem solving skills, but that's all you have, and if datasets don't entice you then you haven't learned how to do any Econ research when the projects I did during Financial Econ could all have been turned into master's theses and dissertation. I didn't need to go get a PhD if I already knew how to produce that kind of research and analysis, so I didn't waste anymore time in computer sci since I knew all it could possibly do for me is get me introduced to antiquated programming languages that wouldn't ever be standard at any programming job I could have ever gotten.