what's the common approach to develop an edge(if there is any)?

Discussion in 'Strategy Building' started by traderzhangSan, Jul 14, 2010.

  1. For stock traders. 5000/6.5 ~ 3 years. That is too generous. I would say about 8000 hours minimum. For forex that may not even be enough, 10000+. For futures maybe the same.

    "many institutional traders don't [ahve] that [mnay] screen time, yet they are profitable."

    In 13 words, you have 2 spelling errors and one syntax error. In maybe about 20 years plus, you have not managed to learn how to spell properly English, yet you think it can take less than that to learn how to take other people's money. You are mistaken.
     
    #11     Jul 14, 2010
  2. Lots of good stuff here. Nice post. This has been my process for the last 10 years or so. 1000's of ideas, maybe 10-20 good ones that are working well.

    I think the best thing to take away from this discussion is two-fold:

    (1) Generate a lot of ideas.

    (2) Don't get married to / attached to any one idea.

    Mike
     
    #12     Jul 14, 2010
  3. Piffle

    Piffle

    Great post. I pretty much agree with this. I think after 5000 hours you'll be lucky to be consistently profitable. I agree that 8000 to 10000 is more likely. I know new guys don't want to hear this, and I didn't either when I was new, but you need to be committed to putting this time in if you want to be successful. If you somehow make it there early, great. It will take you thousands of hours to even figure out what you are looking for. Some never do.

    Eventually (for some) things start to click and you make a few discoveries that REALLY work. If you are lucky you will figure out how to spend your research hours productively and start generating a profitable system every 20 to 2000 hours (yeah, that wide of a range).

    Sometimes you even end up with, as they call it in the art world, a "happy accident". My best system I stumbled across because I was testing out a completely different idea, but there was a bug in my code that made it work differently than I was trying to code it to work. Of course I found the bug and fixed it, then my profit went away! So I built a system around the bug.
     
    #13     Jul 15, 2010