People have no idea how much this attitude can influence their trading results. Person A trades only when he has a clear signal. Because he makes consistantly money he has more confidence. His winning rate is high so he is not afraid to trade and to wait for the perfect timing. Because he makes money there is no pressure to quickly trade again. Person B cannot wait to trade. He jumps in and out with a much lower winning rate because he trades every possible move. Because he has constantly to recover from previous losses he has a lot of pressure to trade. The result is that he has no patience to wait for the perfect moment and makes more bad trades. The pressure to trade will impact his results negatively. I daytrade but do on average around 2 trades a day. I have never more than 4 trades a day. I try to find the 2 best entries every day, and these entries I can find in general.
Sounds awesome! I imagine people doing really complicated quant stuff must be ridiculously intelligent and have a much bigger edge than those of us trading from charts and lines etc. Any chance of posting some of your calls so that we can copy you on some trades to make some extra $$$? (assuming the trades tend to last for more than a few minutes or you have very small profit targets)
I am not more intelligent than other people I suppose. I hear from other people that I have a very special way of (logical) thinking. For me the way I think is normal, but apparently for most other people I have very strange patterns in my thinking. I think also very analytical and seem to have very high skills for finding order in chaos or disorder. I did not realize all this, but my girlfriend came to this conclusion. She has a university degree in psychology. So I was a test case for her. Most of what I know now comes from here founding's. I always thought I thought, analyzed... like all people do. But I seem to have an abnormal pattern. As a result from this I seem to have found an edge that others cannot find. Sometimes my girlfriend asks me: what you are testing here is extremely logical. But how on earth did you have the idea to combine these things? Normal people would never make this combination or see the connection between the combined things. But for me it is all logical and taken for granted.
There are in general two populations in trading forums (message boards): one seeks to solve the puzzle; the other looks for calls that they can copy. The first is tenacious and is likely not to give up until the solution -- or at least an acceptable solution -- is found and they can cement their independence. The second never grasps that following somebody else's calls must eventually fail since one cannot take advantage of an opportunity that is already gone, and to follow this route necessitates perpetual dependence. This may fill the coffers of those who operate trading rooms, but it is not the road to long-term success in the financial markets, any more than is making investment decisions based on watching Buy Sell Or Hold on some financial channel. Is this kind of stuff [chat boards] helpful? Yeah, I guess, if your trading decisions are usually made in a men's locker room right after half-price "kegger night." -- Gary Smith
Could it be that people asking for live calls want to check live for themselves, by butting real money behind each call, the performance of a trader? Or could there be other reasons?
If they know the trader's trading plan, what difference does it make? The only variable is whether or not the trader is actually taking the signaled trades (and even if he is, they have no way of knowing whether or not he's using real money). But whether he does or not has nothing to do with whether or not the asker takes the trade. If the asker is to afraid to take the trade, then all he winds up with is unrealized expectations. Unless he's in a trading room, in which case he's also poorer.
In your view, is there any positive reason for someone to take someone's else calls - with real money? Or this is a totally absolutely useless set of actions, with zero possible benefits? I will continue the convo later on, but I will chech your views.
Not to take the thread off track, but my dad made a hell of a lot of money (hundreds of thousands of pounds) about 10 years ago copying the trades of someone he met on MSN messenger! (going back a while! do people still use that?) I sometimes wonder what happened to that trader. It was a female called 'Sarah'. For all I know, she is on this site!