The trader who trades because "it's difficult and I want to prove I can beat it," I'm happy for them that they struggle and can't make a dime.....
Once a reporter interviewed Ted Weschier and Tod Combs asked them what they did with their time everyday, after all, at BRK they only made a few trades a year. They said they spent 8 hours everyday reading and researching companies, businesses, news and after they went home, they read and researched more until bed time. So it only looked easy from the outside looking in. We are all different and with different trading styles so trading is very easy for you but 24/7 hard for me: The amount of constant backtesting, adjusting the recipe, finding/testing new recipes took up a lot of times. I tested and researched many things you folks posted and there are hundreds of things mentioned just in a day. The other day, someone here mentioned statistical arbitrage, I went out bought books written by Ed Thorp, read up on all the ET posts on the topic and studies published by professors from MIT, Columbia, Harvard, Stanford. And then there is Butterfly. Someone said it was bread and butter for you pros here. I spent hundreds of hours on it and still haven't found a profitable way and will probably spend hundreds of hours more before I give up. I also have hundreds of books on options that I read and reread. For every underlying I trade, I read up on the company's annual reports, SEC filings, FDA filings, analysts report, news releases, political news related, Fed reports..... the list is endless. And I read charts: ticks, minute, hr, day, wk, month for each underlying on my watch list everyday.... Since I don't have a finance background, to arm myself, there are also Coursera courses in finance, economics, financial engineerings, coding, programing and statistics I am taking. Life was a lot easier when I had my day job but the joy of making one good trade is priceless. Best wishes to you.
Yes, I too have spent thousands of dollars on trading books once upon a time. Recently I got rid of them all, I never need to buy another book again, unless it was just for the pleasure of reading. I also once subscribed to custom built fundamental data which a supplier sent once a month, that went on for some years and produced nothing but an experience of something which didn't work. I've had made for me, and produced myself, scores upon scores of Amibroker formulas that probed into every facet of indicators or ideas, volatility, acceleration blah blah, and no longer do I use. Do not even use Amibroker now, probably has been maybe 20 odd years on using that. Thousands of dollars spent on data. These days I use free data widely available on the internet. The point is; like any job, if it is approached incorrectly, it becomes difficult. Know how to do a job correctly takes skill and perseverance, narrow your focus onto simple concepts. I draw no charts, use basically no indicators bar a couple, draw no lines, plot no support or resistances, use no bought charting software, yesterday was an ok day (Monday) made + $12,000 on the day.
PS: I trade in my lounge room sitting on a sofa, laptop on my lap, not even sitting at a desk. The only time I might sit at my desk, if I want to hit numerous stock positions at once, then I use a monitor as it's more convenient using mouse and keyboard.
You are the master and I am not even at the student's level yet. There is also this constant fear that my success came from luck rather than skill so I need to keep looking for the real edge. It is "24/7" hard but I enjoyed it and made way more the last decade trading than when I had my day job. Best regards,
I've always thought to myself, "those guys many years ago, trading in the pits, how could they have been making money - surely they weren't plotting MA's and drawing hundreds of chart lines". My reasoning then became...If they weren't, then why should I? That's one reason I ridiculed some of the older ET posters (no longer here) who ran ET journals going into all sorts of baloney about hundreds of concepts on bar by bar analysis, and squiggly lines drawn all over charts, volume analysis, etc. Waste of time!!!
That's why I'm not an Al Brooks fan, all the bs about bar by bar analysis, utter crap! Talk about making trading complicated! KISS!
Trading in the pits is like playing poker, you essentially trade against someone you can see and you read their emotion and expressions and psychological state in addition to the information at hand and mostly you don't really need fancy charts and statistics. When I trade options, quite often it is against the mm's computer that has no emotion, only the formula inside the computer. To make money I have to be more correct than the computer's formula and therefore I need information that the computer formula misses to calculate what I think is the real price. The only human psychology and emotion I have to deal with is my own emotion and my own psychology.