My answer was better, and you can get rich quick day trading, but the preparation will take you a lifetime.
I think that's nonsense. Whether you have three decades of experience or three days, if you have an edge and you're not a maniac, you'll make money.
It's amusing to see how brokers and others have convinced traders to keep losingmoney in hopes of finally learning how to trade! Either you have an edge or you don't. No amount of time, money or effort will give you an edge if you don't have one. It's only those who need your hard earned money and perhaps the brainwashed who convince you otherwise. Wake up!
In perusing trading forums and mailing lists I find mostly mushy definitions of "an edge." I still can't create a short definition that I can understand. Can you give me a specific example of a strategy and what its edge is and how it works?
What is an edge? The market does speak a language but like any language it takes time to learn. Already indicated I find the quest for a mechanical edge among retail traders to be entirely pointless. If anyone could find an edge with MA's, RSI and the like we'd all be billionaires. Just learn the language. Trading skill comes from experience and experience only really comes with losing money, unfortunately, though paper trading might help to minimize the initial loss.
Sure -- how about: viatical settlements - the edge is that the counterparties are often sick and desperately in need of immediate cash, so they're insensitive to fair-value considerations. Similarly, payday lenders.
I see your point in that often times a market participant can pick up a settlement at a 'discount' while still providing more value than the issuer may be willing to offer the client - however the participant is still taking on model/extension risk, so in my opinion, it's not a true 'edge'. A true 'edge' in my view is hard to define as it can be argued it's compensation for a service rendered or value added. Although I guess that's more of an edge than pure speculation/gambling.
Most people, including the OP, share your desires. There is also the matter of your belief systems. I certainly do not use edges or a collection of edges. Edges are a very popular myth of the Conventional Wisdom. Numerous edges exist and they are intractable as far as going out of favor. They are extremely persistent and can be very very precise. It is just that they are like not being able to see the forest for the trees. Edges are trees in that statement. The forest is NOT seen by the OP nor the person whose comment he persistently favors. What is it like to be an observer of people like you and the OP and all the others contributors to this thread who do not get the "forest" picture and who cannot, as well, see the "edges". An edge is just an approach that has a permanent positive mathematical expectation. A measurement is easy to take if the person is skilled at proper measuring. All such approaches are methodical and as such are completely defined. Mostly people do not know enough to define or operate edges. Often these people adopt an orientation to use groups of edgs and switch from one to another to take advantage of their partial knowledge and skills in applying this to that at specific times. There is a general plague with respect to what is possible in terms of making money. No one settles into a given range of annual income, simply because money makes money and wealth continually grows beyond any life style imaginable. Trading profits and wealth are never static. I understand that most people cannot see the markets or the market's continuing offer. No one resource, so far, is capable of showing what is going on in markets. If a person only has 3 or 4 information providing services, then he can't see the markets in the first place. For reasons only understood by the management here, it is not possible to connect anyone with the desire to see the markets with the minimum description and illustration of what he needs. Do imagine for a moment that you could come to a place that is equipped and fully set up. Imagine operators making use of this resource. In terms of money changing hands, you would be able to witness something like a gaso;ine pump delivering gasoline by the ton and not just the gallon. The print is a constantly flowing "partial fill" collectively. Let me finsih up with two strategies that keep the pump running. They ae not just edges but instead "forests" or maybe what you construe as strategies. For stocks, you trade a Ujiverse of quality stocks. Use 12 streams of 2 to 3 million dollars each. You do 100 turns per stream per year with a turn % of 10%. A one page sheet describes the strategy arrangement and on that sheet there is a rule for entry, a rule for taking the profit segment and a rule for exiting at the end of the segment. The precision lies on one thing. The sheet was verified by checking out 400,000 items as a sample and no changes were required to be made on the sheet. The sheet has time columns as fine as 30 minute intervals. There is a column for entry, a column for waiting until entry is possible and a column for exiting. All these columns are calibrated to the time of the day on 30 minute intervals. All stocks traded using this one pager are selected by calibrating the stock Universe (an Excel set of information columns and times) to the one pager. The remaining 1/3 of this page is a chart that shows the distribution of the measure across the 13 30 minute increments of a day. The one pager is a give away. This approach in the hands of a beginner shows that the 12 streams of capital can be assembled and filled up from a meager beginning and the time elapse is brief as you can see by creating an excel sheet from where you are today going to running 12 streams @ a 100,000 share capacity each. My best day using this approach at the 100,000 share limit was a net of 17 points per share. Certainly, this approach was citable offense by the SEC until they learned that what I do is NOT citable and their belief system was fucked up. They got that education and shifted their view of what is possible by retail amatuer traders. For commoditiy indexes there is another one pager. It is called "The Pattern" and it affords the user theability to extract the market's off to the fullest extent. It is NOT trend following. It is trend monitoring and analysis. What the trader does is "anticipate" an order of events that is cast in stone and unchanging over the history of markets. What is required is annotating the market and logging the order of events all in a binary vector context. The source of The Pattern was done by deduction and NOT by induction. For extracting the offer of the market, the peformance of the extraction is measured in terms of the ATR. You can do the crayola test to verify that the multiple of the ATR that is offered is 3 to 6 times the ATR for intraday trading taking the observable offer. These two strategies that are "forests" and are precise, continually repeatable, fully consistent and totally unblievable to you and to the OP. The trees are getting in the way of the forest for you and believers like you. How is this plethora a trees screening you viewers from seeing the forest. It is simple, you follow the myths of the Conventional Wisdom which permeates the financial industry and all associated with it in any way. Imagine the SEC on my ass for several years. It took them one long time to reason that I could not concievably know as many people as I would be required to know to trade all of my positions as an "insider" trader. Why did it take them so long to get themsleves straightened out? They finally saw through the myth based system they based their enforcement upon. Is it only possible for people to make unbeleivable amounts of money if they are NOT insider trading. They reluctantly and belatedly found out what the OP and you have not found out as yet.