I have trouble navigating around ET(too many threads with the same topic), but you can just post the system results for now, that is if human discretion is not involved. If it is, I label that system no better than flipping a coin Merry Christmas
At least we can both agree that the market is irrational. Anek is a discretionary trader, but im more than sure if you saw him making live calls and doing so profitably day after day as he has now for several months, it could at least potentially be a convincing argument.
why is it that everything you post has to do with Mirus Futures? If you want to advertise you should become a paid sponser, not try to fool us be posing as a trader. pretty weak
Every trader in the business has either lost a lot of money or is about to lose a lot of money. Those who say they have never lost any money are usually liars. There was one year where I lost 100,000 dollars. I went through the traditional speculators guilt. I couldnt sleep at night, I was so stressed, and my entire life was a wreck. However, 100,000 was the price for "growing up". Once you touch a hot pot and get scalded then you will not do it again. In this case, I know where I went wrong and wont do it again. Is 100,000 a lot of money? Nope. Its just pieces of paper that you cant take with you to the grave. It can be made back just as easy as it was lost. However, in order to make it back quickly, you have to know where you went wrong. "Risk-management". Know it, breath it, feel it and make it part of your life. I look on at people in my life who are losing money on their houses and can barely afford to pay their bills. I can see how they are now feeling the pain of the speculation guilt. Their pain was unlike mine when I lost 100k. The money lost was taken from me just like that...however, the housing speculators are going through a harsh and slow pain. Its like the difference between death by a bullet and death by AIDS.
You may presupposing that a person has to create things from scratch. A person in this thread, in two paragraphs said: 1. the markets are irrational and 2. a good record of discretionary trading of a few months is something to pay attention to. He happens to be reading the thread and happens to have a journal that is throwing money (paper) in a big hole. How does a person making a beginning use critical thinking. How does the person grasp the first small truth that is the seed that then allows him to know that he knows? The notion of having to know something is a critical step. It was pointed out that surgeons know what they are doing with respect to the system that they assess and repair. It is something, for sure to do an assessment as a team member and get a person in trouble to at least stabilization. It all starts in the same way. We all know something. Somethings, even. And there are crucial forks in the road. The beginning of the path to keeping a person alive does not start with discretion. People who use discretion are not allowed in the space. A potential trader must not be allowed in the space. The paper trader above is not in the space. He has a journal and he does commentary but none of it is crucial in any way. He is doing experiments and passing the time. That is not what a potential surgeon would be doing. Incisively and critically, a person needs to grasp the opportunity. To be a successful trader, grasping the opportunity is the crucial seed. This is a step past considering the market to be irrational. Systems that operate in the context of rules for participating in trading or investing are doing so with a semblance of order. Humans are systems for surgeons to work with. Markets are systems for traders to work with. I do not use descretion neither does the person who says Merry Cristmas. He may not trade either. To begin , he has to see the nondescretionary aspects of anyone or any system if he is going to continue to go along with it. Everything ultimately funnels towards the system the market represents. By using critical thinking, a person moves away from two things: 1. that markets can be irrational and 2. that descretion is a necessary aspect of participating. What a potential trader turns to is grasping small principles and the connection of these principles. The market reveals these principles upon observation of the rules and upon observation of its operation. The rules are written down and market data is fed in real time to any one who wants to observe it. From the smallest to the largest aspects of markets, everyone really lucked out. Markets do not jump around simply because they are so huge. By grasping, how price moves, without jumping, a person gets to see how money is made by participants. Money is made as price changes. The person who has announced the markets are irrational is participating by losing paper money as price changes as seen in his journal. Hundreds so far as he reads a descretionary trading journal. By grasping a small principle, price moves by steadily migrating instead of jumping around from place to place, a critical thought process becomes evident as to how to join in the movement using trading rules to make money. This can be proven to "Merry Christmas" and everyone else without descretion ever entering the picture. It is crayola 102 which is different from crayola 101. 101 is done by scribing the path of price. 102 is done by noting ahead of time the limits of price movement. Think of the critical thinking required to design and develop the crayola series. 101 uses price movement data and is easy to perform as the data rolls in. The same is true for crayola 102. 101 records what happened and 102 records what didn't happen. 102 is nice that it does it ahead of time. 101 and 102 show that the markets are rational and not irrational. They also show that descretion is not involved. The many other crayola courses are used for corroberation of 101 and 102. It is the end of 2007. Why not make a list of things to do in 2008? Do crayola 101 and do crayola 102 could be on anyone's list from about fifth grade on up. If you are a fifth grader you get out a workbook and your crayolas. In this setting you repeat using the cralolas until you get it right and the teacher lets you move ahead to more complicated things. You are way past writing on walls and fooling around scribbling on sheets of paper. The workbook is the key element. It has drills in it and they are well defined. It is like me asking increasenow to post his trading screen. He cannot do that. He cannot get out his workbook. To do crayola 101 you need a workbook 100 pages long and it has five minute charts in it for 100 consecutive days. there is a little box in the lower right for a person to fill in. the box is filled in with the sum of the lengths of the zigzags drawn on each of the 100 charts. these 100 answers tell a story that crayola 101 teaches. The critical conclusion that is drawn after 100 charts are all zig zagged and summed is that the market offers a lot of money all the time and every day. It is an ammount of money that is not easily grasped. Lets imagine that it is grasped after a mere 100 charts. What does this tell the mind? It says one thing: I better learn how to get that money.Merry Christmas doesn't know this as yet. He thinks something else about a chart whatever that may be. If a person does the 100 charts then whether he likes it of not, he knows that markets are not irrational. Two people who are not going to do the charts are______ and ________. We all know that hundreds of names can be filled in instead. All of these people are too smart to do it and they are all so smart that they can really pretend it isn't necessary and it could just be thought about for a minute or two and pretend it was done in their minds. This thought process is equivalent to doing only one chart and not filling in the sum (which takes some effort to actually work through). Fill in your name and do not fill in my name. I have pencilled in hundreds of charts to even make the bars first with EOD data that for each charts goes 17 inches across 26 weeks. There was no other way to have charts in those days. The rest of the crayola courses are all the same. You have a 100 sheet workbook and you follow the instructions. 102 does not use zig zags though. It just uses a series of horizontal lines which are filled in on a chart before the price bars are formed on the chart. what happens is that the price bars appear as time passes and they come to touch the lines and then move away from the lines. Again if a person does 100 of these, he has to fill in the sum of the movements and put it in the bottom right corner. He can come to understand that the filled in boxes for a 101 and a 102 for the same day have the same answers. After doing 200 of these he has found out that the word "descretion" has no application is trading. For me it is important to have the values of the small horizontal lines transmitted to me and displayed before the bars are formed whose ends then touch the horizontal lines. I wanted to see if increasenow was getting the values of the horizontal lines on his screen. So I asked him to post his "workbook". No workbook. We know kidpwrtrader is not simply because he is losing money all the time in his journal. No workbook either. So 20 to 40 of these horizontal lines are crayola'ed in as the day goes by. The bars form and touch them and they go to the next small horizontal line. Why don't they have this stuff on your trading platform?? Well you bought the wrong one is why. To do crayola 102 you need the right platform (workbook). This is too difficult for most people as was stated. It is not possible to do the critical thinking to get as far as crayola 101 and crayola 102. The answers in the lower left box are what the market is offering you to take form the market. It takes about 200 sheets to get this to sink into your mind. Less than half a ream of paper. If you print this post you still will need about 200 more sheets of paper. It is one long way from fifth grade to financial engineeering master's. And the MSFE is worthless if you did not go to fifth grade and use the crayola workbooks.