and also, indulging in soap box ranting on a forum is a lot more enjoyable than watching some chart going up and down wondering if you're about to lose some money or, worse, win some and have to feel even more reluctant about the subsequent trade than the current one (don't you always get a bad feeling when you've just won, that you'd rather reduce risk of loss by 100% and not trade the next trade, ever?) forums are a hobby, trading is toil. it's hideous work. it's boring shit which rich men and women pay underlings to do for them while they go and rant on twitter or something.
I always found funny in my many years at ET is the amount of time wasted arguing over semantics and "definitions" as though that fills a basket of fucks given about such things rather than simply trading what you see and stop worrying about what others see. It's all bulshit. Trade your product, your time frame and your method, make money.... and shut the fuck up. Seriously...in my business we don't tolerate whiners and people who always have to show their way is the only way. This is the only business I see hidden people on a forum have to be right about their definition of bullshit words that are irrelevant to trading. I short NQ and it goes down and I make money and close the position. Someone find me the rat's ass I have to give to care whether it was a larger downward trend, a bull reversal, a short-term swing, a tick phuck, a candlestick flying vag formation. Seriously...you kids argue over more bullshit that if you put the same effort into trading that you put into defending what "edge" means or diarrhea drivel of what is a trend, you would have more free time in life and maybe make more money. Some of you have threads littered with long prose and not 1 fucking trade posted. Even MY post is too long and is 5 minutes of my life I will never get back but this place is like a giant day care center for failed traders because i never met a person making money in the market that really gave a fuck what someone thought of a definition of a word... I checked my bank account and spoke to my accountant and he assured me the definition of a word or winner of the "Best product to trade" contest has never added free dollars to my account. NEW ELITE TRADER MOTTO: Who gives a shit...just make some fuckin' money!
I read your profile and found this: The 15-minutes-of-work-a-year trading method You are not objective and probably have a hidden agenda. Why else would you put the link in your profile? After more then 2 decades of daytrading I know perfectly well the pro's and the contra's. And it was the best decision of my life. I don't have any stress, no burn outs, no health problems, have lots of free time every day, can even not trade for weeks or even for months... I know nothing else that can give me this quality of life.
obesity stats: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41953530 example of trader performance from front page of ig.com: "79% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading spread bets and CFDs with this provider." so those 'presumptions' turn out to be well-researched facts (you're the one making presumptions i suggest) and you're very naive as for my statements concerning the health impact on day traders, i have spoken to ex wall street and ex deutschebank programmers and analysts and they have told me about traders on the professional trading floors and about traders of that ilk working at home - and the bottom line is all of these traders, i have been informed, suffer from so much stress - indeed i was chatting to police and they were talking about a friend of theirs who worked in the financial sector as a trader and he too was amaaazingly stressed - the evidence is overwhelming. anyway. back to the key to trading - ie maths. i am one of the british establishment's best mathematicians. i know what i'm doing. and you're not very cheerful. proof that trading is turning you into a miserable and unhealthy person!!! "You are not objective and probably have a hidden agenda. Why else would you put the link in your profile?" well actually i am creating an army of activistic hedge funds, it may take decades to reach fruition, thus i have made some key knowledge available free to the public - there is a google ad on the page, true, but if i had 1 million readers all i'd earn is 25,000 pounds, and that's pathetic. i'll make far more out of the trading method. the information is there so that we can build a movement of young, rich, strong, intelligent humans to change the world i am on this forum because unlike some here i know that most of my knowledge came from watching and listening to what others were saying and doing on the markets, as well as some innate mathematics (since a very very young age, as i mentioned, i have been one of the british establishment's mathematical "geniuses") you're paranoid and suspicious. trading, particularly day trading, WILL do that to you!! "Seriously...you kids argue over more bullshit that if you put the same effort into trading that you put into defending what "edge" means or diarrhea drivel of what is a trend, you would have more free time in life and maybe make more money. Some of you have threads littered with long prose and not 1 fucking trade posted." now you see that is a classic result of trading - a completely agitated and foul-mouthed geezer. anyway. i find the lectures of Robert Shiller very useful. now there's a man who knows how to trade. without a god damn doubt "if you put the same effort into trading that you put into defending what "edge" means or diarrhea drivel of what is a trend, you would have more free time in life and maybe make more money." that's just stupid - making money out of trading is a direct result of huge loads of BRAIN WORK - brain work often benefits from discussion, argument, debate and research putting 'effort into trading' means playing psychological games with yourself in order to basically pull out profits through verve and will power. this is all very well, a very excellent feat, well done, i've done it myself, but it is harmful and a stupid second-rate way to make money. the best way is stress free. that's a fact. and in 'our' industry that is perfectly possible, so why make yourself suffer other than because your attachment to gratification is too strong for you to be able to live through penury and trade the slow steady way which pays off in the longerterm. oh and scat-person... i was at a privileged school in britain which is basically a banker factory. it makes bankers and traders. and i'll tell you this - all of the most intelligent students there other than a tiny tiny minority did NOT become bankers they became things like top surgeons or physics professors. most of the bankers from that school came from mediocre maths sets. that's the trading world. it's very far from being a community of the finest mathematical minds. which ought to tell you something about the most commonly used approaches - they are not really the most intelligent possible. why NOT seek what IS the most intelligent road possible? why argue and call me naive and so on? do you think i haven't suffered intensely from the stress of trading, whilst winning, and come to these conclusions like that? otherwise how or why else would i say what i say? trading is extremely tough. the only way to beat it is sheer genius. otherwise the bear eats you every time - whether you win or lose the money. one thing i like about having (touch wood) quit day trading - i no longer hand over hour after hour to a god damn machine. i can do what i like when i like. and despite that i feel confident about making 20 to 30% per year most years of my life from here on. as for day trading, sure, it's the only way i know which may enable me, with a lot of stress and agony and time lost, to make 100% to 300% a year. the money isn't worth it. the 20 to 30% a year i get while doing little more than 15 minutes of work a year. the 300% a year i'd get while doing about 8 hours a day just about all week days... admittedly in the 8 hours all i'd do is about 10 minutes of actual work, but the machine would own my time, new trades would open every day, my attention would not be able to escape thinking about and being aware of trades, moving stops, opening new trades, etc so in other words for NO WORK AT ALL you can get a decent 20% per annum at least, for giving up ALL YOUR WAKEFUL HOURS you can get say 10 times that. now why not enjoy life and keep the 20% rather than go for the 300%, become a schizo paranoid nut job full of bile and stress with no control over what you really do with the hours of your life? if i was day trading do you imagine i'd have been able to come here and write all this? and as for my plan to create an army of activistic hedge fund traders... how would i do that if i was busy scraping away at a graph all hours of the god damn day? like i said, it all comes down to how good you really are at maths. most traders are slackers who want an 'easy' way out and are willing to trade their body's health for that 'easy' way out. but people like shiller are looking at how simple and powerful truths about maths and probability can be applied to the markets in a way which minimises work and maximises profit whilst ideally just eradicating the majority of risk. he does indeed suggest that value stocks are the lifeblood of a traders' profits. anyway. happy day trading, folks. don't bust a gut, as my biology teacher used to say.
Day-trading can be done, but the probability of a new trader progressing from non-trading to profitable day-trading before they blow up is minimal. For those who make it, they've no reason to change what they're doing, so other newbies, "new newbies", naturally and wrongly conclude this is the way to trade and make money. I'd like to have seen ESMA ban day-trading for the first 12 months off a new account rather than the dumb leverage restrictions they instead applied 2 months ago.
I'd like to believe you but I am one of the best mathematicans in the world. No doubt you are one of my peers. I predict that sooner or later you'll quit 'day trading'. When we are both 80 you and I will have the same amount of money, effectively, even if you have say 5 billion more than me (it'll still be, for both of us, far in excess of what we need). But I will have spent almost every single day of my life (not merely a few weeks or even 'months' a year) doing what i want and not being exactly the same as a rat-race wage slave for all your intelligence, you enslave yourself and proudly! of course i'd like to believe you and go back to day trading. one of my points above was that NOBODY doesn't have bad days, weeks and months - ie when you lose overall. nobody doesn't. not even you. and so you have those times, those stressful moments, entire months where you're pissed off. with day trading that's problematic as you are expecting short term gains. with longterm investing it's EXPECTED - ie you wait through slow periods or bad periods - there is no stress involved. if one of my "15 minutes a year" trades goes wrong, the worst that'll happen is i'll sit on that particular trade for 4 years. the difference to the human mind and body is immense. a day trader is a masochist, that is a fact. you have to be one to do it. otherwise even if you're good at it you will, like me, quit and be satisfied at being able to do it right, and consider that alone to be the success you wanted. the evidence i have seen supporting my case seems overwhelming to me. if there are ways to make daily short term gains without risking daily short term losses, i for one would be glad to know about them. so would quantum physicists, no doubt. i think why i am angering some of you is that i'm not saying the tired lines which everyone knows: "day trading doesn't work" - because you and i know that for the minority it DOES work; my argument is not so easy to knock down as that - i'm saying that even if you make money out of it, you lose your time and your health. patience leads to big money the right way. imagine if the dollar and pound collapse (and bitcoin didn't even rise, and gold and silver stayed flat)... and imagine some sort of new socialist society formed where everyone had what they needed AND MORE and money wasn't even a part of society any more... day traders would be the biggest losers of all time, in terms of the time they had invested. and what are the chances of a dollar pound collapse and the transformation of society into a utopia? hmm. well maybe there aren't enough good mathematicians around here to answer that question properly. somebody ask max keiser. he'd know.
i'd just ban day-trading altogether. the fact is that as you admit it takes experience to not let day trading just blow you up. so whether or not you have experience it is a harsh thing which puts much pressure on you and can very easily harm your body and mind. i know that if an intelligent mind figures out how to day trade they may latch onto it but i feel sure that most such minds actually do what i have done and eventually realise that methods they developed for day trading out of working methods for longer-term trades are methods which ought to simply be used for longerterm trades. i could never have been a successful day trader if i didn't first learn how to make money really really slowly. but i said it the other day - ESMA should have banned day trading altogether and hopefully corbyn will begin the process of doing so when he is in charge. and transaction taxes will have that impact - yes daytraders, my bruv corbyn is getting ready to put a transaction tax on EVERY SINGLE ONE of your day trades... then what? then how much more stress will you suffer to get those few % a week or whatever?!!! ha ha ha ha ha (evil laugh of rogue anarchist socialist with trading skills)
schweiz i was actually going to also publish, at tvhobo, a precise description of how to successfully day trade. to explain to people how you do it and THEN tell them why it's harmful and why you shouldn't do it. in the end i scrapped the latter idea, i know my audience, they'll only read something relatively succinct and which doesn't go off on 10 tangents. so i'm only teaching them the 15 minute malarkey. anyway. fyi.
I don't like tax, I don't like government intereference, I don't like Socialism, I don't like Corbyn.