If you had a proven trading system that was consistently profitable, would you share it or keep it to yourself? Here are 2 possible schools of thought. NO - Trading is warfare, pure and simple. The other traders are your enemy. To win in this game, you must be better and smarter than the competition. Every dollar you make is taken right out of the pocket of another trader. All warfare is based on deception. Only the strong can survive in this jungle. YES - The more traders who trade like you, the better. The more people think the same, the more predictable markets become. The extra volume makes market moves bigger and stronger and creates more profit for you. If everyone would follow your system, it would become a self fulfilling prophesy. any opinions?
No such system even remotely exists but if it did the answer would be no. Clearly. If your system backtested profitably without others knowing why would you think it would be enhanced by more traders keying off it? The more people who "know" will cause you difficulty in getting filled, noise, gunning for your levels ect.
I would share knowledge with someone knowledgable but I wouldn't share specifics, because all parties talking would know that is off limits and if the party was a person of skilled nature, he would know what I am talking about without me pointing out exactly what I am talking about. Sort of like what someone said, Two electrical engineers do not need to show each other their certificates to know each others skill level.
Lets say you had a system that worked 62% of the time. If it became more widely used, could the odds of success increase to 68%? Would it become a self fulfilling prophecy?
Over the years, I've noticed that the greater the trader the more open they are and willing to share ideas. The more inexperienced and less skilled traders all think that they've discovered something that is so darned precious that it can't be shared (meanwhile they have nothing of value 99.999% of the time to begin with). Look at all the ideas that have been shared by traders over the years: put call ratio, LBR's stuff, Tony Oz's stuff, Cook's cumulative tick, Donchian (turtles), and on and on.... Why does this discrepancy exist? I think because the experienced traders realize that success does not depend on one idea or setup but rather on the process of continuous learning - which is only possible through the exchange of ideas with other great traders. Also, there is a large psychological element where many times, even when a traders is shown a specific set up or idea, they wont' be able to handle trading it profitably.
This is incredibly true based on my experience as well. I would be open to discuss the method and philosophy of the trading strategy without going into the specific parameter tuning. I have met some very good traders and strategists, almost all of them are very open to general philosophy discussions *if* they believe you can think at their level, and share interesting insights. Tuning a specific strategy into a profitable one involves a lot of hard work, and that can only be discovered by oneself.