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So you're saying that nowhere in all of those spreads is a directional bet, even if only implicit? That seems a bit hard to believe. Somewhere, somehow, you're betting a direction in something, even if it's only a directional bet on the direction of the correlation as it approaches any number...

My experience is that it was emotional until it became intellectual. Now it's all puzzle-solving and optimizing. If my strategy ever started to fail, I suppose it would become emotional to me if I couldn't fix it. I have learned to love being right ~60% of the time.

So what? And not every quant who has "replaced stops with different means" is profitable. The idea that somehow not using a stop makes you better is only going to be true for very naive implementations of stop placement and movement. That example you used this morning had a fixed stop and...

Hey, asshole, you've been saying for about 3 days now that you "don't use stops" and "stops are for losers", well WTF is this: "I go short march 6. I get stopped out." "Next day it tells me to short. I go short. I stopped out." Are you a fucking retard or are you deliberately trying to...

Well, I just noticed that there was a seamless transition amongst those who used to bitch about "program trading" to those who bitched about "HFT", so clearly these were just people who didn't know how to trade, but knew how to find a scapegoat. Plus, from a practical perspective, I pay...

It wasn't the last thing, but it's something that can give you a huge boost in returns and turn a marginally-unprofitable strategy profitable or a profitable strategy more profitable: Identifying "false positive" trade signals, where everything looks exactly like a trade that typically turns out...

Having never been a scalper, I can't say that I noticed a difference. If you are playing for ticks, HFT has probably changed your life, but I'm playing for swings that can last up to a day off of set-ups that take hours to form. HFT is just all the noise "in between" my trades. Don't care about...

Yeah, I already said I don't use charts, but whatever. I would love to see you identify, at a better than chance level, charts of assets traded by HFT and assets not traded by HFT. I highly doubt you could identify any difference in the charts. Sort of a "blind taste test". HFT is just the...

I was thinking more of how they get into a position and how they hold on to it and how they exit. In terms of trying to "cause disturbances", that's a little outside of what I'm thinking, but that's just me. Also, I would think that a strong hand's job is kind of done after they get into a...

I'm thinking more about how they act prior to placing an order and what is their decision-making process, rather than how they'd then execute the order.

The HFT canard? Really? Man, that's hacky. It's the equivalent of some trader in the 1800's blaming the sunspot cycle.

So, how is "your system telling you to exit" different from a stop? And, even if you "stop trading the system" at some point, you're already in the short trade in the example. What are you going to do, go to the exchange and say "Hey, that short trade I put on without a stop actually was...

There's certainly this aspect of it and, at any given moment, one would expect the open equity of a strong hand's positions to show a positive number. And, yes, there is a certain "collective" nature to the strong hands, since the market's a huge place and, despite all the claims that it's...

See, I think this is very much aligned to what I think the strong hand does. Defines a "point A" and a "point B" and treats everything in between as little more than noise or the means to an end. Only, unlike traders who are trading the noise as if it were signal, the strong hand knows where...

For clarity's sake, in that discussion I was talking about an initial stop. I actually do move stops based on favorable excursions. I don't use profit targets. When you say that your system would have told you to "get out" if you had the bad luck of going short at the March 2009 bottom, how...

I think that both of our styles is to boil things down to the essentials, so it makes for a similar approach and similar concerns. Get rid of all the extraneous issues to focus on what's important. Capitalization is definitely part of being a strong hand, but what I'm seeing is actually...

Everything I'm seeing for nearly two years now tells me that the changes in market conditions are more apparent than real. There is an underlying logic to them that is non-random. And it's not just the past two years, because I look at old charts and see the same logic and I'm thinking, that's...

Well, an algorithm has to be devised by a human, so it really isn't the creation of a computer, but of the human mind. There are some software packages out there that create algorithms by data-mining, but I don't know if anyone who'd fall into the "strong hands" category actually works with...

Every trade I put on is based on a specific hypothesis about how the market will behave in the future based on the relevant past action (duh, freaking obviously, since that is all anyone can do unless they have a crystal ball), including a price beyond which it should not go. If it goes beyond...

I'm only concerned with the "logic" of price and time. How that plays out visually is not a part of my decision-making at all. The day I realized that there actually was some logic to the market's fluctuations was shocking and actually was spurred by a series of bad trades that failed in a...