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So how much money have you made from trading, mister experienced trader? I turned a 10k account into a 900k account in 4.5 years, not wildly successful, but I think statistics show that most traders tend to only know how to turn 900k accounts into 10k. :D

What makes you think that successful traders must be using past information? I would consider myself to be a relatively successful trader, and most of my money was made on the non-directional trades (which didn't require past info), as I said earlier, trading direction is extremely difficult...

They don't operate at random, but there are MANY major buyers and sellers out there, its not possible to know if there are more buyers than sellers in the market, until after the fact. Most traders rely on past information to predict future developments, that is why most fail.

They do. The market is inherently irrational and random, it doesn't even have to react to "good news" by moving up, and vice versa. The traders who trade price action or TA usually die by a thousand cuts from their stop losses (which includes commissions and slippage), because markets...

The major investment banks can't lose because they are not trading direction most of the time, the bulk of their profits come from making markets and profiting from the spreads/arbitraging, they wouldn't have lost huge during the 2008 meltdown if they were able to predict markets. There is...

Yea thats a pretty good summary.

Trading has been difficult for the past year, and its mostly due to the shrinking volume and choppy market.

You will never know if an instrument is trending or chopping until after the fact. Charts only show you the past, and not the future.

Yep gotta agree with you. This market is a meat grinder for anyone who is trading direction, especially dicretionary swing traders, these guys are most likely getting slaughtered by the crazy chop. I don't trade direction (only do arb) but even then it hasn't been easy for me either, I can only...

5 consecutive days of crazy whipsaw.

Yes it can. Most of these bets end at FT, so a draw is always a possibility unless its a game that involves asian handicap. Anyway those odds are definitely wrong, no bookmaker I know has Netherlands as the favourites.

You left out the fact that the match could still end in a draw.

Its possible to still lose if the trader has poor money/risk management, though imo its much harder to find a true edge than it is to master risk/money management. No amount of money/risk management will make a trader profitable if he has no real edge.

When you are able to make a decent living out of trading.

Find another edge, or wait it out.

Nobody can predict markets, and GS is proof that you don't need to predict markets to make money consistently. Their edge lies in their ability to siphon fractions of a penny from pikers making their daily bets, not unlike those HFT firms.

There will always be inefficiencies in markets. I know this because I am exploiting one right now (its getting harder to exploit it though), and I am not even doing it with super computers. The banksters are masters at trading because they know how to transfer risk to the pikers, being the...

These banks are making markets, and doing stuff like arbitraging and making money from the spreads, its not difficult to see why they have managed to be consistently profitable. It might be hard for the average piker to understand this though...

Rofl.

IMF/ECB press conference at 9am eastern, time to slaughter the bears.