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What the market DOESN'T do is as important as what it does do. You should strive to be the "smartest dumb money" in the market. Every tick is important, but not every tick requires that you take action. You'll make far more money reacting than you will predicting. Sometimes it's...

For me, part of why I think of it as a standing order, whether placed beforehand or not, is because I view my trades like a scientist views an experiment. 1 tick beyond where I put my stop and the my "experiment" has entered "no-man's land" as far as I'm concerned and I'm out, just like a...

The only way to prove this empirically is to look at the results of traders who use stops and traders who don't use stops and compare their returns for statistical significance. This kind of blanket statement is useless. In simple terms, the only way what you are saying is true is if 85% of...

The other point to consider is that what he's done with volume can also be done with price. I've done it and it's great for keeping me out of trades where price appears to be doing something, but actually isn't.

Exactly, price is the only "indicator" which has a direct impact on your P&L. Not that you only trade your P&L, you trade your process, but still it makes sense to focus your process on the thing which most impacts your P&L. The only way I could see using indicators is for divergences, e.g...

True enough. I think we've all had streaks where it turns out the market was just lending us the money and had no intention of letting us keep it.

I see what you are saying about predicting the exact outcome of the next trade being an unrealistic expectation. I'm more thinking of it in the context of adding contracts over X (hopefully many) number of times reaching my threshold and if there is an equation that says that "on average" it's...

I agree with you that the only rational reason to add contracts is due to equity growth, not simply pumping more money into the account. Everything I do is completely rule-drive, so for me the big thing really is trying to figure out that "n" and just trade the n-th signal as I would the n-1...

The guy at "VIX and More" does a good job of using the VIX. I would start there.

Say you've determined a threshold for adding contracts as your account size grows, but you want to optimize the timing, i.e. you don't want to just add on the next trade after your account reaches the threshold because you don't want to be adding just when you are about to have a losing trade...

Most people with genius level intelligence are used to being right 90%+ of the time. There is no way in the world to be right that frequently when trading. I don't care if your profit target is 1 ES tick, you simply won't be right 90% of the time. Many people who are used to that can't adapt...

Actually, Chicago is the only top 10 metropolitan area to have lost population over the past 50 years or so, if I remember correctly, and is back at its 1920s level of population. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703312904576146741729857936.html It is a great city, but...

And she could make a mistake, lose her medical license and get sued for every dollar she's worth. No shortage of risks in the world.

Some of this can be mitigated, even in NYC or Chicago, if you went to the right schools, e.g. Harvard, MIT, UChicago, Wharton or about half-a-dozen other places. Then people will just assume that you're too smart to waste your time trading for a "good firm". Of course, your results then need to...

ES

I want to be able to set up a stop limit order, but specify a time for withdrawing it if it hasn't been triggered. Any platforms that will enable this? Thanks.

The main problem with that statement is what do you think the books and articles are written about? It's what actually happens in the marketplace. The statistics in the paper I referenced came from actual data, so I'm not sure how it would follow that they were somehow not reflective of the real...

Yeah, it did, but I doubt that anyone within the company would have called what they were doing "gambling". It was one of the most heavily-researched product introductions in the history of corporate America. Point being, your use of the term "gambling" doesn't distinguish between a guy...

Then I guess the management of Coca-Cola was "gambling" when they introduced New Coke, right? By your definition, they were putting something out there that hadn't been proven in real time and so even though they spent millions of dollars in market research, it was all just a gamble. On the flip...

Well, we only really hear about the ones that blow up, though. What you need to look at (and what the paper I linked to kind of does) is look at the expected number of "blow-ups" versus the actual and see how the two compare under the assumption that there is no skill involved in trading. To...