That's true and is one of my top concerns at the moment. I never had coding skills hence automation also was like voodoo for me. Probably the best way from freedom point of view would be some investment activity rather than short-term trading, because even with automation you never know if another CHF spike happens and how orders are filled. Could be a disaster unless you trade net long option positions or watch the market yourself.
Anyone gave up trading for a living?
- Thread starter turkeyneck
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That's true and is one of my top concerns at the moment. I never had coding skills hence automation also was like voodoo for me. Probably the best way from freedom point of view would be some investment activity rather than short-term trading, because even with automation you never know if another CHF spike happens and how orders are filled. Could be a disaster unless you trade net long option positions or watch the market yourself.
As for me, I try to invest it in longer-term fundamental ideas mostly. Financial markets are of great interest, just I treated day trading in a wrong way plus didn't have enough time for that recently, hence the pause.
Well for me one business just "took me" without me having much of a choice, lol.
Dear family member decided to retire and couldn't handle the growing rhythm and pressure (problems in certain sectors of Russian economy started a couple years ago rather than just recently). So we decided I was the obvious candidate due to age and background to take it over and drag out of problems, which I proudly can say I did. Human to human wholesale and retail trade turned out so much easier than day trading.
The other business is more like a life passion accompanied with education, that is counseling and coaching people (I have a degree in psychology), including behavioral finance of course.
The funny part is the longer I am diversified (soon will be two years since I switched from full-time day trading) the more I see how trading experience helps me in other areas of life, psychology helps in other areas of life and everything else helps about everything else.
Indeed there is no such thing as "bad" experience as long as we know what lessons to take from it. In this sense there is no such thing as "failed" trading also. Just valuable experience, pretty applicable in many other ways.
That's it shortly. Hope it helps.
Absolutely, investing gives you more freedom but offers lower returns and therefore requires more capital and I don't make enough to live off investing, never mind growing the account. It also enslaves you to the global macro trends which can be very unpredictable, in my experience daytrading offers better consistency.
With the CHF situation, even if you were glued to the screen, it wouldn't have made a difference as there was very little one could do - there wasn't any market at reasonable price levels.
Well, you can run a business and trade full time, including from the office. You can as well have offices in several places and delegate work. I must say I miss the time I was trading from the office, which for some reason, including traffic and time difference, is not easily manageable at the moment. I definetely had more human interaction when hanging out at the office than when trading from home and the more income you get besides trading, the softer the trading drawdowns feel.
In any endeavour at all, not just trading, you hear the same kinds of comments. Unless the person has an insurmountable fundamental flaw (i.e. I'm 5'3", so forget about basketball), I've grown to think that perseverence invariably leads to success. 10,000 hours is just a ballpark. Maybe success takes 10 years and 3 account blow-outs for one person, 6 months for another, but I don't think that it's "never" for anyone.
So rather, I think that the point where a person calls it quits is more about running out of patience towards failure or lacking conviction in the objective being achievable, than about it being actually unachievable. It just turned out to be too expensive for that person to see through.
And in the case of trading, unlike say professional sports, or even just regular employment to some extent, there aren't a limited number of seats: if/when you're consistently above break-even, congratulations you're a pro. No need to inch into the world's top 1000 traders or whatever, just a slight edge over the mass of retail traders who don't do any homework suffices.
At least, that thinking keeps me going.
In any endeavour at all, not just trading, you hear the same kinds of comments. Unless the person has an insurmountable fundamental flaw (i.e. I'm 5'3", so forget about basketball), I've grown to think that perseverence invariably leads to success. 10,000 hours is just a ballpark. Maybe success takes 10 years and 3 account blow-outs for one person, 6 months for another, but I don't think that it's "never" for anyone.
So rather, I think that the point where a person calls it quits is more about running out of patience towards failure or lacking conviction in the objective being achievable, than about it being actually unachievable. It just turned out to be too expensive for that person to see through.
And in the case of trading, unlike say professional sports, or even just regular employment to some extent, there aren't a limited number of seats: if/when you're consistently above break-even, congratulations you're a pro. No need to inch into the world's top 1000 traders or whatever, just a slight edge over the mass of retail traders who don't do any homework suffices.
At least, that thinking keeps me going.
That's some good attitude, but imagine your goal is... learn to levitate. Maybe possible, but how probable?
It comes down to balance of values in our life in order to achieve the highest life quality.
While we don't know that levitation per se is at all possible, we do know of the existence of successful traders, so I don't think it's a fair comparison.
We both are making the same point about quality of life however: for some, the effort required to become a successful trader may be too uncomfortable.
And in the case of trading, unlike say professional sports, or even just regular employment to some extent, there aren't a limited number of seats: if/when you're consistently above break-even, congratulations you're a pro. No need to inch into the world's top 1000 traders or whatever, just a slight edge over the mass of retail traders who don't do any homework suffices.
At least, that thinking keeps me going.
That's the right attitude. All it takes is to find one good edge in the market, and before we get another flame war on what constitutes an edge, for me it's something that works for at least 10 years through various market conditions.
You won't make billions with an edge like that but you will make a nice living and possibly more than that.
While we don't know that levitation per se is at all possible, we do know of the existence of successful traders, so I don't think it's a fair comparison.
We both are making the same point about quality of life however: for some, the effort required to become a successful trader may be too uncomfortable.
Yes, that is my point: every effort should be worth it, leading to higher quality of life. Too often "success" comes very unbalanced and leads to lower quality of life as a result.
Speaking of trading vs. levitation, for most wannabe traders, who's only proxy to financial industry is online forums, seeing truly successful (over say 20 years) traders and seeing levitating guru is pretty much the same odds. Look @ ET.