Best Trader of All-Time

Quote from bighog:

I vote for the American voter. We got out of our loser and put in a yankee winner. Let the redneck party keep the south with the heat, humidity, gnats, bugs. :p

This guy knows how to get linked up , thank you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxVWckPZX0A
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Good luck with your yankee loser. you will need it.

By the way, the Bushs are really East Coast blue bloods.

Go whine over that.:(
 
Quote from Agassi:

Ok. Lets try to understand this:

What if I trade with $1000 capital and I "blow up". Based on your assumptions "regardless of fund size" and "blow up" ...u get my point right?
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I fail to see what the problem is. If you blow up at any point then you're finished, out of the game, kaputt.. If you turn $1 000 into $0 or $10 000 000 into $0 then by definition you cannot proceed with your trading beyond that point.

You're probably suggesting that if you start with $1000 and lose it you can probably easily whip out another grand from your back pocket. This just means that your initial capital was $2000 and by losing the thousand you just had a 50% drawdown.
 
Funny how trend followers rip on Niederhoffer for blowing up his account twice, but their own guru "the folk singer" blows up multiple times yet trend followers brush this under the rug..... hmmmmm.

:D
 
Quote from Rearden Metal:

Livermore & Gann; the best traders of all time?
That's just like calling Amarillo Slim & Doyle Brunson the 'best' poker players of all time.

A hundred years ago the patterns were MUCH simpler and the competition MUCH softer. These guys were great, sure- but they were playing a far easier game than the one that exists today.

I'm sure the world's #1 top 17th century chess player got plenty of respect back then (before anyone really knew how to play), but put him against any modern day grandmaster, and the guy comes out looking like a scrub.
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It depends how you measure "great". Was Alexander a terrible general because his force would get stomped by most 3rd world armies today? Greatness should be measured as the individual's ability relative to the possibilities and competition at the time, since in the absence of time-travel that is all an individual can perform against, no matter how great he or she might be.

If you measure greatness as performance relative to the possibilities of the era, performance vs competition, resume etc, then past masters can easily be rated higher than the present best.

The ideal experiment would be to take the best of the past at age 1 day, bring them into the modern era, and train them side by side with the modern greats from age 1 day also. If that were done, I don't see any reason at all to think the past greats would do worse - probably they would do better, as the sample size is bigger.
 
It's very natural for people to want to ask who is the best at X ... even though if you were to think about it rigourously, it is a meaningless question with no reasonable answers.

This is really a popularity competition - who do *most* people agree is the best trader, so we can then proceed to lionize him thereafter. Human beings are programed to look for hierachy (hence our love of top ten lists) and then to wax lyrical and lionize (hence our obsession with winners ... which allows guruism and cults to thrive).

Note that most people will name published traders as the "best", because that is the extent of their domain knowledge. To suggest that Livermore is the "best" is simply an admission of personal ignorance. He was a genius, but partied like a rock star, frolicked with show girls, blew up several times and committed suicide. The book about him makes for exciting reading and has subsequently made him famous. If Levefre was a lesser author, we would have never heard of Livermore.
 
Quote from AAAintheBeltway:

Of course, those of us who have been aorund here a while cannot forget $$$$$$$$$$MR.MARKET$$$$$$$$$$$.

Did Stevie Cohen have 73 consecutive winners?

Could Jesse Livermore bench 375?

Does Paul Tudor Jones have 19 inch biceps?

Does George Soros have body hair so thick that large animals live their entire lives undetected on his body?

No, no, no and no.

There is only one Mr$$$$$Market.

There is that other guy Waxie however. I am stunned no one has mentioned him, since it is well known that HE RULES THE FRIGGIN' MARKET!!!!!!!!!!!!! I saw that on an informercial, so it must be true.
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:D
 
Bro, I think you've got it backwards.

Today, trading is much easier for a skilled outsider than a century ago.

Imagine trading back then when a normal stock was trading just several thousand shares a day. Maybe on a record volume day Steel would trade a few hundred thousand.

Who were the participants you were competing against? Was Katie, the nurse from Omaha investing in ETF's from her Etrade account? Were their mindless bots around to pick off? Hardly.

Instead the trade was dominated by insiders and their hand chosen surrogate, the Specialist. If you'd winged them around in 1909 the same way you were at Schonefeld you'd have had the board of directors and inside cliques manipulating you day and night. And without any retail for you to unload into if you were stuck on size. Today these companies are so well distributed it's very rare for any single ax to be big enough.

Case in point of the old days was the Porsche-VW move last year. That was VERY old school. But Porsche owned what? 70% of VW? That's rare these days. The next time you hear of a true short squeeze in something like IBM then let me know......

Quote from Rearden Metal:

Livermore & Gann; the best traders of all time?
That's just like calling Amarillo Slim & Doyle Brunson the 'best' poker players of all time.

A hundred years ago the patterns were MUCH simpler and the competition MUCH softer. These guys were great, sure- but they were playing a far easier game than the one that exists today.

I'm sure the world's #1 top 17th century chess player got plenty of respect back then (before anyone really knew how to play), but put him against any modern day grandmaster, and the guy comes out looking like a scrub.
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i'm a little puzzled people have mentioned livermore and jhunjhunwalla - admittedly, both good traders - but not dirk du toit (forex)

it may sound like a stretch to some, but i think his 'bird watching in lion country' alone outweighs all the achievements of livermore and jhunjhunwalla taken together
 
Quote from gigsup:

He is in Market Wizards so he must have got someone's attention.:)

A farm boy from Ohio won't make your list of elites.......give me a break. Anyone worth their salt starts at the bottom.

Isn't Tudor Jones from Tennessee.
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Paul is from Memphis.

He learned the cotton merchant trade from his cousin, Billy Dunavant, who introduced him to Eli Tullis - - - a cottom broker who hired Paul and put him into the cotton futures pit at the NYCE at #4 WTC.

I was his floor broker at Tudor Investment Corporation on the COMEX back in 1986.
 
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