Did you have naive trader cloud cuckoo land expectations

B

Businessman

.. when you started out trading?

When i first started trading, a very long time ago, i thought i could consistently make $500 a day, day trading stocks in a $10,000 account, no strategy at all, just thought i could catch some intra day moves. This was before pattern day trading rules.

$500 a day on a $10,000 account is over 1000% a year. My only basis was I thought i was pretty smart, having a computer science degree and being good at maths. And how hard could trading really be?, all those tech stocks moved up and down all day long.
My naivety ended after just one day of live trading. The stock i bought went down and didn't recover by the close, so I held it for a few days until i broke even. So after three days i had $0 in profits, instead of the $1500 expected.

What kind of returns were you expecting when you deposited funds into your first speculative trading account?

[It took me almost ten years to actually have a 1000+% year. It was a 12 month period between 2008 and 2009. But that was an easy period to make 1000% trading (all you needed was pretty much any method that traded both the short and long sides of the markets)]
 
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Memorable stuff I did:

Putting $10k into a ~250x leverage instrument (translation mini warrant or certificate or something like that) which went to zero within seconds... without much of a strategy at all (I had some vague idea that it would be 'easy' to make huge money if only I got the entry correct and the market proceeded in my direction).

My first attempt at algo trading in 2014, specifically to use genetic programming to create trading strategies (this without having researched how anyone else had attempted that). Did all the classical mistakes, including intermittently thinking I was going to be rich due to bugs and not having modeled transaction overheads such as bid ask spread. And then having no idea of how severe issue overfitting on historical data is.

As my search of something that worked grew ever wider, I ended up on those sites like ForexFactory, BabyPips, and the MetaTrader ecosystem etc. where many of the perennial idiots reside (on ET you find them especially in the politics and journal sections). Luckily did not spend more than a few months testing filling my screen with pretty indicators on various settings before concluding it's not leading anywhere.
 
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Yes. Guilty on all charges. Hell, I may still be naive in terms of expected returns, but at least I have experience to back it up now.

Long story short, I made a small fortune swing trading stocks in a bull market not knowing much. So, I figured that if I put some time into this and actually study trading intensively for a year I should be a master trader, right? Of course, it didn't work out that way.

The worst thing that may have happened to me is that I got sucked into the world of day trading and I've been plugging away at that ever since. If I stayed with swing trading the outcome may have been considerably better.

I have a friend that's more of an investor and doesn't really believe it's possible to be profitable short term trading, but it's amazing how many seems to believe otherwise, i.e., "I'll become a day trader millionaire in no time."
 
Snuskpelle said:
And then having no idea of how severe issue overfitting on historical data is.
More...

Yes overfitting naivety when backtesting!, after 3 years of failing at manual trading i switched to algo trading with IB, the first system i developed, was a curve fit system, that made money 70% of the time with a 1:1 win/loss ratio in backtesting a 100 trade sample. I naively thought such systems were possible in real trading!.

The first five real money trades it took were all losers.
 
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Laissez Faire said:
Yes. Guilty on all charges. Hell, I may still be naive in terms of expected returns, but at least I have experience to back it up now.

Long story short, I made a small fortune swing trading stocks in a bull market not knowing much. So, I figured that if I put some time into this and actually study trading intensively for a year I should be a master trader, right? Of course, it didn't work out that way.

The worst thing that may have happened to me is that I got sucked into the world of day trading and I've been plugging away at that ever since. If I stayed with swing trading the outcome may have been considerably better.

I have a friend that's more of an investor and doesn't really believe it's possible to be profitable short term trading, but it's amazing how many seems to believe otherwise, i.e., "I'll become a day trader millionaire in no time."
More...

Many are called;few are chosen.

:D
 
At the beginning, my fatal mistake was leverage instrument, it served as a valuable lesson that shaped my approach and mindset as a trader. It taught me the importance of realistic expectations, perseverance, and continuous self-improvement in the ever-evolving world of financial markets.
 
marianhunter said:
At the beginning, my fatal mistake was leverage instrument, it served as a valuable lesson that shaped my approach and mindset as a trader. It taught me the importance of realistic expectations, perseverance, and continuous self-improvement in the ever-evolving world of financial markets.
More...

Hi welcome to ET, care to expand on that because your response sounds like it was generated by an AI chatbot..
 
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After returning from over seas from multiple tours in Korea,
Iraq and Okinawa, I accrued a big fat bank balance and decided to
try my hand at stocks. I was station at Ft Lee and joined a small
group of soldiers who pooled their money to trade.

At the time I didn't even know how to research stocks, so I simply followed
the advice of the soldiers in our group. This was a big mistake.

We set our sights on BMY. We were waiting in anticipation of President Clinton's
health care plan. The stock market prognosticators were all predicting the
Presidents plan would attack the health care industries profits.

We decided, or should I say the so-called stock experts within our group,
decided to go against what the majority were predicting.

After the dust had settled I lost over $7,000. This was a lot of freaking
money for me back then. To say the least, my wife was pissed.
I eventually left the group and started trading
on my own, and did even worse.:wtf: I don't trade stocks anymore, but
regardless what one chooses to trade, it was a valuable lesson to do
my own research.

EDIT: One other thing before I forget, it's barnyard dumb to start
a trading career with stocks. Start with Forex that has optimum
leverage opportunities so one does not go broke learning to trade.
 
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I started trading in late 2019, yesterday for many traders here. I timed the March 2020 crash and rebound perfectly and made significant returns day trading that year and thought I was king of the world. I had never traded a down market and by the end of 2022 had erased all my gains and some. As of today I've recovered my initial investment, far more humble than I was just yesterday.
 
I started in 2007-08 when volatility was ramping up into the GFC, and immediately got sucked in by the gurus ostensibly day-trading index futures using chart TA. I had a spreadsheet to compute how much profit I'd soon be making, after 2-3 months to get the hang of things. I decided to be very conservative in my assumptions, and figured that after six whole months I'd be pulling down just 10 points a day and trading only 50 cars. It wasn't until the twelve month mark that I benchmarked for 30 points a day and 200 cars.
 
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