Quote from AshanD:
Lets say you have 2 traders. One wants to learn to trade a discretionary style. His approach is 80% rule based but the other 20% will rely on intuition, past experience, and other intangibles that can not be programmed into a machine. Important areas of study for this guy are money management, psychology, market characteristics and reading charts.
The other guy want to be 100% mechanical. He's looking to create a system (or systems) that could run 100% on its own. Things like psychology are not important to the mechanical trader. Instead his focus is on programming, backtesting, and math concepts that will help him develop a system capable of churning out results without giving any thought to what the paper projects for the tech sector.
Which trader is more likely to succeed? Who will probably make more money?
Your concerns are normal for most people who get into making money in the markets. This query is often a major fork in the road for the people who actually get there
I failed to be able, personally, to do either of the paths following the fork because I lack skills or I do not feel there is any value per se in one or more of the subsidiary concepts
The approach that will make more money is the descretionary one.
Both approaches are capable of making money at "unbelievable" levels that far exceed any family "life style" needs that can be envisioned. Measuring success seems to be difficult for most people in your shoes.
For the descretionary approach you describe, I cannot do intuition and I am not able to practice money management as it is generally described. It is my understanding that anything defined, like rules, can be programmed. I view where I operate as more or less an informal place but I can describe, in very fine detail, all aspects the manner in which I operate. I call it "grooving" descriptively since it resembles doing a process in such a way that any observer can recognize that it is more or less out of the box as the normal course of events go.
For the mechanical, I am incapable of doing programming but other persons have done what I do in software so I have their software and their data results from using it. No back testing was done as well since the method was devised through forward operating methods that had a level of performance that was known. What contributes to the "unbelieveable" nature of this level of mechanical performance is how it compares to the understood levels of performance as articulated by the financial industry record. Mechanical systems are, by their very nature, simple and uncomplex and they naturally gravitate to making money in "chunks" continually as a direct consequence of the continuing opportunity facing them.
In general, very few people get to the fork in the road that is pragmatically travelled to get to the fork. You are such an example of a person who has not gotten there. So are most of those who have responded to you. The suggestion that most responses will be such as to just advocate for one model or another also demonstrate how people do not easily get to the consideraion of your alternatives.
It is a very expensive process to avoid going down the road to this fork. Not many people get to a place where they have choices of how to become very rich.
The better question set to be asking may be the set associated with how to get to the fork in the road. There are about 20 questions to consider.
