Quote from illiquid:
wtf? 
If you know enough to know you don't know what you're doing, then maybe perhaps you would "quit while you're ahead". But only a very small number of traders would ever arrive at such a realization. And the irony is, it's these very same traders who probably have that certain honest introspection required to actually succeed in the long run. Isn't this the market in a nutshell?
RDT does get your wtf evaluation for pragmatic reasons. Who would agree with him?
When I reflect on the many many sucessful traders I know, there is a thread or theme related to their personal successes. They simply came to choice after choice and made the correct decisions. Their decision trees were based on critical thinking and refraining from doing anything inductively.
This thread is filled with inductive decision making which is anyone's right to pursue.
The market in a nutshell is the rational interaction of our culture and its mores. Individual trading is a very neat thing; it all depends on intellectual integrity.
What I enjoy the most in chatting with other traders I relate to, is the concensus on "knowing that you know" with respect to what must come next. It is like looking at the pyramids and understanding that those who built them knew what they were doing with something that was really big and precise at the same time.
For me, this parallel is one where there is a strong and precise foundation and all the subsequent building blocks complete a system that is without flaw, anomalies or noise. Markets are simply huge and they are human creations and operations; How we, collectively, operate is very well known. The requirement is to go through the deductive process to construct the foundation and add the esential building blocks to complete the system.
Over my trading career there have been cultural changes and the economy has gone through the gamut of nuances. How others have viewed me hasn't changed much.
The majority of people are not going to understand the financial or money aspects of anything. A Conventional Wisdom has become ESTABLISHED and that is perfectly alright by both sides of the eternal debate on how money may be made and used.
My conclusion is that most problems need money to enable their solution. I find that extracting it from the huge pools is an ordinary kind of effort. Then, it is simply possible to apply the extracted capital to problem solving as required.
I do not recommend that anyone embark on trading as a thing where probabilities and risk are involved. This orientation simply denies that person from ever coming into contact with how markets operate.
The concept that drives most professions is knowledge and truth and operating skillfully to the mutual benefit of all. Trading is no different. By sharing the better ways of trading in markets, more and more people will be successful. The baker and the farmer can trade the same commodity in order that both be sucessful. The speculator engages with both to assure that the markets are effective and efficient. Money managers serve the purpose of working with the capital of others to benefit the capitalist; so they charge fees to earn their livings.
Personally, I have always been a parasite of the smart money (See Larry Harris) because my purpose has been to extract capital and use it to solve problems. I determined, from the get go, to just be a conduit.
Trading in my 20's, 30's, 40's, 50's, 60's, and 70 's which I am finishing up now, hasn't changed much. I still use a length of .7mm #2 lead each day and fill in about he same area of paper. The PC and the printer have greased the process a little.
The last 30 years, I have delayed writing up culled and precise guidebooks for the facets of trading from a deductive viewpoint. Cutting down the words to just five books with illustrations and electronic support would probably make life a little mundane. I would just turn into the mailman mentioned since I would just be delivering freebies to a mailing list.... It is so neat how you can just drop off a packet of discs and machinery makes soft coverd guidebooks.
But no one can learn from guidebooks it turns out. They would just be references for practitioners and more convenient than doing searches.
The person who is assessing whether to trade has only one path to follow. He has to go about differentiating his mind by doing repetitious drills that allow his long term memory to become highly organized. The organization is done deductively and not inductively. This will not be understood by most assessors standing on the outside of trading. How could it be? Most people have minds that have been filled with a full range of experiences that are different than those used to trade by extracting the market's offer.
The thread in the Grey box forum about stealing codes is a cool example of people speaking about their experiences in getting to their expressed beliefs. They did Conventional Wisdom drills and got to be what they are today. If you look at the list of math topics, you get to see that the kernel for the foundation was not listed. Elsewhere it has been explained that very young people can figure out the markets as a game. They can and do very well. Later they will not be able to do it, however. they will become like the friend or relative that wants to find out what you do.
My wrap on this is an amusing one. I started trading. Usually when visiting home, my dad would have one of his engineers (BTL) check out my latest ride. the straight 8 in a 300 SL gull wing is canted 30 degrees to gert it to fit under the hood. Mine had a couple of noisey main bearings....lol... so it was faulty. The other minor theme was the money I was taking away from others without working for it. We let it go at that and my parents would not sail with me when they visited Greenwich.
My younger brother and his wife were different; they learned to trade and bough a farm in NJ and then in VA when they retired (BTL) early. they cut timber and built lakes, etc and had an electronic observatory built from a tobacco drying barn.
My father then asked my brother how he did this and that and he became a trader, too. I still have some charts he made on BTL semi log graph paper. As long as my mom was alive (until 94yo) she had an income from the method my dad taught his broker to use which the rules he provided. He died at 72 and for 20 years the brokerage managed the capital where monthly profits were put in savings account one after another at a 100K limit, each. My mom was an orphan and she liked savings. The three of us were MTS's at BTL during our lives. We thought in the same deductive manner and depend upon the Scientific Method for problem solving. It was difficult for my dad to discard his view of my taking money from others; my brother was the facilitator.
From about '60 onward I actively taught others to trade. They came to me rather than vice versa. I turned down all professional offers to work in the financial industry but one. There, I corrected "white papers" and designed FA research methodologies. I worked from my home in Greenwich when I felt like spending the time. Sometimes I was paid to attend meetings and to inverview principals. Low three digits per hour in the 60"s (portal to portal plus expenses). My specialties were machine tools, pharma, paper and textiles (all cyclic, leveraged sectors). No one, at that time, could grasp TA and its implications. QA was the only aspect that they understood they could not do. It is the same today, apparently.
The key for a person assessing trading is to think critically. What appears, then is a model of market operation. The psychology of market operation is fractal and, threfore, becoming parasitic to the "smart money" is where the "beta" aspect lies. Smart money doesn't make money but it provides "tells" for front running the market. The specifc example today was the open and the subsequent "known" order of events. My print on the profit taking on bar 8 today were market partial fills @ a tick over 1122 even; that trade began on the RTL and bar 5. Those who trade similarly recognize it as a pt 3 to FTT trade on a long pattern.
One pattern is possible in markets; the pattern interlocks the fractals of the markets. This deductive model is free of anomalies, flaws and noise. Anyone who has learned to dance, sing or drive a car has a proven capability to differentiate their mind. Choosing to do so with respect to trading is probably not going to happen, however. The decision basis involved is what makes it impossible for most. The inherent belief system that accumulates as a person grows up, generally precludes critical thinking about systems that are foreign to that person.
So who can learn to trade? Mostly it is people who want to help others. They can recognize systems that are workable for helping out. They orient to work as a way to learn and they see work as a way to solve problems.
