How can I be a better trader?

[shotse]

I'll make this simple and post my information. Please help by posting suggestions, thank you.

- 19 years old
- Studying at Harvard currently taking economics and statistics classes
- Developing trading programs to manage risk and to determine entries into both long or short positions.
- Worked on the sell-side of the market at a brokerage firm for 5 months acting as a stock broker. They taught me how to manage risk, choose trades, create all different kinds of portfolios, and other useful things. I also learned that almost everyone on the sell-side, except a select few are horrible traders and almost always loss money.
- Traded equities and options for 2 years
- Read Market Wizards, Zurich Axioms, Stickly Stock Charts, Jesse Livermore (reminiscences of a stock market operator) and some advanced books on technical indicators
- Created a trader stress training plan where you stay up for 48 hours, study and trade using a small cash account, trading nonstop. (This accounts for a lot of my trading knowledge, forcing yourself to learn.)
- I have one programming expert and one mathematics expert working for me to help in the development of my trading programs.
- I created my own research and development firm, which taught me about taxes and how businesses operate.
- Did a research project in high school on how a combination of technical indicators can aid in entering and exiting a position. Tested using real data and live trading. All information was documented properly for this scientific experiment.

I'm a little dumbfounded right now because I don't know what else to do. I know there will always be more things to learn, but I think I have hit a little bit of a road block right now. I trade successfully and I just want to know how I can become a better trader. I'm doing more and more things, but if anyone can give me a suggestion of what to do that would be very helpful and I would appreciate it greatly. Please help out a college student in need of some more knowledge. Please help quench my thirst, I beg of you. I just finished speaking to my economics professor who used to trade derivatives and he helped a little bit by saying to improve your trading strategy and to create multiple strategies for multiple market conditions because markets are always changing, but I have already done that. This is very stressful for me, I don't see the light at the end of the tunnel anymore, I'm in the dark, please someone show me the light, I need more knowledge.

Thank you everyone on Elitetrader for helping me out and I apologize for not posting here all to often.

Sincerely,

Adam

 

[emg]

Quote from shotse:

I'll make this simple and post my information. Please help by posting suggestions, thank you.

- 19 years old
- Studying at Harvard currently taking economics and statistics classes
- Developing trading programs to manage risk and to determine entries into both long or short positions.
- Worked on the sell-side of the market at a brokerage firm for 5 months acting as a stock broker. They taught me how to manage risk, choose trades, create all different kinds of portfolios, and other useful things. I also learned that almost everyone on the sell-side, except a select few are horrible traders and almost always loss money.
- Traded equities and options for 2 years
- Read Market Wizards, Zurich Axioms, Stickly Stock Charts, Jesse Livermore (reminiscences of a stock market operator) and some advanced books on technical indicators
- Created a trader stress training plan where you stay up for 48 hours, study and trade using a small cash account, trading nonstop. (This accounts for a lot of my trading knowledge, forcing yourself to learn.)
- I have one programming expert and one mathematics expert working for me to help in the development of my trading programs.
- I created my own research and development firm, which taught me about taxes and how businesses operate.
- Did a research project in high school on how a combination of technical indicators can aid in entering and exiting a position. Tested using real data and live trading. All information was documented properly for this scientific experiment.

I'm a little dumbfounded right now because I don't know what else to do. I know there will always be more things to learn, but I think I have hit a little bit of a road block right now. I trade successfully and I just want to know how I can become a better trader. I'm doing more and more things, but if anyone can give me a suggestion of what to do that would be very helpful and I would appreciate it greatly. Please help out a college student in need of some more knowledge. Please help quench my thirst, I beg of you. I just finished speaking to my economics professor who used to trade derivatives and he helped a little bit by saying to improve your trading strategy and to create multiple strategies for multiple market conditions because markets are always changing, but I have already done that. This is very stressful for me, I don't see the light at the end of the tunnel anymore, I'm in the dark, please someone show me the light, I need more knowledge.

Thank you everyone on Elitetrader for helping me out and I apologize for not posting here all to often.

Sincerely,

Adam

The best way to improve your trading skill is to make lots of mistakes and that will go by aging. The older u get , the better u get. At age of 19 yrs old and faculties are helping u, are in the right path. Your job now is to do networking among other students. Those students around u will be working in a different firms and u will need them.


Networking. Trading all comes down to personality. Great personality equal great networking because u will need them one day.



Keep it up

 

[1a2b3cppp]

Quote from shotse:
Created a trader stress training plan where you stay up for 48 hours, study and trade using a small cash account, trading nonstop. (This accounts for a lot of my trading knowledge, forcing yourself to learn.)

That doesn't sound healthy but hey, if it worked for you.

- Did a research project in high school on how a combination of technical indicators can aid in entering and exiting a position.

And your conclusion was that it worked?

 

[shotse]

Quote from emg:

The best way to improve your trading skill is to make lots of mistakes and that will go by aging. The older u get , the better u get. At age of 19 yrs old and faculties are helping u, are in the right path. Your job now is to do networking among other students. Those students around u will be working in a different firms and u will need them.


Networking. Trading all comes down to personality. Great personality equal great networking because u will need them one day.



Keep it up

Thank you for the reply. I am willing and I embrace any and all mistake that I make. I forgot to mention that I keep a trade journal documenting everything trade related. I have finished 11 journals so far that consist of 500 pages each. Everything is recorded, my emotions, my analysis, how the market reacted, literally everything is in my journal and it has been aiding me as an excellent tool. Back to what you have said about the networking aspect about trading, I am networking among my peers at school and I have met quite a few individuals that I deem excellent prospects to be in my network. I have met multiple computer programmers and mathematicians and speak to them about the market often and explain to them what I am currently doing. Their insight is definitely useful and I can use their skill set in the future, but what is after networking because I'm doing that as of now. I would like to work at a proprietary trading desk to trade equities or options, but I'm not sure if I meet their criteria as a trader to work at their institution. It is not satisfying to hear that I am doing all I can do right now because I have this eery feeling that I indeed can do more. The market is my passion and trading is my driver.

 

[1a2b3cppp]

Quote from shotse:

I'm a little dumbfounded right now because I don't know what else to do. I know there will always be more things to learn, but I think I have hit a little bit of a road block right now.

Here is something I just posted in another similar thread that may apply to you as well.

There is no course of instruction that anyone can give you.

Nearly every trader follows the same path on his own.

First you will learn about indicators and think they are the best thing ever. You will see all these instances where they would have been profitable. Then you will realize they don't work either alone or in any combination.

Then you will look at other price pattern things like head and shoulders, cup and saucers, etc., and then you will realize those are no more reliable than indicators.

Then you will get pissed and give up for a while.

Then you will read about some other nonsense like Fibonacci levels or magic harmonics or whatever, but you will also realize that those don't seem to work in real time (although they sure look nice in hindsight!).

Then you will hear about "price action" but you will struggle for years to even get a definition of what that means despite hearing traders who claim to be profitable talking about how they only use price action.

You will encounter dozens of traders online who claim to be profitable yet never provide any proof and who also cannot give you direct answers to questions you may ask. They will also never make calls in real time, but they will be sure to post winning charts after the fact showing how they entered exactly at the bottom and sold exactly at the top! In the beginning you will see them as gurus, but eventually you will realize that 100% of them are just trolling people online and your BS detector will develop nicely as a result.

You will develop your own ideas... you will develop your own indicators, they will work better than the commercial ones you learned about when you were a beginner, but they still won't be profitable over time.

You will hear about things like grid trading and think holy crap... that is the holy grail... and then you will learn about the people who blew their account doing it.

Somewhere along the line you will get the genius idea that all you have to do to make money is take a losing system and reverse the buy and sell signals. You'll have dollar signs in your eyes. And then you will test it and realize that the opposite of a losing system is quite often still a losing system. This will cause you much internal struggle as it will make no sense.

Trading seems to be a field of stripping away what doesn't work. You must go through it yourself. I can tell you that I've backtested every commercialy available indicator and system in every possible combination and with every possible parameter and none of them is profitable, but you will not actually believe me when I tell you because you want to believe that something works. You must go through that path alone. It takes months/years before you are finally convinced that "nothing works" and once you finally realize that, THEN you have a framework in your mind for how to begin designing a system that may be profitable.

If you make it that far, you have a chance to be successful. If not, you will be like every other person who is still searching for that holy grail indicator, falling for the hype, and wasting their money on "gurus" who don't teach them anything quantifiable and indicators that don't work, as well as watching their account shrink from losing trades.

It's best if you use a practice account during these steps. Once you are consistently profitable for 3 months on a practice account, then you can start using a real account with small size. Beware, trading with a real account feels entirely different.

Also, read the first post in this thread. It will potentially save you a lot of time and money:

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=244375

Also, I see you joined this forum when you were 16. Talk about early interest!

 

[shotse]

Quote from 1a2b3cppp:

That doesn't sound healthy but hey, if it worked for you.



And your conclusion was that it worked?

My conclusion was that it worked, but following only a quantitative approach is limiting your potential. After further research I concluded that a hybrid of qualitative and quantitative approaches is superior, but as with quantitative approaches about how you need to define your parameters you need to define your qualitative parameters as well, which in some cases can be difficult, but nonetheless possible.

The 48 hour program doesn't sound healthy and I'm sure for the time being doing that program I wasn't in a good healthy state, but I can conclude that if you create a structured 48 hour program to follow and follow it with discipline working nonstop you will reap extreme benefits and insight. The key word here is discipline and not many individuals have that virtuous trait.

 

[shotse]

Quote from 1a2b3cppp:

Here is something I just posted in another similar thread that may apply to you as well.



Also, I see you joined this forum when you were 16. Talk about early interest!

Thank you for that post and yes I have been interested for sometime now. I would say that I have already hit that point that "nothing works" and have learned that the hard way. In my experience training the qualitative side, your mind, is much more profitable than finishing a quantitative program. Although, the quantitative program will give you insight as to what exactly is going on, I do believe strongly that the qualitative side will give the results, the holy grail, that traders want. Now we enter a more difficult side and that is how to train your qualitative side and how to have qualitative parameters, how do you decide on such a thing. It is extremely difficult, but as I posted earlier I did mention that I was possible with a good deal of hard work. Understanding how we can make decisions do help, but it is our "monkey" that makes the decisions in the end. I'm still a little dumbfounded on what to do now..

 

[emg]

Quote from shotse:

Thank you for the reply. I am willing and I embrace any and all mistake that I make. I forgot to mention that I keep a trade journal documenting everything trade related. I have finished 11 journals so far that consist of 500 pages each. Everything is recorded, my emotions, my analysis, how the market reacted, literally everything is in my journal and it has been aiding me as an excellent tool. Back to what you have said about the networking aspect about trading, I am networking among my peers at school and I have met quite a few individuals that I deem excellent prospects to be in my network. I have met multiple computer programmers and mathematicians and speak to them about the market often and explain to them what I am currently doing. Their insight is definitely useful and I can use their skill set in the future, but what is after networking because I'm doing that as of now. I would like to work at a proprietary trading desk to trade equities or options, but I'm not sure if I meet their criteria as a trader to work at their institution. It is not satisfying to hear that I am doing all I can do right now because I have this eery feeling that I indeed can do more. The market is my passion and trading is my driver.

By the time u graduate, u will need to work in a respected trading firm and other peers will be working other firms. Working in the firm is where the GAME begins. That game is not all about trading but gathering more networking. U will need to learn how the business is run. Get to know your neighbor, get to know your supervisor/manager and how they run their duty. Keep in touch with your college peers (Instant message, bars). Expect to work more than 1 firms within 5 years, u will need to firm hop and learn their business model and gather more networking. Learn to play golf and learn to party and drink with your co traders/workers because u are there to learn more about trading by networking. Work in New York or Chicago.


In your twenties, u will be busy busy busy. If all goes well, at the age of 30s, u will be able to open your own Hedge Funds (based on your networking) and at the age of 40s successful, u will be able to own a $800K house (starting) and cars, and beautiful wife and kids.



Keep in mind, when u are in your twenties, that is where u will be working your hardest and the reward will be given at the age of 30s

 

[shotse]

Quote from emg:

By the time u graduate, u will need to work in a respected trading firm and other peers will be working other firms. Working in the firm is where the GAME begins. That game is not all about trading but gathering more networking. U will need to learn how the business is run. Get to know your neighbor, get to know your supervisor/manager and how they run their duty. Keep in touch with your college peers (Instant message, bars). Expect to work more than 1 firms within 5 years, u will need to firm hop and learn their business model and gather more networking. Learn to play golf and learn to party and drink with your co traders/workers because u are there to learn more about trading by networking. Work in New York or Chicago.


In your twenties, u will be busy busy busy. If all goes well, at the age of 30s, u will be able to open your own Hedge Funds (based on your networking) and at the age of 40s successful, u will be able to own a $800K house (starting) and cars, and beautiful wife and kids.



Keep in mind, when u are in your twenties, that is where u will be working your hardest and the reward will be given at the age of 30s

Thank you for the networking advice, I do consider myself an excellent networker, but I can agree on that my networking skills can be much better. I will take that into account and start to improve my networking skills after now realizing (not really now, but more now then ever) that networking is a huge part of trading. I live in New York so I think I am going to stay here, maybe even transfer to Columbia, but I really like Harvards campus here, everyone is so motivated that it makes me 10x more motivated. Thank you for putting me into perspective by quantifying what will happen at each age. I do come from a very affluent family so I'm not sure how that age quantification will suit for me, but I'm sure it is a ball park estimate that I will abide somewhat to. I don't care about the money really, even though it is a really nice thing to have, it can buy you nice things and all that stuff, but what I really care about is being the best trader. I know that sounds weird, but that is my goal, my extreme long term goal. I love doing work pertaining to the market because it doesn't feel like work because it is something I personally enjoy to do.

 

[jack hershey]

Shotse:

My comment will not be important to you but it is important.

Read some neuroscience to find out specifically what your mind is telling you.

You are getting personal input from yourself that is telling you something is __________. Fill in the blank.

Now the badest news.

You are in a traditional orientation. As you build your mind in this vein, what you build is hard (impossible fits) to erase.

Ask yourself: Should I continue to do mind building, if my wave patterns are connecting the way they are and getting the result you filled in above.

Read the Temple Grandin Story (or view the movie).

After that, I ask you to consider how you would have helped Temple if you were able to step out of the role you now occupy.

Your conscious (_____ waves) is hearing from your subconscious(_____waves) via(______waves).

You had some experience that gave you pictures. You got a conclusion by doing a lab in prep school.

Temple didn't do labs the way you did. She didn't do "broker" either. She did "steer".

NSF scholastic winners get to go to summer school as a reward.

They do labs but the lab is a problem that needs solving. You didn't do that kind of lab. (I am speaking from the orientation of a supervisor of the creme of the crop) "Broker" isn't that kind of lab.

Maybe the light that is flickering now will go out and you will continue as ever. Maybe the light will grow brighter and you will find out why it is there.

Temple had an advantage you do not have; she was autistic. So she worked many times harder than you do being a copycat.

Work harder and don't be a copycat any minute of your life. Read this to your proctor.