I simply don't think there is a "real key" to anything out there.
How many years are necessary to consider yourself a successful trader?
- Thread starter Evermore2017
- Start date
@Xela, what is the key to ALL trading? Apparently, "buy rich, sell cheap" is too vague.
I think trying to find a "key" to any complex activity is silly. Would you expect a Formula 1 driver to have a key to driving or a surgeon having a key to performing successful surgeries?
There you go. Same questions everybody asks. You think it's complex. You've made it complex for you. It need not be.
I'd tell you, but I wouldn't want to deprive you of the joy of the "ah-ha" moment of figuring it out for yourself.
And I probably shouldn't have mentioned Xela in this. She's tight-lipped about her trading.
But it is complex, that's the nature of the markets. The objective is simple enough, as we established, but the inputs aren't. There are a lot of people that learned a complex activity in an intuitive way and may think that it's simple (I wonder what pro-ball players think about their skill, for example). It's not, it's just that they created a personal black box that is hiding the complexity from them.
I think @Xela has a good enough sense of humor to get involved in this banter. Nobody is talking about anything tangible here so any loss of alpha is very unlikely.
Speaking of keys . . .
The tape is like a moving picture film. Every minute of the day it is demonstrating whether supply or demand is the greater. Prices are constantly showing strength or weakness: strength when buyers predominate and weakness when the offerings overpower the buyers. All the various phases from dullness to activity; from strength to weakness; from depression to boom, and from the top of the market down to the bottom – all these are faithfully recorded on the tape. All these movements, small or great, demonstrate the workings of the Law of Supply and Demand. By transferring to the charts portions of what appears on the tape, for study and forecasting purposes, one is more readily enabled to make deductions with accuracy.
– Richard Wyckoff
The tape is like a moving picture film. Every minute of the day it is demonstrating whether supply or demand is the greater. Prices are constantly showing strength or weakness: strength when buyers predominate and weakness when the offerings overpower the buyers. All the various phases from dullness to activity; from strength to weakness; from depression to boom, and from the top of the market down to the bottom – all these are faithfully recorded on the tape. All these movements, small or great, demonstrate the workings of the Law of Supply and Demand. By transferring to the charts portions of what appears on the tape, for study and forecasting purposes, one is more readily enabled to make deductions with accuracy.
– Richard Wyckoff
Are you saying that, in essence, to keep things simple you just isolate a single aspect or "profit factor" and build a process around it? Well, each one of my strategies tries to do exactly that. However, I am trying to deploy a lot of capital (well into nine digits) and the firm expects good resulting risk metrics. So I have to have a lot of these strategies working together.
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I'm not sure about "too vague"; perhaps "too inscrutable"?
I've heard that the Sargent & Greenleaf high-security padlock is about as reliable as these things come, and "C sharp minor" is often a promising ley (Rachmaninov seemed to think so, anyway), not to mention the "hot-keys" that some intraday traders use ... but I suspect (a) that there isn't really one "key" for trading (because long-term, successful trading depends on getting quite a lot of different things right simultaneously, and a mistaken or misguided approach with any one of them can easily enough turn overall profit into overall loss), and (b) that the keys are even going to vary slightly, from person to person, depending on themselves (e.g. their attitudes, beliefs, prejudices, experience, and so on)?
I don't know ... I have a sports car myself (admittedly not Formula 1, and some people would consider it almost an "antique", in automotive terms, as it's 17 years older than me) and it certainly has a key.
As for surgeons, I'll have to ask my mother, but my understanding is that they can do almost anything, these days, by "keyhole surgery".
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