How much did your trading education cost?
- Thread starter peilthetraveler
- Start date
I think one of the biggest problems I had in my beginning was I knew I was intelligent but I was lazy, markets loved me.
Day one in stocks was profitable, but I had studied price action by hand for three years before, then I got bright idea to add long term commodities four years after I started then dropped $105k over seven years - been profitable each of past nineteen years. Then day trading futures took another seven years of losing 100k - been profitable past seventeen years. Somewhere in there day traded stocks, never really had bad beginning in stocks. In options, always used them as a hedge or credit spreads.
After thinking upon it, I truly wished I never went into futures back in the eighties, although I do well now, I lost out by years of losing and profits from stocks were being sucked out by futures. I burned through like fifteen futures accounts. It took awhile for me to learn being smart doesn't make profits in futures, you have to work your rump off backtesting/forward testing. Ego has to be checked at the door, trade aggressive but conservative. For me it has developed into learning how not to lose than making wild enormous profits, those also have wild enormous drawdowns. As it is now, I have a major hissy fit when I have a full loss as I aveage down ten levels, but if you don't know the numbers going back ten years, for me it is trading in the dark.
Perseverance
Have a great weekend all.
Day one in stocks was profitable, but I had studied price action by hand for three years before, then I got bright idea to add long term commodities four years after I started then dropped $105k over seven years - been profitable each of past nineteen years. Then day trading futures took another seven years of losing 100k - been profitable past seventeen years. Somewhere in there day traded stocks, never really had bad beginning in stocks. In options, always used them as a hedge or credit spreads.
After thinking upon it, I truly wished I never went into futures back in the eighties, although I do well now, I lost out by years of losing and profits from stocks were being sucked out by futures. I burned through like fifteen futures accounts. It took awhile for me to learn being smart doesn't make profits in futures, you have to work your rump off backtesting/forward testing. Ego has to be checked at the door, trade aggressive but conservative. For me it has developed into learning how not to lose than making wild enormous profits, those also have wild enormous drawdowns. As it is now, I have a major hissy fit when I have a full loss as I aveage down ten levels, but if you don't know the numbers going back ten years, for me it is trading in the dark.
Perseverance
Have a great weekend all.
Around 750k lost in options trading in late 2009 betting randomly against the market for fundamental reasons during the rally. Then a year later I learned about technical trading and was able to lose/some win some. A couple years of programming and testing later I am finally getting some consistent results in futures trading.
Oh boy, I hate to even post it. The figure is not exact, but my estimate is $75,000. At points I was profitable and then crashed and burned. I have been profitable for awhile now, and have somewhat enjoyed the fact that I have offset all my losses and am ahead. I make no bones about it, it was a painful road at times.
We all think the simulator is boring and making alot of fake money on the sim is as frustrating as losing real money. If I had to do it over, I would tell myself to trade on the sim starting out, but knowing me...I wouldn't listen to myself.
Hi, new poster here.
I lost 3K within 2 weeks in the FX market, and stopped for a while. Then I was up 18K in the post-BP oil spill rebound, but over-leveraged and eventually stopped trading when I was down 8K.
Now I am utterly chickened out. I have 10K in an IB account, fearful of leverage, holding only a few equities, selling covered calls rather than buying options outright. I'm in the middle of a MFE program that will ultimately cost me about 27K, but which I'm hoping will get me a good job in a hedge fund or at least give me the theoretical backing to manage risk and/or discover arbitrage opportunities.
But you guys seem to have bounced back much better than I did, and it seems to be because of practice and fine-tuning on the "simulator". May I know what simulator you are using? Are you referring to MT4 forex demo accounts? I'm not quite familiar with stocks and derivatives simulators out there which support automated trading, will be grateful to anyone who can provide a list or offer a few pointers.
I lost 3K within 2 weeks in the FX market, and stopped for a while. Then I was up 18K in the post-BP oil spill rebound, but over-leveraged and eventually stopped trading when I was down 8K.
Now I am utterly chickened out. I have 10K in an IB account, fearful of leverage, holding only a few equities, selling covered calls rather than buying options outright. I'm in the middle of a MFE program that will ultimately cost me about 27K, but which I'm hoping will get me a good job in a hedge fund or at least give me the theoretical backing to manage risk and/or discover arbitrage opportunities.
But you guys seem to have bounced back much better than I did, and it seems to be because of practice and fine-tuning on the "simulator". May I know what simulator you are using? Are you referring to MT4 forex demo accounts? I'm not quite familiar with stocks and derivatives simulators out there which support automated trading, will be grateful to anyone who can provide a list or offer a few pointers.
Quote from peilthetraveler:
We all think the simulator is boring and making alot of fake money on the sim is as frustrating as losing real money. If I had to do it over, I would tell myself to trade on the sim starting out, but knowing me...I wouldn't listen to myself.
Myself I just found my Holy-Grail serendipitously as a result of beginning study of an instrument I didn't understand over the holidays.
I studied for about 2.5 months every night until about 2am until the epiphany hit me.(I'm still researching it but that pace was killing me as well as working 50hr weeks at my day job)
Meanwhile I was in the worst trade of my life and i just basically threw in the towel so i would have something left to trade my new system
with.
All in all I'd say I lost $350,000 over a span 10 yrs trading off and on.
The big change instead of being a trade one idea to a time is i have developed a system that is mathematically sound and based upon behavioral finance research.
Anyway that's my story and I'm VERY CONFIDENT about the future.
I studied for about 2.5 months every night until about 2am until the epiphany hit me.(I'm still researching it but that pace was killing me as well as working 50hr weeks at my day job)
Meanwhile I was in the worst trade of my life and i just basically threw in the towel so i would have something left to trade my new system
with.
All in all I'd say I lost $350,000 over a span 10 yrs trading off and on.
The big change instead of being a trade one idea to a time is i have developed a system that is mathematically sound and based upon behavioral finance research.
Anyway that's my story and I'm VERY CONFIDENT about the future.