I think I figured out why trading can never work for so many people

[WD40]

Quote from ChkitOut:

Simply put, they grow to hate it.

After a while, a trader will sit at his computer and say, this stuff is so beyond stupid. They will never be able to tolerate dealing with a probabilistic work environment every single day enough to get over the big hump and into profitability.

And to take it a step further and probably more important, they cant work in a world of subjectivity. You can have 10 different traders giving you 10 different reasons why a trade may or may not be ok. And maybe all 10 of those traders are profitable but the lack of clarity and subjectivity are enough to drive a learning trader nuts.

Imagine working at a pizza shop and everybody in the room is giving different instructions on how you need to cook the pizza in order for it to come out good. You would take off your apron, throw it on the floor and storm out yelling, 'you people are a bunch of wackjobs!"

Well, this is the trading world. And quite frankly, it sucks.

you are talking about yourself

 

[cornix]

Quote from TheMagican:

No,i dont believe you were able to produce consistently two digits per month over the years either.Why lying?10% who don't day trade they just win.

How do you think, do I really care if you believe me?

 

[cornix]

Quote from sellindexvol66:

despite my 20 yrs trading i cannot be as sure as you. for me, i only made my living after i moved to swing trading..averaging in, get my expected move then exiting.

i am sure there is an aspect of carrying stuff multi days for even the people who claim they a more or less day traders. i do also agree (but not as certain as you) most of those day traders if the do not go bust will in time migrate to swinging trades.

Some day I will likely become a swing trader too, just because I'm not going to spend all life day trading.

 

[oldtime]

Quote from cornix:

Some day I will likely become a swing trader too, just because I'm not going to spend all life day trading.

there's no relief swing trading, in fact it's actually worse. You spend all day staring at the screen, doing nothing. No action. You can get away for the day to take care of business. But whatever energy you got from trading, you better convert into the patience of a saint.

better is a strategy which has you trading all day and night, and then swings

otherwise, if my ib trade log is more than one page, I don't even have to look

I know it was a losing day

small traders don't lose because they are small

they lose because they trade

 

[cornix]

Quote from oldtime:

there's no relief swing trading, in fact it's actually worse. You spend all day staring at the screen, doing nothing. No action. You can get away for the day to take care of business. But whatever energy you got from trading, you better convert into the patience of a saint.

better is a strategy which has you trading all day and night, and then swings

otherwise, if my ib trade log is more than one page, I don't even have to look

I know it was a losing day

small traders don't lose because they are small

they lose because they trade

Ah, I probably confused terms here. Meant trading with daily time-frame as the lowest (entry) level to exploit short/intermediate term moves lasting from days to weeks.

Otherwise it's the same day trading in my view.

Currently play a couple hours of Euro and a couple hours of NQ every day, not even close to sitting from the dawn to twilight at the screens.

 

[bwolinsky]

Quote from oldtime:

if you are using targets and stops, I doubt you are going to make it very far in this business, unless you are a genious, have a genie in a bottle, or God Himself tells you what is going to happen.

Your statistical knowledge is lacking, and, yes, I am a genius. The genie in the bottle is time travel, but the minus seconds it takes for my programs to analyze the max adverse and max favorable excursions means you know nothing about what constitutes profitable trading, and your retorts have shown a lack of machine learning understanding and its applicability to the financial markets.

I've been considering ignoring you for a long time for your arrogance and stupid non-chalance that because the intraday bars are purely random that that means you cannot predict where price will move within a time set by your programs when you really can.

You don't know the people I know, who are some of the smartest people in the world, as am I. When I tell you that the stops and targets aren't the point of what I'm saying, your meaningless retort to a subject you're obviously not qualified to discuss makes me resent the fact that people like you do not ever correspond respectfully with people like me.

 

[cornix]

Many people underestimate the effect knowing MFE/MAE may have on their trading.

Must say that thanks to a few people I got to know during past 6 months my beliefs changed about objective trading towards believing it can be much more objective than I ever thought and still have a nicely looking equity curve without those insane draw-downs mechanical systems usually have.

 

[oldtime]

Quote from bwolinsky:

Your statistical knowledge is lacking, and, yes, I am a genius. The genie in the bottle is time travel, but the minus seconds it takes for my programs to analyze the max adverse and max favorable excursions means you know nothing about what constitutes profitable trading, and your retorts have shown a lack of machine learning understanding and its applicability to the financial markets.

I've been considering ignoring you for a long time for your arrogance and stupid non-chalance that because the intraday bars are purely random that that means you cannot predict where price will move within a time set by your programs when you really can.

You don't know the people I know, who are some of the smartest people in the world, as am I. When I tell you that the stops and targets aren't the point of what I'm saying, your meaningless retort to a subject you're obviously not qualified to discuss makes me resent the fact that people like you do not ever correspond respectfully with people like me.

hey man, I'm just a small retail podunck trader. I've always been small, and I never pretend to be anything I am not, and will always be small. But I am still alive.

You don't have to be that big and know a lot of important people to eek out a decent living trading.

It certainly isn't a straight way up. There will be times when you think you are losing your mind or fooling yourself.

I've had due to unfortunate circumstances and bad trading decisions a real job from time to time. It's wonderful when you can learn from your mistakes and get back to trading for a living.

good luck to you to in your future endeavors

and I'm sure you wish me the same

 

[bwolinsky]

Quote from cornix:

Many people underestimate the effect knowing MFE/MAE may have on their trading.

Must say that thanks to a few people I got to know during past 6 months my beliefs changed about objective trading towards believing it can be much more objective than I ever thought and still have a nicely looking equity curve without those insane draw-downs mechanical systems usually have.

I'm not sure where this notion that mechanical systems usually have insane drawdowns.

Here's an analogy: Not every robot is created equal.

Since machine learned systems aren't designed by humans, the machine learning is what makes the drawdown so high. When the machine is built as a base model, then the machine learning isn't whether a machine learned designing programing built its functions and parameters, but that the machine learning portion of the program should come from intelligent design and not from the machine building itself.

There's a misconception that genetic algorithms write their own code, and, it's true, some do, but they aren't effective and certainly not as effective as a base model that gets re-optimized genetically by checking its parameters and not simply by redesinging its own codes and maybe a few parameters. They're both machine learning, but one is so much more effective it's not fair to clump mechanical systems together like that. There are machine learned algorithms, genetic algorithms, and the parametrization procedures for the two are so drammatically different that this does show a lack of experience in distinguishing the application of these two technologies.

Really the two have different purposes.

It's funny that this is the topic. I finished optimizing a parameter in my codes that is designed to analyze portfolio movements, and not simply targets of trades (particularly this has not been discussed on this board). When I do that, I went from a $37k profit and $15k drawdown, to $10k drawdown for $57k.

So was that beneficial? I shouldn't do it because people say that's not the way to do it? Well it is. When people tell you not to do it that way they don't know what they're talking about because they probably don't have algorithms capable of the consistency most seek in their trading. It comes from a smart robot, not a smart robotic self-constructor.

 

[cornix]

Comes from my own experience of what I saw: most trading algos and most algos in general still have relatively poor abilities of reading context (not just in trading, but anywhere). For example Google cars can't drive in winter, because surrounding reality look changes. Not a slightest problem for a human to recognize the same roads and other stuff in winter or when it rains.

And trading with ability to quickly recognize context is still something human brain is able to do very easy and very well compared to robots.

That's why "human algo" (trader who developed her/his skills to the stage of nearly perfect self-automation) is still superior.

Only in cases when discipline is perfect of course, we don't consider classic emotional lapses here.

Just my subjective experience. If someone created a trading robot, which can consider context to filter stuff that must be great.

P. S. I beg pardon for possibly Al Brooks like writing style today... yesterday's night tempranillo still in effect a bit.