I was a senior trader. Now I’m a programmer. Here’s why

Scataphagos said:
Don't give up. It's there to be taken.

You don't have to "get it right away and go big".

Start small and learn. Scale up as your success and confidence grows. Your objective should be to "get it" someday. Sooner would be better, of course, but not a requirement. Confidence in trading is HUGE! Genuine confidence comes only from "understanding".

Lemme tell you....when it's your money and you want to "go big", you'd better be damend sure that your play "has a high probability of being right and/or the potential reward makes it worth taking the risk", and to understand why. (Still gotta trade with a stop, however.... the market is often tricky and sucks even smart people into the wrong play.)
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Yeah, I hear what you are saying. I've been experimenting with scalping. My win rate(which is always deceptive) is almost 100%(at least high 90s). If buy then offer out a few seconds later I always win. I find it exhausting to trade like that. Maybe I just need to train myself. Just experimenting with this style vs the pure chart analysis that holds for 10-30mins to an hour.

I feel like 2 ES Points or the equivalent in YM/NQ points isn't that hard. But you have to account for losses. All is great when you are doing fine. But losses is where they get ya...

Let's see how this experiment goes...
 
trader99 said:
Yeah, I hear what you are saying. I've been experimenting with scalping. My win rate(which is always deceptive) is almost 100%(at least high 90s). If buy then offer out a few seconds later I always win. I find it exhausting to trade like that. Maybe I just need to train myself. Just experimenting with this style vs the pure chart analysis that holds for 10-30mins to an hour.

I feel like 2 ES Points or the equivalent in YM/NQ points isn't that hard. But you have to account for losses. All is great when you are doing fine. But losses is where they get ya...

Let's see how this experiment goes...
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Would advise against "scalping". The ES is too noisy to try to "risk 1 tic to make 2" or "risk 2 to make 4".

As for "2 points/day", that would be "average and net".
 
trader99 said:
https://news.efinancialcareers.com/us-en/312931/algo-trader-trading-programmer-coding/?mi_u=546,535,002&utm_campaign=JS_EDI_MC&utm_source=AMS_US_ENG&utm_medium=EM_NW&mi_locale=us-en


"I had a great 25-year run as a Wall Street trader, but I have had to adapt to stay relevant. I have focused on learning to code in C#, C++, Java, R, Python, HTML5, .NET Framework, T-SQL and others in order to appeal to employers in the financial services industry. Now I’m coder instead.


Trading is a dying business. Electronic trading is growing. Every human trader still has to compete against many other human traders for a shrinking number of seats. Everyone is facing decreasing margins, so unless you can code, grasp data science and have other quantitative skills, forget about job security.

Big banks from Goldman and RBS to UBS and Nomura have replaced most of their equity traders with IT guys, market-making off of the automated-trading programs. It makes sense in this environment when it’s almost a liability to have the traders making public markets, because there’s a greater chance for them to skirt the rules. Now they can tell a regulator, “The algorithmic-trading program screwed up,” as opposed having to a human trader with fat fingers to blame."
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I guess algorithmic strategies take advantage from deep understanding of market microstructure and speed, instead of long-term macroceconomics. Simply the problem of the time frame of the decision making. The markets still takes fundamental directions from big money which is not focused on making profit from the market, but to put funds in best place in terms of R/R (take for example pension funds or insurance companies). On the short run yes we lose to AI the problem is to what direction those AI can skew the price from long-term fundamentals.
 
trader99 said:
You must understand that most "traders" at banks are just execution traders. Those are the traders that have been replaced by machines.

Traders who run their own book are prop traders. Very few traders are prop traders at banks. After Volcker Rule, banks shut down their prop trading desks. Some of these prop traders move to hedge funds. Others start B&B or other biz. Or just quit the game period.
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And this is WHY I ALWAYS say that we retail traders are actually lot better traders than those "institutional" traders considering the limited trading capital, the psychological pressure that we have to work with. We retail traders are actual traders; we actually study the market, perform analysis, design our own trading system (manual or automated) and yet people still think that they would become better traders if they ever worked in those institutions and get all star-struck when an "institutional" trader comes on and gives insight. Don't get me wrong I am fascinated by learning about the inner-working of those institutions that make up the financial industry but one needs to understand that that does not necessarily make you a better trader.
 
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Scataphagos said:
Hmmm..... If you're losing $2,000 a day consistently, don't you think you'd soon figure out that you should be doing the opposite?
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Not necessarily because once you do the opposite, the market can all of sudden turn around and your opposite starts to lose money again. This is why trading is so hard. Market is really dynamic and unpredictable. The only way to master it is just cut losses early and let profit run.
 
JSOP said:
Not necessarily because once you do the opposite, the market can all of sudden turn around and your opposite starts to lose money again. This is why trading is so hard. Market is really dynamic and unpredictable. The only way to master it is just cut losses early and let profit run.
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Missed the sarcasm, eh?
 
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