A programmer has a better chance for profitable self employment than a trader. A programmer doesn't even need a bankroll; just a computer.His perspective seems perfectly reasonable to me, in the sense that if someone's primary ambition is to get a job and be an employee, programming clearly offers more opportunities than trading.
That's a limited perspective, though: it's limited by the reality that he's only comparing overall prospects of "getting a job trading" with those "getting a job programming". That's a very different thing from comparing the prospects of "earning a living trading" and "earning a living programming" (in that one comparison specifically excludes all consideration of self-employment possibilities while the other doesn't).
I'm "just saying" ...
I was a senior trader. Now I’m a programmer. Here’s why
- Thread starter trader99
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A fully automated, hands-off system would be extremely difficult to build. My trading system is not fully automated. It simply automates those parts that would be very time consuming to do manually. For example, if banks stocks are suddenly hot, in 5 seconds I can show all bank stocks that have an ask price less than yesterday's close price, and have not been downgraded; also have a link next to each stock so that I can buy with a single click. The final buy decision is still up to me.
Another way to think of it -- If you want to build a new house, you can't just drop off a bunch of power tools and come back later and the house is fully built. But the power tools sure make it easier to do individual tasks.
I fully agree. A simple test for anyone -- If you can't fully explain to a new college graduate who knows nothing about trading, how to manually do what you want, then you are not ready to automate it.
Difficult to answer that without knowing a little about what each trading play does, but generally speaking you would probably want to make several different programs, just to make it easier to manage (design, code and understand). You would probably group similar trading plays into a single program, so you may end up with 3 or 4 different programs each handling 2 or 3 different plays.
From my experience. It maybe easier to teach a programmer to trade vs a trader to program. Similar but different skillset and personality. Many star programmers are introvert, especially at the beginning. However, they may learn interpersonal skills as they mature...
Good point, but I’d rather live off my investments and just exercise and read. It doesn’t sound like this fellow was a good investor.
Of course. You can do 1200 plays.
Well then, "doing 12" must be like, easy as pie.
haha.
I'm NOT even sure the article is about a real sr trader. While it's still possible to learn to code, I wonder how far he will get at a i-bank with his newly learned programming skills. Most banks would hire the best compsci majors coming out of Stanford, CMU, MIT, Berkeley, etc. to work on software development for them. Not a 25 yr trader veteran learning to code for the first time. Even if they did hire him it would be at a huge pay discount since he had already achieved seniority though through a different ladder.
This is not to say that great programmers will not get as much pay as decent traders. They probably will given the trends.
This article seems to be written as an OBSERVATION of things that are changing in trading at banks. That is more and more of it is computer driven. So having computer skills is important. I think that's the main point of the article rather than about an actual sr trader. There might be sr traders who try to learn to code. I wonder how far they will go with that. Anything is possible...
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Not so much nowadays. A program can execute them faster in an event driven environment. By the time a manual trader recognizes an opportunity on one instrument, an algorithm could have entered the same instrument and 100 other correlated ones. Primary purpose of automation is to capture opportunities and inefficiencies that can't be done manually. Otherwise we'd still be calling our brokers on the phone.
Xela,
You've just identified my problem! I scalp, scalp, scalp. 100% win rate.
Then one scalp doesn't automatically go my way I hold on and used a higher timeframe signal that says it's still good to stay in(which it is but at that timeframe NOT at the scalping timeframe).
But then I can't stand the heat of the pullback for my scalping timeframe, then I get out a worst possible spot. So my win rate is 99%. But the 1 trade wiped out all the small gains from scalping. haha.
I mean we are talking small amounts here. I'm just experimenting. But that' the crux of the problem.
Of course, it goes back to my original price and more had I based on my native style of holding much longer. At the entry of the trade, if I had the intention for it to be based on the longer time frame signal then I'm more than OK to sit through that because that's normal pullback at the higher timeframe.
So I have to chose which horse to ride to town. Can't ride 2 horses.
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