Improving Trading Skills

Quote from kubilai:

Jack,

I find it hard to follow your train of thought at times. Here I'll try to restate your exchange with Albert Cibiades. Please correct me if wrong.

You don't like the word "predict" because it implies "getting ahead of the market", "taking money from the market", in any case DO something to the market. Too much action orientation to sense the subtle currents in the market.

The approach your advocate is more of the Eastern philosophical approach, as in, be one with the market, sense what it's doing, then take action to follow the market, and finally iteratively refine your actions based on the market's feedback. Emphasis is on BE and KNOW long before the DO, right?
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The trader/ market relationship is wholistic or holistic (your choice)

The trader develops his mind through experience and rational thinking to gain truths (usable knowledge) that function as comprehensive skills and expertise in real time.

The trader has the responsibility to do his thing and not do what the market is responsible for providing to him.

Sensing through monitoring an excellent and complete set up allows the trader to do analysis of what the market is telling him. He gets signals related to two things: holding and reversing. The P, V relationship is a statement of two parts: one for holding and one for reversing (changing) on end effects signals.

What BE DO HAVE means is that a person is equipped from the word go. By going through a process (DO'ing) all knowledge and skills manifest through iterative refinement. Then the person is equipped. He HAS it. He has gotten it.

I, Jack Hershey, a real person, introduced the image of a caring realtionship in my response to the collection of aliases. What that picture conveys is that having a caring relationship can be comparable to the identies "the trader" and "the market". This bilateral relationship can be conducted in a caring manner.

Two partners in a caring relationship do not get into prediction. They, instead consider the value of being effective and efficient in their connectedness. They learn how to connect better and better. Were they of equal stature they would affect each other in a lot of ways. Here, the trader is not on a par with the market so some things are different.

You can skip the Eastern shading. Replace it with "how the mind works" and how to fill it up and how to make it operate in a part of the brain where "sports memory" is located.

So where I am coming from is having done the iterative refining for about 50 years.

A sidebar is that I have always had the delightful experience of being on the cutting edge of dealing with fixing stuff that was busted and writing books about it. This ws a consequence of having the money to do what I did and not having to do anything that I did not want to.

That makes me "unbelievable".

The prediction slice of the commentary.

The simple calming truth about prediction is that it is unnecessary.

Why do things that are unnecessary and risky if it is not necessary to predict of take risks.

Making money is an important pastime. I have a rule about not taking salary nor fees nor commissions. All of them relate to the use of time. I only allow myself to make money by the well chosen use of money. At some point using money to make money becomes unbelievable.

I gave an example of the use of a paradigm to make money as an attachment. In that particular top rows example, my paradigm is applied by our c corporation which is the only corporation in the US to be used by the 4th largest corporation in the US to market a product in a given local. We target precipitating into the parent corporation 420,000 dollars a day in new cash flow. Some days we divide the crew into two groups.

The result is two books, the director of senior products is in residence in the local 100% of business days and we are going to rep the paradigm ad nauseum in 4 county blocks throughout the US.

it was determined early this week that our market impact was unmatched in the US and our biggest market share competitor sales force could not do better than an absolute net loss of clients. This is based upon a begining base value of the competitors current clients (manditory public record as posted by CMS of the US government) plus the full internal staff sales completed minus the loss of clients who rolled over to us. The othr lessor competitors are doing less well.

Friday, unexpectedly we were requested to host the competitors who had flown in and assembled with state administrators (a lt of administrative levels) to simply drive to our location and review our existing contracts that we have as a backup pruduct. We heard an "override" offer that was over 200 % of our unit gross. Hardball is fun.

What I am saying to you on your interpretation is this.

I am the provider of salient pertinent, no bullshit plain old American down to earth commentary on how traders can chose to make money and also how an entrepreneur can take any usable product and put it into the marketplace and make more money per square inch than any large corporation.

The equities market place was invented to handle corporate enterprise. Now markets, their derivatives like futures and operating corporations, in modern times and aliases says, do it with statistics and the like. My differing viewpoint it that it is done by reasoning and thinking and manifesting pragmatic successful operation approaches. I call them paradigms that can be put in place to change how things are done for the better.

There is no unique cultural influence attributable to this matter of making human progress. It is a product of rational objective thinking where the opportunity is defined and staring everyone in the face.

Success can be transferred. It is how America and the world operates.

Guessing what is going to happen by any means is bullshit and uneccessary and ineffective and inefficient.
 
Quote from BSAM:

I'm not sure what you are saying. But, I do know that when I put on a trade, I enter with the "prediction" that I'm going to make some money.

It's not confusing or complicated. Sometimes a person "predicts" correctly. Sometimes he doesn't.
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Hey just for the fun of it why don't you let the market take you into a trade.

It could be a fun experience once a day and fairly routine.

What would it take to have you just relax and put in a bracket and let the market take you in instead.

To avoid discomfort after you get taken in, go right back to predicting. Predict when to get out with a set profit equal to or better than the profit you have after a 1 minute hold on the market entry. Work up to a minute hold from a 30 second hold, maybe.

Personnally I like the bracket entry and the pee exit. After entry pee first then exit at market. It works best if you drink a lot of water.

Or, what the hell, let the market take you out by using the progressive protective stops that you presently use automatically to cut losses or something. Keep predicting when to move the trailing stops on your entry. When you chicken out on seetting a higher stop, just hit T and take that extra profit above the old stop you can't force yourself to advance to lock in more profits.

Maybe do a "spike exit". Its like predicting an S or R only you take maximum profits instead.

All the lousy bactesters know that you cannot make money on BO's because after the BO people are not able to trade properly using stops or something. Or they can't program for doing stops.
 
Think I misunderstood what you were trying to say. Let me try again.

Are you advocating the use of the scientific method in trading?

BE rational and inquisitive
->
DO apply the scientific method (iterative refinement)
->
HAVE a model for success

In applying the scientific method, there's no involvement of the ego or personality. It's all down to facts and experimentation. Someone who says "I predict this therefore..." is getting his personality and his emotions involved much like the shamans of old. Someone applying the sciencific method builds a model of the market through iterative refinement, his models will have predictive value, but not him. Is this what you were saying?
 
Quote from kubilai:

Think I misunderstood what you were trying to say. Let me try again.

Are you advocating the use of the scientific method in trading?

BE rational and inquisitive
->
DO apply the scientific method (iterative refinement)
->
HAVE a model for success

In applying the scientific method, there's no involvement of the ego or personality. It's all down to facts and experimentation. Someone who says "I predict this therefore..." is getting his personality and his emotions involved much like the shamans of old. Someone applying the sciencific method builds a model of the market through iterative refinement, his models will have predictive value, but not him. Is this what you were saying?
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Not really my viewpoint is about making money effectively and efficiently. It is a process orientation is a market that is people oriented.

I do look at it scientifially but there is the participation factor. I am not outside of the market but a partner with it.
More SA (systems analysis) strategy. Interactive stuff.
 
Quote from Grob109:


Personnally I like the bracket entry and the pee exit. After entry pee first then exit at market. It works best if you drink a lot of water.
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LOL. Cant wait till Monday.
 
Jack. Seriously, I am happy that my brief comments inspired you to share more of your personal and trading philosophies here. It was great reading. I am sorry to hear about your physical limitations. My own fingers are stiffening from so much diddling. And you are very kind to pity my own pathetic mental deficiencies. Because your personal development viewpoint is apparently so alien to that of many posters here, I encourage you to codify and to clarify it in a series of posts. Take the time to be more accessible. As one of your most avid students, I must tell you, absorbing it piecemeal does not work for me. It would be worth it to you to present your thoughts linearly. Just as I may wake up dead one morning soon, so might you. I doubt that there is any other venue where anybody would give a shit about what you have to say. Or just write that book! Best regards to you from all of us. Al.

P.S. You really don't like the trades I post? I think they look a lot like yours, hahaha!
 
So do you act more like an engineer who applies processes to manufacture things efficiently? That as opposed to a scientist who tends to be detached from whatever she's studying. It would make sense from your involvement comment.

Another thing that you tend to say is that the edge as most consider it is irrelevant. Do you say that because a lot of people think of an edge as some kind of holy grail that they can find and thereafter be successful, whereas you're focused on refining your system so that it'll accept whatever the market wants to pay you? So it's not one edge, or multiple edges, but a whole lot of little things, added/subtracted over time that makes an effective system. And after decades of refinement, you can't look at it and say what the edge(s) are any more?
 
Quote from Grob109:

......viewpoint is about making money effectively and efficiently.
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And I can tell you that is appreciated.

I also like the who cares if you don't like what I say.

Oh yeah and that fact that you're willing to share to others although many of them don't really deserve it, all this and free too.
 
To continue to respond to you, the thread is considering improving skills.

To do that it is a refining process.

Some skills are easy to have and do; these are what a person begins with if he is rational and open to formulating how to go from scratch to expert.

A person can easily see the money flow from the market.

Going with the flow and extracting it continually only takes so much skill.

People can acquire those skills fairly competently if they do not get sidetracked by things that prevent them from making money.

There is a list of ways to get sidetracked. You ID the one that has you captured and then work out of it by laying it aside in your mind and returning to the place where you were before you accepted the trap. Then you buid a new path towards the higher ground.

I call the sidetracking and traps and such myths. They are not real places to trade. but they are thought of a reality for that person.

You will notice that most people do not like where and how I trade because they view what I suggest as off the mark and not real for them. Most posting people go through a lot of stages of criticism, etc.

Some of them, reflect on how skills are improved. After a certain level of skill discussion, skills leave the picture and the level of performance is then considered as what is to be thrown out and not accepted.

A person named Profitlogic posts a given approach for example. It is conservative and captures a good portion of the market movement. An average of 6 trades a day, perhaps. This is usually more than the H-L of any day. The long term average of the ET members is said to be 1 point on ES per day.

By comparing this 1 point per day with something larger than the daily range (H-L) you can see that there are at least two realities. Groups of ET members advocate for different performance levels. Low performers advocate for their level of trading. A few ET people actually look at possibilities for making money.

Improving skills to make more than 1 point per day in ES is not too hard a process except for one thing. It depends upon where you are starting from.

Having a starting point for improving skills is not a possibility for most people. Most people is a large group.

To be in the group that has a long term average of one point is difficult too. So anyone who is not in that group is faced with having no skills mostly.

Improving skills from a no skills starting point is not possible.

The majority and the largest group od traders not only have no skills, they have unusable skills that only apply to select parts of the market and then they do not have any additional skills that apply to completing a round of trading.

The above is the majority of ET and all traders in general. the most active aspect of the market's operation is doing a turn over of failing traders who come and go. The turn over ratio is interesting. As interesting is the range of ways in which people are cycled in and out of the system.

The memory is the major culprit in this turn over function. it is a biochemical series of events whereby people are literally frozen out of the reasoning processes that they used to have by the massive generation of a set of longer lasting biochemicals. For a qucikie reference go to reptilean behavior as an aspect of the fight or flee syndrome. Failing traders literally "protect" themselves from being able to further consider trading in an intellectual setting.

So the turn over of failing traders and the extraction of capital from the market for living purposes of sucessful traders is where the dynamic balance is struck. Think of the cost of a headlight on a car as an example. Every so often I have to replace a headlight. It is 0.7 time the cost of a contract for ES. I need a person(s) to contribute that money into the market for me to extract it to go get a headlight installed.

the people who are the source of capital are being turned over by the market largely; they are not going through a skills improvement process simply because they have a failing skills set and considering improving it is a concept that is not in the cards for almost anyone including any mentors.

The vast majority of skills sets considered are not plausible nor feasible in the first place.

I rank in twelve vertical sets of skills and methods a succession of ways to make money. I use two of these. My commodities ranks fourth and my equities is below that. I am not eligible for any of the ones above the one I do for commodities. My business paradigms are priceless as they say and in another league. My social paradigms are now imbedded in the social fabric of the world so they are big money things. I know because I can enummerate the PL's associated with their exitance and the supportive legislation that ensures their practice.

As the saying goes there is no way when the chips are down to beat the system. You have to know how it works and play by the rules or at least have the legislatures make up new rules to your specs.

Improving trading skills begins with knowing how at least a portion of the market works where those first skills may be applied. Then the rest is iterative refinement.


Here is the beginning point:

You can only make money when the market price is changing is a good place to start. The market gives you signals that are always correct. If you enter a market where price is changing, you must know how to read the signals the market gives you to exit.

Trade with least money and only when the market risk is at a minimum. A fast paced volatile market is the least risky market. enter late and leave early to avoid risk.

After you have made enough money to remove your initial apital and still trade, remove your original capital and continue to trade with the minimum capital allowable.

This milestone brings you to the first place that skills may be improved.

So everyone skips all of the above and goes to reptilean survival condition and their minds are irrevokably disabled in the field of commodities trading and the dynamic turn over balance continues.
 
Thank you, Jack, for taking the time and pain to share your views.

Why is it so important to remove my starting capital and trade with early profit only? What do I do with the starting capital? Sock it away in a Swiss bank account or spend/enjoy it?
 
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