Quote from hftvol:
because I can guarantee you that you will lose money over time if you believe you can be net profitable looking at one single asset. The market is highly integrated, correlated and sometimes currencies lead, sometimes bonds, sometimes cash equity, sometimes news hit markets in Europe and carry over to US markets, sometimes it is Asia, sometimes the US. If you honestly believe you or any algorithm or any bank or hedge fund trader can limit him/it-self to one single symbol and decipher market dynamics then you must be a genius. I have never come across such genius in my over dozen years as professional trader. Do you honestly want to listen to charting software salesmen? If they knew about financial markets and knew how to extract value trading rather than selling software do you really think they would pay a bundle to advertise their software here? Think about it for a second and draw your own conclusions. If you tell me you only looked at one symbol and traded in that way for more than 3 years and every month were net profitable then I draw my hat and bow in reverence. I doubt, however, that this is even remotely close to the fact.
Think for a moment why bank traders shell out thousands of dollars in high quality data feeds, multi market real-time data subscriptions, even if they only trade one single asset (such as a JGB futures and options trader). Why are some people so limited in logic and intellect that I am afraid they will not even follow this kind of reasoning? Of course you may be lucky and have been profitable over a short period of time but again if you had applied your claimed approach over 3 or more years and had been profitable each and every single month then we can talk again. Otherwise you should maybe first overthink your whole approach and thought process.
hftvol
thanks for the candid opinion.. i have no intention switching to MC with the 2 symbol limit but was just asking if me/someone is trading only one instrument, then MC may be useful to place trades provided they have other software to look at other instruments.
as to why i trade only one single instrument - many reasons for that.
1. watching/trading a single instrument helps me get a feel of short term price moves.
2. i dont want to run a scan on 4000 stocks daily and pick the ones that are in play for the day.. i simply don't know their historical movement patters to put my money on them. plus trading SPY/ES is a way to trade all of their individual components right?
3.i am an individual trader with limited capital so it doesn't matter which instrument i use to extract my profit.. i can't possibly trade all the asset classes
4. i know all the markets are interrelated but unless i have a tradable plan based on these relationships why would i even waste time in looking at all of them..sure i look at them enough to get a feel for whats happening but thats more than enough
5.would you say the same to folks who trade only the ES or NQ or CL?
6. i am no where close to being profitable... thats why i am choosing 100 shares of SPY to begin with and if i can prove to myself that i can trade, then move on to bigger lot sizes of SPY or trade the ES.
fyi..i'm not arguing my approach is right but this is what i could come up with by learning to trade the markets sitting in a box..