OP being in IT if you are a coder I think it can help, an automated trade is a dispassionate trade, see "The Disciplined Trader" for why that is important. Ignore all the "wolf vs sheep", "domesticated vs risk taker" and all that nonsense. In business the people who make the money are usually the guys who can see how toilet paper is being made and figure out how to make it for a nickel less. The people who are consistently making money trading are squeezing an extra tick or pip out a millisecond faster than the other guys, an analytical mind that can see things objectively can only help.
Is active trading a viable job for an individual?
- Thread starter BYoung
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Agree, it can help once a profitable and consistent tradeplan is created. But it is not essential.
Essential is to have a profitable and consistent tradeplan. And to build that you don't need IT at all. You need insight in how the markets work and being able to think out of the box.
IT is not an advantage for the creation of the essential part, which is not the programming. Having an edge is important.
An automated trade is the last step.
Create something that can later be turned into an automated trade is the difficult and essential part. And for that you don't need IT.
I think that's a popular way to go about it ... or at least plan to go about it ..
Yes, but there is one huge trap.
I saw IT experts program something with a lot of parameters. Then they ran the program and waited till something popped up that seemed to look like a profitable system. They don't study the market (too lazy) and think that doing what AI does, but in a very primitive and simplified way, will give them the holy grail.
They had no idea at all what actually generated the trades and also not why it went wrong.
try trading crypto , much more trader friendly, from my prespective...
I don't trade crypto but my son was for a while, so I started looking at it quite closely.
My opinion, I thought it looked very trader friendly in terms of price action, seemed to behave very well and I had the impression the big money betting on crypto were professional traders, certainly nothing like the type of randomness often seen in fx.
Discipline and personal ethics will keep you above the hoi polloi for a while but the following adage still applies in the long run:
"You cannot soar with the eagles if you are working with turkeys."
Wherever you go...Walmart, Costco, College, church, kindergarten, a sporting event, a rally or parade, Dunkin Donuts, Starbucks,...basically 94-98% of the sample population will be turkeys -- even in here, in E.T
,So the successful man, or person, will have to venture into the Wilderness by themselves...kind of like Moses in the desert using and relying on their own cleverness and ingenuity and smarts and intuition and somewhat common sense and wisdom, and etc misc 2018,
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Quite so.
"He who travels fastest- travels alone."
-Rudyard Kipling
Although at the far reaches of traveling along, you come to rely on more than your own cleverness.
For each to discover. OR NOT.
Turkeys are quite beautiful if you look at them. Their feathers are used to decorate hats. A better metaphor would be "You cannot soar with the eagles if you are working with pigeons". That's more appropriate.
To be fair, I wasn't responding to tell him to remain with the "pigeons"; I was suggesting to him how to deal with those "pigeons" WHILE he was still working with them. Everything takes time and so does leaving "pigeons".