Is trading easy?

Is trading easy?

  • Yes

  • No

  • Fuck off cunt.

Results are only viewable after voting.
nooby_mcnoob said:
I recently encoded my "strategy" into a pine script and it was profitable. Not as profitable as me trading myself, since it took entries I wouldn't, but it had positive expectancy.

I think pinescript is a good initial test, if you can encode your approach in code.
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LOL... see... you just proved my point. You said initially that coding wasn't necessary, that is actually hinders, and yet here is a direct example where your coding skills gave you the go ahead signal after running a test that gave you faith in what you are doing.

I think in trading, so many profitable traders don't even really know why they are profitable. They might go on and on about their indicators or other bullshit, but in the end, its I think years of screen time and developing a feel for how the market is moving.

Fib guys love to quote their 50% or 61.8% levels, but they still say they don't put on a trade just because a level is hit. They still need to see something else. I think its that something else which matters more. There are like 4 or 5 fib levels in a retracement from 0 to 100%. Mathematically, price is highly likely to turn at one of them. LOL
 
NoahA said:
My issues are mostly psychological. My trade stats have been very positive if I stuck to a strict stop and target. But of course, I think I know better in the moment and then fudge them. Its obvious my losses are bigger than my gains, but this isn't how much OCO orders are set up. LOL...

The other thing that has really helped is putting on a trade that is an inconsequential amount of money. Even trading micro contracts can sometimes hurt to be honest. A 5 point ES stop is $25, and get a few of those, next thing you know, you are down $100. If your account is only 5k lets say, this is 2% already. So losing 2% in one day isn't good if you don't have subsequent 2% gains.

By by trading the 3X ETF's, I have found that I can easily scale down the leverage. Trading just 25 shares of TQQQ for the NQ or UPRO for the ES proxy means that a trade can be scaled in, held longer, etc. And the fees are only about 30 cents for each order. I wish I did it sooner because trading the micro futures can still draw down an account pretty quickly with lots of losing trades.
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The reason bracket orders were a game changer was I struggled to get my desired statistics to play out exactly, and it was bothering me. My model results did not match my real results. Bracket orders basically encode average win/loss. Then your only job is to make sure the brackets are achievable and take ONLY the trades you're supposed to.

So my trading will look like -6.75, 20, -6.75, 20 ideally but sometimes (like today) I keep pulling the take profit higher until it becomes obscene.
 
NoahA said:
LOL... see... you just proved my point. You said initially that coding wasn't necessary, that is actually hinders, and yet here is a direct example where your coding skills gave you the go ahead signal after running a test that gave you faith in what you are doing.

I think in trading, so many profitable traders don't even really know why they are profitable. They might go on and on about their indicators or other bullshit, but in the end, its I think years of screen time and developing a feel for how the market is moving.

Fib guys love to quote their 50% or 61.8% levels, but they still say they don't put on a trade just because a level is hit. They still need to see something else. I think its that something else which matters more. There are like 4 or 5 fib levels in a retracement from 0 to 100%. Mathematically, price is highly likely to turn at one of them. LOL
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Recently, just out of pure interest. It did not impact anything I do, although now I do keep it on during the day and see if it tells me something. Plus pinescript is super fucking easy to learn unless you are retarded.
 
nooby_mcnoob said:
The reason bracket orders were a game changer was I struggled to get my desired statistics to play out exactly, and it was bothering me. My model results did not match my real results. Bracket orders basically encode average win/loss. Then your only job is to make sure the brackets are achievable and take ONLY the trades you're supposed to.

So my trading will look like -6.75, 20, -6.75, 20 ideally but sometimes (like today) I keep pulling the take profit higher until it becomes obscene.
More...
When I track my trades, I use every entry and then see what would happen if I used a 3 point stop and 5 point target, or 5 point stop and 10 point target, etc. It was amazing to see how my trade management resulted in the least number of points. Usually a 5 point stop and 10 point target for ES worked the best. Some trades did hit 20 or 30 points, and it was even better if after 10 points, the stop is moved to break even and then you let the trade ride.

But there are of course also times where it hits 11 points, drops back down to zero, and if you didn't take the +10, you get nothing. But over many trades, the stats don't lie about what should be done.

What is also interesting is doing a monte carlo simulation. Even with a highly profitable system with a 50% win rate on a risk to reward of 1:2, 5 or 6 losers in a row is completely expected. So many traders pack up after 3 or 4 losing trades, but knowing how this distribution works has to make you prepared for it.

But you of course need to be prepared to deal with all of this psychologically.
 
Trading is always challenging, it's just the types of problems change.

Focusing on pair trading leveraged ETFs is working best for me now, vs just daily gappers.

Trading is always hard af
 
I think trading can be really easy when you have an edge and a disciplined process. You’ll still lose but your profit will be much more.
 
I haven't discovered the holy grail method that will make me money every month

If you can make money every month (or anything over 90% of months with no blowup risk in the other 10%), trading will be easy you.

Maybe others have found this Holy Grail. In which case you dont need to read any further.

I find trading is really easy when it is really easy and it is really hard when its really hard.
In that sometimes the market just gifts you lots of money for many months at a time.
And other times it just wants to take (again for many months at a time) and there is nothing much you can do about it. You just have to take the losses and not lose discipline otherwise you will miss out when the winning restarts.

Over the last decade some years the markets i trade were volatile and much easier to trade and some years they were relatively slow and hard to trade.

People will say adapt your trading during the slow markets. But it is not that easy, I find that market action is just more random in those slower years and less random during the good years.

Since Covid we have had good markets for trading so our luck is in at the moment..

The above doesn't even touch on about all the psychological issues and biases we face as traders.
 
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