Quote from SNYP40A1:
I have been programming for over 4 years as my day job. I am quite good at software development, but not so good at trading. For those of you who do automated trading, what do you look for? I would like to make a scanner to continuously monitor hundreds of financial instruments in real time and detect the best opportunities. Where do I begin?
After hundreds of hours of meditation and countless hours of previous life-pain, I have come to the following as a suggestion for new people wanting to learn to trade, the fastest way possible:
1-Grab a (There are dozens. Any will do, really) near breakeven, small losing trend-following method, and start executing it real time in a very small real time, real cash account. (If you thought SIM, for even a split second, then stop right here, you aren't ready. Find something else to do with your life, you'll be happier overall on average).
2-When you can execute 1- perfectly above (which comes after many hours, days, and weeks, of practice), you are a small loser long term, including slippage and commissions. Come to terms with your situation, and accept it for what it is.
Look only at one chart of one instrument in one timeframe. Look always at the same chart.
3-After many, many, many hours/days/weeks/months of 2- (which 99.5% of people will NOT do.). Then you will start recognizing, intuitively, when a certain "situation" WILL NOT work, then you can ignore that signal. THAT alone may give you an edge over the long term, and make you a small winner long term (in this case you are A WINNER in a game in which MOST lose. BE HAPPY about this. It is a tremendous achievement!). After a while you will see that doing the opposite of your signal WILL give you an even bigger edge, and make you a not-so-small winner in the long term.
4-After an even longer time, then someone, more enlightened than you, will take pity of you, and give you some compassion, he will literally pop out of cyberspace-nowhere to your rescue, help you completely pull your head out of your ass (You will still need to do most of the pulling.), and you'll start looking at reality for what it is (it is pointless to try to help someone that hasn't endured the unusually enormous amount of emotional and financial pain, sustained over many years of frustration).
At that moment you will "inmediately" reach complete consistency of thought and action.
5-You will then, of your own choosing, adopt a boiled white rice diet, and post "stupid" posts, like this, on internet forums, with the hopeless intention that most people reading them, will indeed find something better to do with their life than subject themselves and their families to an undue amount of pain, before enlightment and consistency is even close to being achievable.
