Mentorship / training fail
- Thread starter garachen
- Start date
Not sure if it should be necessary for each member of the group to have technical ability.
Perhaps individuals who are highly creative, have good intuition, and are able to logically deduce and reason could make a useful contribution despite lacking mathematics or programming ability. If you are looking for an interesting and different experience there might be value in selecting outside of your usual pool of graduates in a technical subject. (I get the impression you are wanting something a little bit different but still worthwhile - this could be your opportunity to experiment with e.g. music majors)
I would expect that candidates would need basic familiarity with e.g. matching algorithms, Windows/Linux and perhaps familiarity with a programming language, have a concept of how to organise data in a database, understanding of hardware and networking, etc as well as some futures market experience in order to be sufficiently familiar with the concepts under discussion...but perhaps not necessary to have everyone to the level where they could code up a strategy over a few days or understand how to use PCA or the Kalman filter.
I wouldn't expect tons of math/CS competency. Just an Excel level understanding of manipulating data and some basic trading knowledge. Something a high functioning high school kid could do. Except most of them are extremely unmotivated.
You have been doing a bootstrap for 13 years. I did that for 40 days. after that I helped others for about 57 years. It was sad to see that your mind did not gget built to have a full and complete spectrum of inference. Since you lack the inference, it is not possible for you to have Perception. that is why you are in a separate room and do have have a white board for discussing the market in real time ahead of time.
This is the deal I've done in the past as a mentor:
I teach you my system and chat with you daily as you learn the system and I shape your thinking, teaching you how to think and operate as a trader
You put up enough money in your own account that I have to sign off on withdrawals from
We split profits 50/50 until we've both made a specified amount, then you're on your own. I know that eventually once you are on your own you'll morph the system into something more inline with your personality, but you'll know HOW to trade and HOW to develop and manage a trading strategy.
This is a good deal for me because my system is fairly rigid and the rules are simple, so explaining and teaching it doesn't take a lot of time. I take no financial risk. If you flame out, I'm out several hours of time chatting with you online. Yes, you know my system, but if you haven't learned how to manage certain intricate details, and you don't stay in the loop for how it changes, you'll blow yourself up with it, or anyone else you share it with.
I would only do it with someone who's already been trading for years, and has made a lot of the rookie mistakes. It would take WAY more than two weeks of hand holding.
Don't anyone pm me asking me to mentor them. I'm not looking.
I teach you my system and chat with you daily as you learn the system and I shape your thinking, teaching you how to think and operate as a trader
You put up enough money in your own account that I have to sign off on withdrawals from
We split profits 50/50 until we've both made a specified amount, then you're on your own. I know that eventually once you are on your own you'll morph the system into something more inline with your personality, but you'll know HOW to trade and HOW to develop and manage a trading strategy.
This is a good deal for me because my system is fairly rigid and the rules are simple, so explaining and teaching it doesn't take a lot of time. I take no financial risk. If you flame out, I'm out several hours of time chatting with you online. Yes, you know my system, but if you haven't learned how to manage certain intricate details, and you don't stay in the loop for how it changes, you'll blow yourself up with it, or anyone else you share it with.
I would only do it with someone who's already been trading for years, and has made a lot of the rookie mistakes. It would take WAY more than two weeks of hand holding.
Don't anyone pm me asking me to mentor them. I'm not looking.
I think the hardest thing about manual trading is managing exits. I find that, more often then not, peoples entries have positive expectancy but then they become way too fixated on trying to exit based on some metric related to entry price rather than then disappearance of alpha. When I teach manual trading it's all about attuning people to better hear the exit warning bells and strengthening their ability to exit regardless of where the entry price was.
This usually takes about 3 months of handholding and requires a certain personality type. I don't hire people to teach them to manually trade anymore because generally there's a better use of everyone's time, but I'm not opposed to them picking it up.
High frequency strategies are much easier. There's a lot of information in the data. And there are lots of strategies that fall into the 'too tedious to discover, too tedious to implement, not quite profitable enough' category that are passed over by the very large firms that really need to focus only on the big stuff. 10-14 inexperienced but motivated man weeks split between discovery, back testing and optimization should be sufficient.
Lescor, if I had to guess, were you doing this mostly for fun and then got tired of it? And, if so, was it a bad experience in particular or more like 'eh - I've had enough'
If I had to break it down I think my motivation would be about 1/3 each of
1) add variety to the day
2) potential profit
3) meeting new people
None of that is worth even a small amount of anxiety or frustration - I have enough of that. This would need to be an anxiety reducing proposition.
Interesting idea.
Most of the comments on this thread relate to training experienced traders. One of the problems an experienced trader has (for me, anyway) is the opportunity cost of taking capital from a well-performing system to try something new and unproven. I seem to recall from other threads that lescor is well-regarded within the ET community, and that's worth a lot. But as we all know, the most important part of a system is the suitability to the trader's needs (assuming profitability is one of those needs). Not all systems work for all traders, so even good training and mentoring can get wasted.
The two critical pieces every successful trader needs are a methodology/system/style/edge and money for both trading capital and living expenses. For those newbies who have money, there is no shortage of people offering training. And that's the motivation behind a lot of the caustic remarks here and elsewhere.
The problem is for newbies who lack adequate capital and lack the pedigree to get hired by a big-name bank or hedge fund is money. Has anybody tackled that one? How do you structure a program for inexperienced traders who lack adequate capital without being so selective that you screen out a lot of people with good potential. I think that's where the real need is.
One of the unique aspects of the Turtle program was that Dennis and Eckhardt provided capital for both trading and living expenses. Some of the students had prior trading experience, but some had none at all. I read an interview in which Dennis was asked what his selection criteria were. He declined to discuss it saying that he might want to repeat the program again some day. But trading experience was clearly not a prerequisite.
There have been a couple film productions that supplied both training and capital to inexperienced students, but it appears they were more interested in telling an entertaining story than producing good traders.
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If your profitability estimates are correct, wouldn't it make more sense just to hire people to develop strategies full-time, or spend more of your own time developing strategies, until it became much harder? I can't imagine training a few guys with no background for 2 weeks would yield better results from a profitability standpoint.
It does sound like it could be a fun exercise. Someone mentioned the Million Dollar Traders documentary, and this actually seems like a good subject for a documentary.. finding a few random joes, teaching them how to trade with a realistic chance of success, working together as a crack team to beat the market.. It has the feel of an experiment and I would watch that show.
If this were your motivation for doing it, I wouldn't think it would be a sustainable model.
Given that the ultimate goal of most people would be to become a profitable, independent trader, how would you quantify the training as far as getting them there? I personally think it's highly valuable just to see what a successful trader is doing, and getting their opinions and philosophies, so I have no problem with your value proposition, but maybe some prospective students might wonder.
I already hire people, but on a small scale. 3-4 a year. Thats about 100 phone interviews and flying about 20 people out for onsite interviews every year. It's an arduous, time-consuming process which requires a much higher return on investment. If I were less picky it would be easier but firing people after putting a lot of time into them is also pretty expensive.
I'd only really be interested in people who agree with your philosophy of value.
Also, in this business, smaller independent traders tend to overestimate the value of the trading piece and underestimate the value of the relationship and business pieces. Getting from the indepentently profitable a few hundred thousand dollars a year to many millions as year usually requires relationships and some business expertise. If people don't know who you are you are probably not going to get the phone call when a new market making program comes out or when there are changes to the data feeds or exchange network infrastructure. To get from retail to institutional (creating your own institution) or even just getting to less-retail you need to cultivate these relationships.