Poker -- Has your knowledge of poker improved your trading profits?

No. The most important dynamics of poker are about intimidating opposing players to making a mistake. That is, "betting in position" and/or intimidating with your big stack if you've got it. That is.... you try to bluff opponents off of a winning hand or suck them into calling/raising when they have the loser. (And then there's the play when you bluff while stepping into the lion's den.)

Sometimes it ends up being all about 50-50, but none of which translates to the financial markets.

Any trader who hopes to gain some insight into the markets via poker knowledge is fish'n in a dry hole.


^this^ dude does not play poker.
 
you fraud quit stalking me lol.

no I don't play seriously... but got to Amateur 6D in Go, and am a decent bridge player

Hey @dozu888 , don't be embarrassed, but the mighty, highly successful @destriero, was not directing his comment to you but to the ^Scat..^ as he posted above. No worries.
 
And that would depend on what kind of trader you are. Scalping ES is one thing; spreading interest rate Flys is another thing.

I'm going to disagree: they both involve quantitative position assessment and risk management. Ooo! Same as better-level poker. :rolleyes:

{Additional random thoughts...}
Bridge seems more like the option market than futures scalping.
Chess more like fundamentals' investing.
"Time" which figures so much in scalping and near-er term option trading, seems almost absent in poker. (Just watch any 'world series of poker' broadcast...!)
 
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Just my 2 cents---I used to play cards online (have been looking for a thread like this) so I finally created an account here. I multi-tabled online poker back in the day (Cake Poker) and made around 75$/hr- had fairly low variance playing same full ring game over and over, lots of adderall. Of course they are similar, bankroll management, self awareness of bias, non-attachment to hand/trade/money, patience......fold fold fold. The difference personally and it's big is.....TILT.

I think the ability to blow yourself up with trading makes the Tilt factor so big. In poker, even if I went on full blown drunken tilt mode, the worse I did was maybe lose 3k in a night(50k bankroll). With trading, you can destroy yourself so quickly that people don't really understand until it's too late, at least for me it was on the first go.
 
I'm going to disagree: they both involve quantitative position assessment and risk management. Ooo! Same as better-level poker. :rolleyes:

Let's face it nobody is more valuable as an opinion provider than our @tommcginis. So thanks Sir for your post.:rolleyes:
 
I'm going to disagree: they both involve quantitative position assessment and risk management. Ooo! Same as better-level poker. :rolleyes:

I honestly get what you are saying and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree on the face of it.

I do think that certain kinds of options and spread trading strategies require more cognitive dimensionality than scalping but that’s just my opinion borne out of experience doing it all - I don’t have any empirical evidence to cite.

The really good scalpers I’ve met over the years were very aware of what the cash underlying was doing, and how the correlated (and inversely correlated) products were driving order flows. They were also very good at anticipating their response to multiple market action scenarios.

Likewise - I would NOT say that all the great traders I’ve met over the years were also great Poker players. BUT - more than a few were.
 
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