POLL (Trading): If you knew then what you knew now...
- Thread starter rcanfiel
- Start date
That 95% lose money is a belief, no one knows for sure. The question is, "what would you differently?" so this reflects improved knowledge. Thirdly, ET is a traders' community, so the likelihood is that there are a higher % of successful traders than the worldwide "beginner" set.
Most of the successful traders tend to gravitate towards price action, so I suggest the number is rather accurate.
Fund your account with money you don't need. I traded with money I needed to use for a ballon payment on real estate due 18 months down the road. (There's some risk for ya).
The clock ran out on my winning streek. My errors redeemed. It wouldn't have been life changing money by some standards but I would have been exhonerated. Nutmeg will rise again.
The clock ran out on my winning streek. My errors redeemed. It wouldn't have been life changing money by some standards but I would have been exhonerated. Nutmeg will rise again.
You forgot to add "I think that..." or "In my opinion..."
I am not aware of any empirical evidence either for or against that weasel statement. Practically speaking, such evidence would be extremely hard to come by.
If anything, I would not be surprised to find out that a higher % of fully automated, system traders - themselves almost certainly in the minority - are profitable than of the other kinds of traders. Your poll is conspicuously missing a choice along the lines of "Learn more about developing ATS." (Studied engineering/programming is somewhat related, but not nearly close enough... there is much more to ATS R&D.)
I don't want to discourage you from conducting polls (none of my business), but the defects of your polls must be exposed so that traders reading your poll results won't be misled. So what I am going to say is not against you, but to serve the traders involved.
For a survey sample's result (e.g. "most of the successful traders tend to gravitate towards price action") to be valid (i.e., generalizable to the population), certain criteria must be met:
1. sample is randomly selected
2. sample is NOT self-selected
3. every member of the trading population has an equal opportunity of being selected
4. sample has a large enough size
Otherwise, the results of your survey are invalid.
I am still puzzled at your conclusion of "most of the successful traders." Your poll never asked the filter question of "Are you a successful trader? If yes, proceed to answer the following question." How do you know the respondents are successful traders?
I would become a top secret agent and stash away as many of the toys as I could and then use them to kill and torture all the lying SOB's in the trading business. I admit to falling for any number of the get rich easy BS'ers when I got started, and while I take full responsibility for being stupid, I would also still want to take out the trash to prevent others from going through all that garbage. 