The Electric Day Trader and Ruin. How probability oppposes short-term investors.

you have clearly never traded nor have you read the article in full. So what exactly do you base your utterances on? And what do you mean with "if you are both reasonably cautious and lucky"??? If you play sufficiently often then this has nothing to do with being cautious or lucky.

The article is twisting the truth to let the author make his weird point: A system with a positive edge has a nearly 100%probability of ending up in the money when employing the right position/bet size. How do you want to argue against that?



Quote from Ms Varima-Garch:

overall, i agree with the article. it's useless to argue with the math of ruin

stay out of probability's way or you'll get run over by a bulldozer

ByLoSellHi has greatly contributed to the aggregate intellect of the trading community by posting this high-quality article

some people get hysterical because they don't want the myth to be taken away from them

the good news is that the truth isn't as awful as some people may have thought

the article is not saying "you don't stand a chance." it is saying "you are more likely to lose, if you play very frequently over a long period of time."

if you are both reasonably cautious and lucky, you may win in the end. may win is the operative word, that's all. that's all. relax

Varima Garch
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Quote from Ms Varima-Garch:

overall, i agree with the article. it's useless to argue with the math of ruin
stay out of probability's way or you'll get run over by a bulldozer
ByLoSellHi has greatly contributed to the aggregate intellect of the trading community by posting this high-quality article
some people get hysterical because they don't want the myth to be taken away from them
the good news is that the truth isn't as awful as some people may have thought
the article is not saying "you don't stand a chance." it is saying "you are more likely to lose, if you play very frequently over a long period of time."
if you are both reasonably cautious and lucky, you may win in the end. may win is the operative word, that's all. that's all. relax
Varima Garch
More...

Natural price oscillations aren't based in math and do not need to be calculated using math.

When you view price movement on time, tick or range based charts you MUST HAVE statistical data in order to make any sense out of it's movement BUT using time, tick and range based charts are like looking though an opaque lens to drive a car. You can see something is out there but can't quite get a solid grasp of it.

What, do you need an interpreter to understand what to do at a red light? Not no but hell no. Clear the garbage off your chart and look at what pure price movement does with perfect consistency. Trading is only gambling if you can't see what you are doing.
 
Quote from asiaprop:

The article is twisting the truth to let the author make his weird point
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what's weird about making a bona fide attempt to make some money for yourself, per se ? vs enriching your broker only

long run . . . what about it? as keynes famously said, in the long run we're all dead

Varima Garch
 
Quote from Thunderdog:

"Electric," you say? I got a real jolt out of that one.
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You know the mentality you are dealing with when you see that useage instead of "Electronic".
Like the pit traders are reading their trades using candles and reading prices on chalk boards.
 
Quote from ProfLogic:

Natural price oscillations aren't based in math and do not need to be calculated using math.

What, do you need an interpreter to understand what to do at a red light?

Trading is only gambling if you can't see what you are doing.
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true, you don't have to use mathematical definitions to see what's going on with price. (like some people have tried to do, for example kaufman in his skew-kurtosis strategies - look at shape of price distribution to see what's going on, but i don't know if it really work)

there are other ways of doing it like moving averages, various standard deviation ideas, atr/kettler channels etc

i guess we're not arguing about whether technical analysis works or not. it probably does help a picture is worth a thousand words

the issue in this thread is how frequently you trade, and at want point the frequency of your trades begins to work against you
 
Quote from ProfLogic:

You know the mentality you are dealing with when you see that useage instead of "Electronic".
Like the pit traders are reading their trades using candles and reading prices on chalk boards.
More...
Perhaps by "electric," the author was referring to traders who are more "plugged in" to what's going on and are therefore more "current."
 
Quote from taojaxx:

Anybody who bases a study on day trading on the assumption that traders risk between 10 and 25% of their capital on each trade deserves to remain in academia for the rest of their lives.
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Lol...is that what they assumed? I didn't even read the junk. These are morons and the problem is our kids PAY to receive education from them.

I know people who day trade for years and have made a lots, I mean a lots of money. Not easy, but flying a jet fighter is not easy either. Only people good at their profession make money. The rest lose either money or time, which is money of course, or both, which is everything.

Jerks..
 
Quote from asiaprop:

"if you are both reasonably cautious and lucky"???
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reasonably cautious: try to find optimal position size, % of equity you risk on a trade.

"reasonably" means if your bet per trade is too small, you're not moving anywhere

"cautious" means if your bet per trade is too large, you're increasing your risk of ruin

"reasonably cautious" means finding the right tradeoff

lucky: we don't have an infinite series of trades. lucky means being lucky, as it were, to have your theoretical edge realized, over the course of the limited series of trades.

that's why this risk of ruing thing is so important. yes, it's unpleasant for some of us to even think in those terms. trading does not always have to be about pleasure, no pain no gain

lucky means having the courage to say: i know i can be wiped out by a series of losing trades

all this should be balanced, but i don't know how, quite frankly.

that's why i don't trade regularly, it's true
 
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