Trading is Bad for your Mental Health

Quote from 4DTrader:

This job of trading (if you can call it a job) will destroy your sanity and drive you nuts, it will make you depressed some times, and euphoric at other times, yes, you will become bipolar :D

You will lose your life savings and your marriage (if you have a wife/husband), you will trade alone, die alone, die poor, very poor, very very poor.:D :D

You will lose interest in other things in your life, such as growing flowers and playing baseball. The reason I mention those two things is that I never growed flowers or played baseball, so I am immune to the harmful effects.

You will be addicted to gambling.

You will lose sleep.

You will have nightmares.

You will have cold sweats, fevers, chills.

You will be ruined.

To save yourself, STOP trading today.

Once you stop, you will be a heathy person. You will start growing flowers and playing baseball (I still don't understand why people play baseball. It baffles me:confused: :confused: :confused: )
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Is that all you do - spread negativity?

What a waste of bandwidth

Hey - thank you for your 'concern' - but other traders are doing just fine
 
Quote from jack hershey:
Etc

There are many stags of building the mind. I think cheese and lilduck are not considering how the mind works and then building the mind to be an expert trader. I changed channels. LOL....
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The first piece I wrote in this thread was for newbies and learning amateurs who compose the membership of ET. Harmony, calm, etc of adopting more certain methods was my suggestion to replace the anxiety, anger etc of faulty or incomplete methods. Grob chose to misrepresent this. Also I don’t use stops. I don’t use targets. I don’t use set-ups. I don’t (knowingly) consult my feelings while trading. As an amateur Grob has been outside the loop all his life. He is stuck with embedded impressions of how he thinks the world of trading works from his 50 years experience. He doesn’t know sufficiently his mind and doesn’t know why it has shaped and honed the apparent deficiencies he displays.

If he doesn’t know, stops in daytrading CL are impractical. He would need to progress from ‘sports memory’ to ‘ace racing car driver’ to play as I do the sharp tops of spikes or sharp bottoms of reverse spikes, along with often extremely fast forming tops and extremely fast forming bottoms, which punctuate CL .. LOL

Blockages in the mind can become large. I think Grob (Jack Hershey) has not yet considered the rigidities of his mind and then progressing the mind to professional player. LOL.. :)
 
Quote from Cheese:

The first piece I wrote in this thread was for newbies and learning amateurs who compose the membership of ET. Harmony, calm, etc of adopting more certain methods was my suggestion to replace the anxiety, anger etc of faulty or incomplete methods. Grob chose to misrepresent this. Also I don’t use stops. I don’t use targets. I don’t use set-ups. I don’t (knowingly) consult my feelings while trading. As an amateur Grob has been outside the loop all his life. He is stuck with embedded impressions of how he thinks the world of trading works from his 50 years experience. He doesn’t know sufficiently his mind and doesn’t know why it has shaped and honed the apparent deficiencies he displays.

If he doesn’t know, stops in daytrading CL are impractical. He would need to progress from ‘sports memory’ to ‘ace racing car driver’ to play as I do the sharp tops of spikes or sharp bottoms of reverse spikes, along with often extremely fast forming tops and extremely fast forming bottoms, which punctuate CL .. LOL

Blockages in the mind can become large. I think Grob (Jack Hershey) has not yet considered the rigidities of his mind and then progressing the mind to professional player. LOL.. :)
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I'm certainly an amateur and you are a pro (I think from what you say).

Im my amateur opinion, I would expect that you as "the ace racing car driver" are definitly contending with many more dimensions than I do. For me "sports memory" is a description of my mental mode where everything just flows along unconsciously and carving the turns (in what ever patterns or formations) is an infrequent (20 to 40 times a day) rather gentle action over 6 and 1/2 hours. My emotions are either feelings of comfort, support or confidence which arise from knowing that I know.

I'm sure that CL is a heck of a lot of fun to trade and you must really enjoy it. I just frontrun the ES because it has leading indicators and is very liquid and partial fills work at about 5 times the market capacity.

For a while I felt that the thread might get involved in how the mind can be improved for trading really skillfully. Now, I realize from what you said you were just addressing the type of traders you characterized ET as being. I'm sure that you would use a different set of emotions to describe "the ace racing car driver" than you recommended the ET traders use in you prior post.

I've never seen the ace racing car driver set of emotions as you well point out.

For me, its just 20 to 40 trades and I know I will have four pages of logs. As a practical matter I can fill out the pages roughly long before the market rolls out the turning points. It seems very smooth and orderly and by operating in the space a little bit ahead of NOW and just doing the turns when NOW comes around, it is kind of like touring around an track where the turns come up one after each other the same way on each lap.

Have a good one. The "trading is bad for mental health" subject isn't my cup of tea as you point out.
 
Quote from SoxxClinton:

Trading is brutal man. In hindsight (I am 37 now) it would have been 10 times easier to follow through on my top rank education and a developing career as an analyst at a major bank. Maybe even more lucrative too by this point.

And I am one of the ones who have made it 10 (almost 11 years) now. I have lived entirely off of trading for almost all that time, outside of maybe six months at the beginning, when my girlfriend supported us.

Upsides-
-No boss, office politics, corporate nonsense.
-No set hours (I am not a day trader so I can even blow the market hours off if I feel like it).
-No commute, suits, etc.
-No sales, marketing, etc.
-If I do a good job, it all accrues to me. I get rewarded based on performance: no subjective assessments, no negotiations, contracts, profit sharing, etc.
-Time to study other things, read, or even goof off if I feel like it.
-Intellectual gratification. I like #'s and the study of systems, time series, options, etc. are fascinating to me. I always have more to learn.

Downsides-
-I bear all the downside risk.
-Skills not really portable in the sense that my resume is now nearly worthless from a hiring managers point of view. I would have to start from scratch somewhere most likely.
-No medical insurance.
-Social isolation.
-Feast or famine pay schedule. Good months, bad months, Good quarters, bad quarters. I make more money than the average american, but I might make it all in one or two great months a year.
-No feeling of having contributed to society or being part of a team.

Now all the the downsides have remedies to some extent, but after working my ass off, I am often too exhausted to join a running club, volunteer, etc. all the things that would improve the quality of life.

So like the poker players say, "Trading is a Hard Way to Make an Easy Living".

Maybe I am just one of those guys who is destined to be a grinder at this game, making my living, but certainly not making any headlines, kind of a joe sixpack of private traders. I don't know, maybe a bunch of other guys here make tons of money and turn it into something glamorous, but it hasn't been that way at all for me. Without the "love of the game" factor that keeps me going on, trading would turn into a special kind of hell, not unlike being in a cubicle, or on an assembly line, or all the other things people do to support themselves.

In the end, my Dad was right- To paraphrase "If you don't enjoy what you are doing it is going to suck".
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The best post I read here on ET. All the major points on trading in a glimpse.
 
Quote from SoxxClinton:

...And I am one of the ones who have made it 10 (almost 11 years) now. I have lived entirely off of trading for almost all that time, outside of maybe six months at the beginning, when my girlfriend supported us...
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To become not only profitable but to actually make a living from trading after only 6 months is fairly remarkable.
 
Quote from Thunderdog:

To become not only profitable but to actually make a living from trading after only 6 months is fairly remarkable.
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The answer lies in this sentence:

"Feast or famine pay schedule. Good months, bad months, Good quarters, bad quarters."

Translation: got lucky first during the dot com bull market, made loads of money (after 6 months)=feast, then the bull market was over, lost a bunch of money=famine, started to learn/change/adjust/struggle=bad months, was not consistent=good quarter, bad quarters, finally after several years, became consistent=grinder. So he is now a grinder=a good sign of consistent money.
 
yeah it was kinda like that. I made money like everybody else in the last couple of years of the 90's. To be honest I never did much momentum, technical, or daytrading so my returns develop over much longer timeframes than most of you guys talk about. You could say that I am a fundamentally oriented position trader I guess, though it is a little more complicated than that. I use hedges and market neutral strategies, options spreads, and lots of other tools to implement/complement my strategy. I guess the style is probably closest to Hussman's amongst well known investors. So yeah I can see an inefficiency and maybe not get paid for months once I put on a position, or go through periods like last July, where I took a hit like most of the quant funds who tend to long value and short expensive. So the times that are meager for me are either when some of my legs go against me, or when the market takes time to come around to a normal state. I tend to run a ton of positions at the same time too, usually 25-50 at a time. And I don't know what you guys are getting but an average solid year for me is like 25% with of course lots of average variation around that. I do a lot of trading throughout the day but it is more like gardening, trimming positions here and there. I have zero techincal analysis skills whatsoever and am probably the worst short-term trader ever. But yeah I know all about the mental issues, I can have long flat periods and 20% drawdowns which because of my style of trading involve periods of months usually.

To answer another question, I was one of those kids who had a few shares of KO and XOM as a kid so I started watching stocks early. Also I have a finance degree and did five years of credit in a bank. I bet I have read the annual reports of maybe 2,000 companies between work and managing my little portfolio.
 
A profession is invalid because it involves uncertainty? I guess actuaries, insurance companies, weather forecasters, and anyone in the military is shit outta luck then.

Please, think a little before posting next time.

As for a serious "edge", what about the performance of successful speculators using public information on a long-term timeframe? Or what about the advantage of simply following the order book for a security more than anyone else - won't work on the S&P but can easily work in small caps, less liquid ETFs, and so on. As for how productive trading is, liquidity and price discovery are both socially useful. In any case, the only objective measure of productivity is how much $$$ you can make from your work - by that measure, trading and investing is rated higher than almost any activity on the planet.

Quote from tschmidt1234:

I never said financial markets were random in any way. There is a perfectly sensible rationale to how they work, but basically I think it takes some kind of serious "edge" to accurately predict their movements, be that inside information, some kind of incredibly wicked news/data feed, or maybe a billion dollars to just move the market yourself.

The main point of my post was that through all the rhetoric among traders, you ultimately don't know what the price of any given instrument is going to do. You can GUESS, or make an educated GUESS, but this is not a very productive occupation like say, a mechanic who knows how to rebore your engine block or a translator who knows how to communicate about technical subjects in two totally different languages. Given a task, they can tell you up front if they KNOW how to do it. Traders, at best, can give you a GUESS as to the price action of a financial instrument.

maybe you're very successful at trading, rearden, and given your number of posts I'm sure you've been at it for a while (a lot longer than myself, I'm sure), but wouldn't you agree that uncertainty is the main element of trading as an occupation that differentiates it from others such as those I've mentioned above?
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