Quote from Whamo:
Jack,
Thanks for your suggestions. I must say it's one of the few posts of yours that I could fully understand
I've sat out of the market several times as you've suggested and I find that it helps. The ebb and flow of the markets certainly takes a lot out of you when you are in it every day. My initial efforts / first years tuition ended about a year ago and that mindset is firmly in the past.
You are very welcome.
If i were to paint a brief picture of making money, or to put it another way: being effective with time and capital, I would suggest some really fundamental truths that must be managed properly.
1. It takes little initial capital to become a millionaire in a very short time.
2. The market does not jump around: it migrates from condition to condition.
3. Everything considered all you have to do is have a KISS approach that handles all market conditions of 2.
In 1957, I was a super dummy and newbie. I have gone the course. It has been the most fum thing in the world.
Prove 1. to yourself by using the compound interest formula to make up stuff about the workings of he market. Not many people here can make up what is required to understand 1. Read a few of the ninnie's comments on the stochastic thread. I use the yellow brick road illustration to show the potential of making money. The fact is that p[eople can not intuit the answer of which of two compounding approaches will be the best. given A or B it is not possible to process to the anwsr that is correct without doing the actual maths with each set of factors and get the comparison values.
Clue for you: You have never chosen or gotten to the correct bar duration for what you are doing. Example: reagan and his team made us the greatest debtor nation by operating on the wrong side of a distribution curve because they though they were on the other side. They actually did the opposite of what was required to get to optimum because they thought they were on the other side of optimum than they were.
The compound interest formula is impotant because it teaches you how much of the market potential you can get by the limiting factors of your efficiency to participate. If any thing has slowed down the ET efforts people make in learning from me it is this factor.
2. is complex. The singular point that it makes is that there is no need to gamble nor predict. You can see ALL over ET people are operating in a nonsensical world. If you know where you are and there are paths of migration for the operating point of the market, what does one do? Well you simply apply a set of tools that handle all eventualities in the immediate path. There is a quiver of tools available to all players. simply use the group that can have possible application and the market comes to where it wants, all to your advantage all the time. you read here about guys who fade the market or enter on retraces blah blah. the real deal is to go along all the time and extract money continually.
If the market jumped from place to place it all would be like gambling. But it doesn't and the gambling stuff doesn't apply.
The market is not a macro thing either as you would think if you read a lot of stuff here. It is entirely micro.
3. Getting to KISS is a process of winowing and culling and powering up your skills. The market is a slow motion thing with no surprises at all. The size of this monolith is so huge that we only have to deal with our chosen microcosm. You will see all your life most people not knowing where they are at all. So sillily, they are looking at where they are not and they know so much about all of where they aren't.
Notice the referent frame in which people place themselves. Some kewl ones are nitro and TM, magna and blah blah. How did they get hung up and hung out to dry?
Here is the groove:
Find out where you can optimize your micro potential to get what the market potential offers. For me, it is 30 min on equities and 5 min on futures commodities indexes. I deal with quality stocks and their 6 to 8 day cycle. I pull down 50% of the potential there; call it 10% for reference. Plug in 50 cycles over three years; that is half the trading time available as you can see. Half the time and half the profits available is what I take out. The commodities is about 50 times more productive.
I take many steps to know where I am, what is next, and how fast things are changing. I cover my situation using standard market tools from my quiver.
Look at it as tic tak toe. the nine cells are eight cells surrounding the center. The market operates in many many cells but you can always consider where it is as the center one and there are eight possibilites around it. Use tools to cover those immediate eight posibilites. It moves and you reenlist another group of tools for the next step of migration.
What makes it easier and easier is that the migrations arerepeats of the past. Further, things distill by looking at what are the road blocks to each of the alternatives. I call these road blocks flaws. At each operating point, initially there are many possibilites. Possibilities die when roadblocks are seen. Finally, and without fail, the market moves to the only place it can. You hear people talk about set-ups. This is moronic truncated laziness usually. Zoom about and look for a set up. Sit and wait for a set up. Blah blah.
It is easier to just know where you are. Cover the situation with tools. Pull money out at a portion of the current potential (your personal effectiveness).
Get a tool box.