And then there's the rest of us.... who also need to eat.
Why market wizards are not day traders?
- Thread starter mr_byte31
- Start date
And then there's the rest of us.... who also need to eat.
No.
Each trader can have other preferences. Some want to become rich and famous and will trade day and night, some will trade till they reach a certain level of financial freedom, and some will have no real ambition and are happy with some extra money.
Like in any job, not everybody uses his talents to the extreme, or has the same ambition. People are different.
Please do tell us more. Ain't that wonderful, like in those commercials, a guy trading from a porch overlooking his marina with a nice boat, and for only 1 hour a day.
That's not a rule. It's the unrealistic dream of every newbie. By the time he will be a real trader he will understand it was an unachievable dream.
I really don't understand this thread.
People are taking time out of their day to write that day trading cannot be done?
Let me see... ES overnight low 2883.50, rth high 2917.75, which gives me a range of 34 points. So I am to believe that there is no opportunity to take out 5, maybe 10 pts today? There is no healthy pullback during the day that lets me get onboard the intraday trend? Ok, gotcha!
H.
People are taking time out of their day to write that day trading cannot be done?
Let me see... ES overnight low 2883.50, rth high 2917.75, which gives me a range of 34 points. So I am to believe that there is no opportunity to take out 5, maybe 10 pts today? There is no healthy pullback during the day that lets me get onboard the intraday trend? Ok, gotcha!
H.
it took many years and a ton of money for many to come to that conclusion, imho
that's why they take time to write it
they just had to rephrase it from can not be done to i could not do it
that's it
that's why i put imho and the beginning or the end of most of my statements (hello Tom !)
Respectfully, I don't agree. Could you elaborate?
If you have a strategy aiming to capture the daily range or a large part of it - how has that changed...?
in all cheeriness,
statistically, at least about 90% of day traders lose
statistically, in britain 70% of adults are overweight or obese (needing to eat isn't an accurate description of them)
anyway you didn't appreciate what i was saying, which is that you make more money by doing very little and earning much for doing very little; if you slave yourself to a machine hour after hour then the money you make will have to pay for all sorts of things to help you combat the high stress and basic slavery; you may imagine that you still have a net profit between all the crap (like sugar and booze) you buy to comfort yourself on the front line and the takings you walk away with, but that's assuming that you can put any price on the health of a human body
i need to eat - that's why i learned to trade
but day trading is like that song by paula abdul - one step forwards two steps back - yeah, you have more money, but your body requires way more money to keep healthy, and even that isn't really acceptable because it's like with an elastic band - if you stretch it and stretch it it'll just stop working
Well I could do that but it is my considered opinion that you probably know more about that than I. I mean you guys must have been doing all this for quite a while. Next to you I'm probably a beginner.
One thing I think is interesting is that trading doesn't really attract the best mathematicians a lot of the time - I mean sometimes it does, but usually they go elsewhere and do other types of work and those drawn to trading are often second and third-rate mathematicians.
The trouble is you can only make money in 'the right way' from trading by being correct in your maths. Nothing else, not 'event driven' trading (per se), not 'technical trading' (per se) is of any use to anyone - whether you do it on an hourly basis or whether you sit on trades for weeks and months.
What do I mean by the 'right way'? What you just said. Sitting on the beach, "watching money making money". The proper way. Why do this job if that's not your goal? Surely if suffering labour intensive lifestyles is okay with you there are far less harmful ways to stack up big money (work for big industry, for the weapons sector, for advertising, etc - heavy industry, until recently oil and gas, perhaps still in the future).
We do what we do, I believe, those of us who will do it until we retire (from all commercial work) with a view to being as clever as possible, doing as little as possible and making the most out of that.
Anyway, an hour a day, to me, is still day trading and too much stress. I'm just saying that those who invest on a much longerterm basis, as we here all know, don't suffer all the crap that you suffer if you try and trade like clockwork. A few trades a year, or a few dozen, depending on your budget, seems to me to be the only way to be masterful without damaging yourself - and yes, it means you can't buy all that booze and those donuts and the other crap you don't really need (well not for the first years anyway, and even after that only in a sensible fashion, not as though you have it on tap, which I guess some people believe they 'need') - yes only if you are capable of actually living like that mounty off due south could you really achieve what I'm saying, perhaps. But still, I think that's definitely the only way to do it. Everything else just undermines itself, largely because most people lose the other ways, particularly day traders (but everyone really), and also because it absolutely and undeniably harms the physical health. Day trading is without a doubt physically harmful. Even 'just' an hour a day. I'm talking about being a trader who can technically go days at a time without even remembering that she/he IS a trader. The money is taken care of by intelligent mathematics, not by rote, by labour, by solving silly crossword puzzles (the fundamentals), by sitting next to screens jumping in and out of things (technical traders).
Well that's the theory anyway. Whatever you do in practise is an individual thing, but I'm just saying, in theory being utterly skilful in this field surely is all about making money without doing any work, or as close to that ideal as possible. As organisations like the bank of England are supposed to do - essentially. But the age of gambling has tainted that. As journalists like Max Keiser talk about rather more articulately than I can.
I'd hate to spend my life doing something as mindless, pointless, soulless and basically shitty as trading. I'm happy to make a fortune out of it, using intelligence, if I can, but my life will not be spent doing such a crappy job, or any other like it, from cleaning roads to being a civil servant in the corridors of Whitehall - I don't believe in the system, it's a crap one, and I think people should live their lives in more 'real' ways, and be what nature has really made, and not these hyperconsumer idiot-sheeple most people are. I'm obviously an outlier, as far as these goals are concerned. Never mind. It's interesting reading your points of view. Perhaps I'll learn some wild trick from you and become enamoured of day trading despite my pretty virulent indictment of the 'discipline' in question (and it surely IS in question).
you say people are different but really all people aspire, unconsciously, to evolve into the best human they could be, for their own sake
trading is a road people may legitimately follow in our times to escape wage slavery
to do that the best way one wants to avoid harming one's body
the problem is most people don't really know or understand that day trading (and other types of trading) harm the body - hugely - that the anxiety and such have an invisible impact on you which only becomes clear when you've let it cause a lot of harm
there is a saying people in the west know, an eastern saying: "do unto others as you would have done unto you" - it is not meant to be taken to be truth, although sadly in the west your culture has basically just treated it that way. what it is there to do is to make the person who hears it think - well i want to eat donuts until i am fat and bloated (many people do) - therefore if i do unto others what i want done to me i will feed them donuts until they're fat and bloated, not good.
ie what i'm saying is that most people don't really want what's good for them, because they don't really know what IS good for them, not in a totally whole-minded way. they are just starlings fluttering about the place in big groups, zigging and zagging this way and that - you see this on the charts, indeed.
nope. what people would want if they knew what to want is precisely what i'm telling you. yep. it's one of those really tricky conundrums best articulated by humphrey appleby.
anyway. day trading, like eating sugar, harms the nhs. the more of us say no to it, the less the burden on the nhs (and other healthcare systems the world over) will be