Trading is hard because you have tons of competitors fighting for a tiny crumb of pie same as you. It used to HFT firms making tons of money. They had the technology to "see" milliseconds ahead of the market. Now most of them go bankrupted. They are destroyed by even faster HFT firms like Jump Trading using microwave technology to run faster.
Why Trading is so Hard
- Thread starter John9999
- Start date
October was the best month for many on ET apparently. It was just okay for me. I don't think 24th was erratic at all, it was a fairly typical selloff. In 2008, 2009 days like that were very common.
The beginner is constantly struggling with FOMO, thinking they must be apart of every situation. I've been guilty of this for years. When you graduate you realize that it's fine to sit out 2 or 3 days or even longer, waiting.
Trade decisions are made on facts from organizations who lie. Example GE ...
Trading is tough, no doubt about it. And because it's tough, the bigger the reward if you're successful.
Like any difficult occupation, trading favors the people willing to put in the work. Why trading seems to be really tough is that there is no set courses or a curriculum or a knowledge test like you have with other occupations like doctor or lawyer, etc. You determine what you need to know and/or what to do. So trading will naturally favor the self-starter, the go-getter, the person who thirsts for knowledge.. and the person who has financially set themselves up for going years without the need to make money from trading.
If you are emphatically chasing the knowledge and experience over money, you have the right mindset to succeed and will succeed one day if quitting is not in your vocabulary. So ask yourself, what is more important to you...the attainment of knowledge or money??
Like any difficult occupation, trading favors the people willing to put in the work. Why trading seems to be really tough is that there is no set courses or a curriculum or a knowledge test like you have with other occupations like doctor or lawyer, etc. You determine what you need to know and/or what to do. So trading will naturally favor the self-starter, the go-getter, the person who thirsts for knowledge.. and the person who has financially set themselves up for going years without the need to make money from trading.
If you are emphatically chasing the knowledge and experience over money, you have the right mindset to succeed and will succeed one day if quitting is not in your vocabulary. So ask yourself, what is more important to you...the attainment of knowledge or money??
The OP should phrase the question as "How can I make trade profitably easy"
"How can I make trade profitability easy?" is like saying "How can I climb Mount Everest easily?" There is no easy way, the only people who make it to the top of Everest/trading are the ones that are determined to do whatever it takes.
If you are looking at others to give you the holy Grail of strategies, well then you are going to be looking for a very long time. Nobody is going to give you a great strategy as you wouldn't give somebody else a great strategy. It's up to you to develop a great strategy. I know that's not what anyone wants to hear. The question becomes then, "What does it take to develop a great strategy?"
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Great post.
I don't know of any money making occupation (but possibly competitive sport) where after you begin to achieve success it is a requirement to continually learn and relearn how to make money.
It's like learning and winning is fleeting if you think you have "arrived".
In the majority of businesses you have to adapt all your life if you want to survive. If you have success, others will copy you.
But I admit that in trading the pressure can be much higher, and it is a never ending story. Lifetime studying.
Well, all you are really saying is "improve your alpha and your win rate will go up". By the same token, one can say "improve the expected alpha of your winners and the win rate will matter less". In real life, your ability to juice up your alphas is usually fairly limited and you end up making trade-offs of various sorts.
As I have said before, win rate on per-trade basis is a very odd metric - thorough my entire career I've only seen it here and in various retail-oriented trading books. If anything, whenever a trader says that he has a very high win rate people should get suspicious since that could be an indicator that he's somehow, somewhere selling tails.
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