TheDude

You make a fair point. I'd just add to that though by stating there are many ways to trade. Finding the approach that is right for the individual is key. Intraday trading off a chart using some sort of momentum based strategy is probably the toughest of all. We all know the failure rates. Yet this is the only approach most retail traders try. It looks easy (simple pattern recognition and simple maths, throw in some back testing and off you go), but as many have found out, it's really a coin toss as the markets are ever changing. In the example I posted above of spread scalping, I'd be the first to admit, that it's like watching paint dry for some. These guys are trying to catch a tick or 2 - often taking hours or a day in some markets to do so. You have to be managing a lot of orders in a lot of markets. On the trading spectrum, I'd say it's way at the other end of the scale to an FX trader trying to grab 40 ticks with a 2 lot on every trade. One is a skill, with a defined and quantifiable edge based on pricing dynamics, the other is a high octane gamble. One will appeal to a methodical, analytical thinker, the other to someone who's probably more emotional in nature and searching for a high. One method has a success rate of 60-70% for those who enjoy it/well suited, the other has a success rate of say 15%. Some trade!

Heres a few ideas.... not in any order.... 1. trading the wrong products that are too volatile (fx, crude, etc) 2. paying too much commission 3. greed (see 1) 4. ignoring professional strategies as they are seen as being out of reach or difficult 5. trading like a punter in a casino (ie intraday momentum strategy on an outright), then talking about 'edge' and 'risk management' lol. 6. general ignorance of self and self delusion can I have a 7th? 7. joining the herd rather than thinking for yourself (ie trading fx, risking 2%, signals based solely from a chart etc etc - just like the books and gurus tell you). I'm still surprised when folk question why 80-90% lose, when they are all doing slightly different variations of the same thing! 6 months or a few years later - if they are still around, they are still doing the same thing and losing, but they think they have changed what they are doing, yet they havent - they've just changed timeframes, or using a different chart setting, product, etc. lemmings!!!

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havent traded stocks for years - better off with futures for sure.... anyways, to daytrade stocks you will get more margin, so you only put up 25% basically, whether putting up 50 or 25%, you will borrow the rest from the broker. He will charge you for this. Im paying 5% for my investments on margin (im not trading). other brokers charge 6-8% per annum for the amount borrowed. Any losses come out of your share, not the brokers of course.

LOL You're not following this at all are you pal. The screenshot I mentioned was in reference to the strategies being discussed, not P&L. In other words, you cant really show a screenshot of stock lending for example, or an options hedge. It was in reference to the fact that TA isn't much use in my opinion, and next to useless when day trading. The posts were to prove the point that there are other ways of making money that have less risk than TA, and have a clear edge which TA does not. Primarily though, it was to show that not all analysis was TA or FA as some here try to impose. If you had the brain power to understand and follow what was being discussed you would have understood this. Therefore, perhaps it is you that should 'put up or shut up', or at least have the manners to follow the line of conversation before spouting off your pie hole! Finally, I dont believe Steve was even in this thread at the time of conversation. Hey! We have a trend here! A trend of errors and mistakes on your part. Lets bring the conversation back on track.... Is your foolishness random, or purposeful? Do try harder next time. :rofl:

most prop traders are acting as liquidity providers. they want to get filled. they want to be on every price if they can. a profitable short term strategy aims to trade as often as it can in order to play the edge out as often as it can. also, the unit cost of transactions decline the more volume is traded. Exchanges rarely enforce those fines unless you really screw up their bandwidth with an autospreader with incorrect parameters. No exchange is going to stop liquidity being added to its books unless its stopping others from trading. i see you have yet to read Irene Aldridge.

Sticking to the original idea ( i do try sometimes )..... I think there have been several references to the original post and coin flipping experiments. Therefore, if we are all agreed that random outcomes can indeed look like a price chart, then it would suggest than in order to make money, the skill lies in risk management and money management - not analysis. I appreciate there are some aspects of a price chart that cant be mimicked so easily with the coin flip chart such as volume, and non linear price/time segments. And that would suggest these differences are the only variables worthy of any kind of analysis - the patterns and magic lines certainly arent as any profitable trader will tell you. This is just yet another massive nail in the coffin of the hobby trader and his charts. This is partly because the chart trader needs to wait until the end of the time segment to make his decision - which is an utter nonsense if day trading, but may have some merit if position trading. This is because the settlement of a day (NOT the close) means something. The close of an intraday bar means jack shnit of course.

I agree. Not meant to be a pissing contest, but Ive worked with firms where traders get to profitability after 1-2 months. Of course, this is in a professional environment, trading a professional strategy. And before everyone pm's me here is the strategy: trading calendar spreads against each other to build a fly and then getting out either as a fly or in on a fly and out in cals. no charts, no ta, just maths and knowing how 2 markets relate to each other, and understanding the whole curve - be it wheat, corn, eurodollar, nat gas... This is the basic strategy taught at prop firms the world over. To do this, you need focus, determination, discipline to focus and basic maths skills that anyone with average intelligence can build through mental rehearsal. low costs are also needed - but such costs are available to a retail trader if he applies himself in a business like fashion through exchange schemes and professional brokers (forget IB!). the down sides? none other that the determination. ok, you can be sitting on multiple trades waiting for them to fill which will be boring as hell to those of you looking for a quick fix like you do trading outrights in crude or fx (and then try and convince everyone risk is high on your agenda! lol - what a freakin' joke!!). why wont anyone here be able to do this? because most here a losers. losers lose. that is a fact of life. losers would rather keep chasing their tails trying to day trade off charts, kidding everyone they are successful, when real traders know either they are lying, or 1 in a million. Whichever it is, its a lot easier to day trade without charts once you understand what trading is, which some of these gurus dont. keep looking at your charts kids, and keep beating yourself up wondering why its taking you YEARS to learn after reading 10000's of guru's empty posts when others get it in 1-2 months because they approach from a different angle. there was no psychologist at this firm, no mental 'peak performance' crap, just kids out of college who want to make money. All there was was an afternoon talking about mental toughness and not giving up when times are tough. I'm sorry Randy & Co, but if you need all this introspection and self-analysis then the problem probably isnt the individual, but the method being taught - which is probably TA/chart based. You dont see any other profession with so much BS written about it like trading!! (as Steve sort of eludes to)

theres only one reason why orders are placed away from the market ahead of time - and thats to get time priority in the queue. if you dont need/want to trade at the level, then you pull the order.

Sure - you make a valid point. One platform I used allowed the user to specify random volumes in iceberg order types (the child orders are random numbers smaller than the parent order). I see no reason why this wouldnt be extended to time based order types where the times of child orders are selected at random between two points of the day for example. What I meant of course was that the decision to enter an order isn't random. Elements of the execution of large institutional orders may be random, but not the decision itself to trade, or the parameters of the trade. That would be daft of course.

Bothered. Youve probably read the following posts by now in which case you probably understand a screenshot is really quite irrelevant. Maybe you'd like to do some work yourself rather than expect others to feed you? Anyway - back on topic..... I view the randomness idea as a bit of a fools errand. No one inputs orders 'at random'. Randomness is just what the market may appear to be if you cant make sense or deal with the seeming disorder of the trades. Professional quants treat the markets as random simply as a model as they appreciate they cant predict markets or the next few trades. Just because some treat the market as random, it doesnt mean they think the market is random.

1. Thats called luck 2. TA offers no edge. How can you get an edge from something that cant be defined in exact enough ways to measure? This one keeps coming up, yet none of the TA fans are ever able to provide the evidence of statistical proof that TA offers an edge. There is not one study that has proven this. If TA did offer an edge, trading would be easy due to the ease of learning TA. If all you needed was to spot double tops/bottoms, flags etc, with the 'correct' associated volume pattern, all you folks would be rich. However, given the amount of posts and time some here spend, my money is that they are not rich, otherwise they'd be out spending cash on fun stuff! Anyways...back to the topic.... randomness is simply a word we use for something we dont understand. I took that from Taleb.

Indeed. However you must make sure youre diagnosing the correct information, not something that looks visually easy to grasp, easy to understand, but in fact offers zero edge. Trading is about numbers. It's not about visual patterns. Thats what art class is for.

It's all utter bull excrement. It does not matter one jot. One does not make money from technical ANALYSIS, you make money TRADING. Those are 2 verbs with very different meanings. I can guarantee you this: If you spend your years becoming an expert in analysis, you may be a very knowledgeable analyst, but still totally unable to make any money because you spent all your time studying market history, not understanding how to act NOW. ie trading. 90% fail because they dedicate 80-90% of their time to TA and not trading skills. Butterflies, tripple tops, box, magic lines, pennants, flags, blah blah blah. What a joke! Please folk - looking at shapes on a chart is basically like reading tea leaves. It also carries as much intellectual weight in true trading circles. If I notice patterns of tea leaves or moon cycles and correlate them to market moves, is it coincidence (no matter how loosely defined they are), or is it proven fact I can call a statistical edge? PLLLEEEEEEAAAAASSSSSSSEEEE!!!! Get a grip folks.

Times up Phoenix. Looks like you FAILED. Surprising since TA is THE ONLY way to analyse the market, and TA is all encompassing unless it's FA (according to you). Anyway, 3 ways I could have made money despite scratching the long and short trade: 1. The obvious one. Dividends. The short position would have been a hedge of course. 2. Also quite obvious - options, where the stock is the hedge, ie short calls on the long, short puts on the short stock. I'd pick up time premium. Time decay is neither FA, TA, or any A. It's a F. F is for FACT that options have this characteristic. 3. Stock lending. ok a bit of a trick one this, but still valid. I could have loaned out my long position to another hedgefund who wished to short the stock. I would have charged them for that of course. The short was a diversion. But as the expert guru on TA, Im sure you are used to diversions, and things going up when the chart says down etc. There are more.... I hope you see now that not everything is TA. Hopefully now you see that the world is not black or white (TA/FA) but there are many, many different themes, colors around us. Perhaps a little humility and objectivity wouldnt go a miss in future? Lets see how you weasel your way of this.....

i suggest you keep looking for easy solutions.difficult may not be your bag. the ta guru's have millions of easy solutions all over the web. we keep forgetting that trading is as easy as identifying a profitable scenario of visual price and volume combinations through back testing. then forward testing. then risking only 1-2%. then relying on the law of large numbers. hey presto, next step a gazzillion dollars. all the top hedge funds do exactly this dont you know.

Maybe they just get tiered of the the same old conversations that just go round the houses? Especially when half the stuff is just reiterated 'trading for dummies' that one sees everywhere else eg, 2% risk, TA, blah blah blah..... A wannabe trader either comes to realise it's all crap and becomes a trader, or he learns all this stuff until he can recite it in his sleep, spouts it all over the internet, becomes a guru, but still a wannabe trader.

Only STIRS (Eurodollar) on CME are pro-rata. I *think* NYMEX has market maker priority, but Im not 100%. I dont think there are designated market makers in ES. Youve either got a crappy platform like Pats or Ninja, or a crappy broker. Maybe both. TT has an EPIQ feature so you can see your position in a FIFO queue, and also another feature that allows you to see how many orders are in front of you. Take a free trial of TT or use their sim and see if you get the same experience. All good brokers offer TT, and the sim is fairly accurate as its based on live data.

Again, wrong answer. Please try harder. You're thinking is off. It seems stuck in fact. Here's a clue: One way is based on perceived supply and demand, The other isnt. Another clue: May be there are other ways to make money than the only one you can think of? Surprising that after all these years of analysis of the markets, you are only aware of one way of making money. Wasted years perhaps? I will hold my tongue/fingers until the weekend.... Please try and think a little harder. I have every confidence in you

Wrong. Try again. :haha:

There are 2 answers that I can think of. There maybe more.... I'll post the answers at the weekend ON CONDITION DBP has a stab. No back peddling allowed.....

As is your reply!

So statistical and quantative analysis is TA is it? e.g. Im a stat/quant fund. (and you think thats TA lol) my number crunching suggests i should go long xyz, short abc. I do so. when i close the trade, based on more number crunching, xyz is the same price, so I scratch. abc is also the same price, so that too is scratched. YET i still make money on the trade. How come? Come on Phoenix. You know everything about everything. Tell me how I made money using a branch of TA where there was no price movement? This I got to see!.... Ringside seats folks...... How to polish a turd coming up.......

AND WHY WOULD THEY NOT WANT TO BE TARRED WITH THE SAME BRUSH MAY I ASK??? BECAUSE PROFESSIONAL INVESTORS WOULD RUN A MILE IF THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE INVESTING IN DECISIONS BASED ON TA. WHY? BECAUSE EVERYBODY EXCEPT THE RETAIL CROWD WHO PERPETUALLY LOSE, KNOWS THAT TA DOES NOT WORK. IF IT DID WORK THEY WOULD USE IT IT DOESNT WORK SO THEY DONT. SIMPLE!!! :missy:

More diversion tactics I see. We're talking about your reference, and how you think you know better than an author. I respect Steidlmayer as a trader and a thought leader. I dont worship him or hold him as some demi-god as you do with Wyckoff. I have not devoted countless years of my life reinterpreting his stuff on every trading web site. I'd rather spend my time in the markets, doing, not talking. I use MP a bit here and there, but if truth be told I seldom look at charts. I focus on trading you see, and trading intraday has little to do with demand and supply as you (or was it Wyckoff) like to call it. Odd as that may sound to you I know, but only traders would understand what Im driving at here in this game we play (oops, theres a little clue in that last sentence, can you spot it?) I think its only fair to correct you and point out that its you who doesnt understand what TA is, as you include everything including the kitchen sink! Utter balderdash! This I find astonishing given the years you have dedicated to it. You remind me of a friends 3 year old. He calls every animal a cat at the moment. In his thinking, if it has fur and 4 legs, it's a cat. If it studies price movement it must be TA eh? Anyway, I should point out that this small failing of yours is ok with me. It is only a definition anyway. It doesn't detract from the useful and occasional thought provoking post here and there that you do manage to produce. If you wish to call a horse a dog, or an iron a kettle, thats fine. You may find you will sell a few more of your e-books however if you call a spade a spade!