trade_canada

Keep in mind that your primary role as a trader is to manage risk. Use these emotions as an indicator to tell you when to scale out a bit, I find locking in profits while maintaining a position to be a confidence booster.

Start with realistic expectations, and don't blindly follow somebody's strategy, use rules that fit your personality and risk tolerance.

19, trading futures for a year and a half now.

I agree that studying the introduction of information and the impact following the intro is a great method to give insight as to how prices will move in the future, it still doesn't solve the problem of implementation. When information hits the market the race is on to trade before price moves to an unprofitable level, and in this day and age you are competing with firms who have access to the fastest execution. Also what if the largest potential buyers or sellers make an incorrect analysis? Their irrational opinion will still be reflected (probably for a very limited time) in prices if they choose the execute on their opinion. If I were to incorporate news into my strategies it would be more of a trend confirmation/denial tool rather than a directional signal.

In my opinion 'automated trading' is such a competitive field that most things currently written in books won't give you an edge. I think that reading well respected books on market structure, quantitative financial modelling, programming (C, C#, C++, Java, Python, R, etc.), and data mining/analysis would give you a much more well rounded view of the automated trading environment rather than reading books that try and cover the whole topic. The SSRN also has tons of papers written on quantitative trading, also check out nuclear phynance (sorry to the mods for mentioning another forum). I don't have time to go through and pick out titles for you, but if you spend an hour on google and amazon you could probably come up with the same list that I'd give you.

I choose not to trade news because I don't see any edge in it. There are a lot of traders out there with an information and latency edge (miles ahead of any retail trader), why would they leave any profitable risk on the table after a news release? Sure news is a source of volatility, but honestly do you think that you can manually analyze and trade the news before all the HFT desks and banks?