This is my first post in the forum. This place seems to be a good place to share some information and perhaps I'm sure I will learn a lot in return. I'm glad to be part of this community.
I'm a internet poker pro who has been doing that since 2005, professionally (sole income) since beginning of 2008. As a poker player I've got used to the lifestyle where im completely free of all the chains surrounding vast majority of other people in the world. Lately I've had this feeling when I want to move on to the new challenges (even though im still doing good in poker -- its getting harder day by day) and I figured trading would allow me almost the same freedom as poker and it's a new, interesting venue to try my hands on. I'm still a poker pro but I would soon like to be a trader instead and part-time poker player.
Last year or so I have been studying trading quite a bit. First I stumbled on pair trading Hong Kong stocks. The backtests showed wonderful results but the real problem is low liquidity of those stocks and that caused a lot of problems/slippage. On my quest to the higher liquidities the next stop obviously was Forex market. Also I have heard some talks among the poker community that makes forex sounding cool alternative. Lately I've only been studying Forex and I just made my first minor investments to get started. This forum seems to be more oriented to Derivatives trading which would be very interesting to try as well but I don't know much about that stuff yet and I don't want to make things more complicated right now either. Perhaps I will see about that after I have got some profitable forex-strategies fired up already.
So here I am at the beginning of my new "career" wondering which way to go. I bought licence for MCFX (Multicharts forex version) and rented a powerful server for strategy optimization. I figured algo-trading would be my thing if I can make it. I've always been computer savvy and would like to use my programming skills. As a poker player I'm very aware of the variance and the ways to deal with it. In poker you can at times get bad "downswings" (or drawdowns) which puts you in psychologically rought situation. If I've backtested all my strategies and they seem to be working very well I can have a good confidence on my trading even when the times are rough (to certain extent where I realize my backtests have not been accurately simulating the market behavior in the future/present). Also trading manually seems to have much higher variance/volatility than playing poker since in poker you will get losing months very rarely if you are good but in trading you get losing months every now and then. That makes evaluation of your manual trading is very difficult and it's very easy to fool yourself that you are actually good if you have actually ran hot for a year or two. When the variance smashes your face later on you probably will have extremely hard times to evaluate what you have been doing correct and what are your problems.
That's all for now. I will be updating detailed info on my strategies soon when I actually have something decent to share to keep you folks hopefully interested.