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This may upset some "benevolent" traders out there, but when you put on a trade, lets say long,
aren't you hoping that the guy or gal who just took the other side of your trade:
GETS HIS OR HER TEETH KNOCKED OUT?
LOL
I confess. When I trade I want that other person or institution or grandma, to lose every penny in their margin account.
Then, before covering, I want them to borrow every dollar in their childrens' and grandchildrens' college fund, wire it into their broker's accounts and only exit the trade at the exact same time as I do . . . preferably when they have $.50 cents in the account.
This is a zero-sum game and victory goes to the predators and the losers are left to the dung beatles.
Maybe the brief humanity left in our heartless souls is left to proffer advice to some unfortunate situation we hear about in the hope of assuaging our own guilt for making so much money?
I don't know. But I do notice that I usually wind up "trying to help" others after I have had a particularly gratifying trading week.
Friday and Saturday arrives. I count my money. Then I feel guilty.
Or do we help people because we want to keep newbies in the game? Do we want to give them Free advice so they save up more money and lose it again to us professionals?
Well damn; Interesting take from "TheBenefactor", lol. Don't think you should feel guilty, but the way I think of it is that everyone can win; everyone is trading different timeframes so maybe the person who took the opposite trade and netted you 3-6 points will cash in 2 weeks later for a gain of 25 points. Who knows? I'm not sure if its even theoretically possible for everyone to win, but it's not that black/white like poker where you are clearly taking from your opponents.
This is endlessly discussed, between people who want to be optimistic and say "everyone can win" versus those who understand how the account balances are adjusted in CME futures trading, and who therefore know that it is a zero sum game in a literal sense.
If I am long and my instrument closes up, at the end of the day my margin account is credited cash money for the increase. (I don't need to sell for this to happen. I'm just marked to market automatically.) If I had been short, it would be debited. All the credits, exchange-wide, come from money taken from accounts that are debited, exchange-wide. Aside from fees and other costs, it is a literal zero-sum game, exactly like poker. Money just moves around the table.
There is a good reason for this, and that is because it allows "commercials" -- who are in the actual oil business or grain business or stock business or whatever and who are actually going to buy or sell the underlying commodity at delivery date (or settle with cash in the case of indexes)-- to offload their market risk in their actual positions (for example, physical oil that they are going to buy or sell at delivery) by hedging in the futures market, transferring the risk and profit potential to unhedged traders like us, who are willing to accept the risk in return for a potential for profit. The fully hedged guys are insulated from the risk because we take it on, and in return they give up the possible profit from price fluctuations, which is what we are in it for.
The debit that hits the account of a true oil trader (for instance, one who works for a refinery or an oil producer) goes as a credit to the account of a futures-only "oil trader" (who has no oil to buy or sell), who is on the opposite side. So the trader in real oil has a loss in, say, his short futures position when the price of oil goes up, but his actual oil just went up in value because of the price increase. He's net flat between the two, not affected one way or the other by the price change. The unhedged long trader on the other side is net positive. If price had gone the other way, the physical trader (who is short the futures) would still be net flat because his gain in futures would be offset by a decline in value of his physical oil, and the futures-only long trader would be net negative.
You and I are never going to buy or sell millions of dollars of oil at delivery date (at least, I'm not) so we will be closed out well before then. But our taking on the profit or loss from their futures positions is what allows them to hedge their inventory against loss, which is the point of their futures hedge, and in fact the point of the futures market itself. It's a vehicle for facilitating and protecting commercial transactions. It's not only a neat way for us to speculate on price movements, although that is the reason we're in it.
Zero sum does not mean everybody loses, it means some win and some lose. It does not mean the market is predatory, it just means some win and some lose (you can feel predatory -- or victimized -- if you want to; it's got nothing to do with the market, just with you .) It does not mean that long-term traders can't win in the long term even if they lose in the short term (obviously, they can). It does not mean everything is rigged by the big players. It does not mean you're a pessimist. It does not mean anything except the arithmetic of daily marking all accounts to market to realize the daily gains or losses in their positions.
It does not work the same way as stock trading, because stocks are actual assets and futures contracts are not -- they are contracts to buy or sell an asset at a future date, and the market for them works differently. (I know there are traders in oil futures who think they have just bought or sold some oil, but they really haven't. )
I strongly doubt that anything I just wrote will change many opinions on the subject. Somehow, people seem to think "zero-sum" is about the market being cut-throat, and they either don't like that (the optimists) or they do like it because they want to think of themselves as the sharks, the throat-cutters, preying on the losers. It's got nothing to do with either. It's just a factual matter of how the accounts are marked to market, and why this mechanism exists. You should understand what is happening in your own account, and what the market is that you are trading in. But it really isn't either good or bad. It's value-neutral.
But there will still be people who tell me I'm wrong, and will have a big explanation of why, because the whole idea of zero sum feels wrong to them; win-win seems nicer.
It's been about 3 months since I wrote this post; thought I would reflect on what I've changed, a lot in part because of the advice in this thread.
Though I primarily trade NQ now, looking back at my charts, my stops were evidently way too tight; I also noticed that I took significantly more trades and definitely still overtraded to an extent. Since then, i've also expanded my timeframe significantly, and gotten rid of heiken-ashi; I felt that they didn't accurately portray bars and limited entry opportunities. Expanded timeframe helped me become more selective with trades, and catch bigger moves. I got rid of almost all indicators; wave trend, stochastic, the lot. They provided me with nothing, and thinking back, I never really even used them; trend identification isn't difficult on a larger timeframe.
I retained EMA and Volume and ATR, just for a sense of the bigger picture, and still find those to be helpful occasionally. The bigger picture- context and reading the price objectively really helped; I used to try to take the same number of trades every day no matter what market conditions were. Developing an entry system also made things a lot easier; having a defined setup makes things a lot less complicated. I started to take away from discretionary trades and started adding rules; I take a lot fewer trades now, but they are better trades. A lot less guesswork involved.
I'm at breakeven now; it feels good to have seen growth. I've come a long way, but have an even longer way to go; I wonder what I'll have changed 3 months from now. Thanks for the help fellas, never thought 10k of you would see this.
Good summary of institutional and hedging volume in futures. I've come to believe the markets especially futures trading isn't a zero-sum game among retailers either. Retail volume while rising in recent years again, is reportedly only up to 3.5% of total CME volume. (https://www.chicagobusiness.com/finance-banking/cme-sees-future-small-fry). So I'd think it's far less likely the opposite side of your profitable trade is only some other losing retailer. It could be an institution, bank or firm on a higher time frame. Or an HFT or algo trade on a lower time frame fractal of price action making trades on pullbacks. All of this trying to "iron out" the inefficiencies as the market searches for price. With all the hft front-running going on since this decade, it could very well be competing algos from different firms taking the opposite side of your contracts anyways. So overall, I'd agree it's moreso value-neutral and we retailers pay a price in hefty fees and taxes. May the FTT never come to pass (along) to retailers..