Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
Honestly, I think you need to get a different job to address money needs and then work on trading on the side if you still want, until you build up a pool of capital and find a profitable strategy.
In my opinion, you should never rely on the day's or the week's or the month's (or IMO even the year's) profits for day-to-day life but instead have to have a large capital cushion before you can trade. One reason is that if you strategy stops working, you have a drawdown, etc as you've experienced, you need to have time to resolve the problem without running out of cash for day-to-day life before. However, and perhaps more importantly, you can't trade with scared money. You can't run around from strategy to strategy in desperation; that way you'll never be successful because you won't be clear-headed and won't be able to take the proper level of risk.
Look, the markets are hard and it's entirely possible that you won't find a strategy that works. Or maybe you will, I'm not psychic. What I do know is that if you have a real job to live off and thus avoid panic, you'll have a better life and a higher chance of success for it.
One or two posters hinted at the 4th quarter 2019 volatility impacting options premiums and a possible contributor to Oliver's predicament. To shed light on what changed, what happened, Google has a lot of answers if you ask it the right questions. First, back in the days, late 80's early 90's when Alex Jacobson was an instructor for the CBOE he was speaking at an options conference with a room packed with 300 people. During a Q&A period I asked him a question about the CBOE and volume on the NYSE. I asked how much NYSE daily volume is due to options market makers hedging their positions?" I had been told that MM's went home flat each night by maintaining an inventory of stock underlying the options they made markets in to hedge positions. Silence filled the room. Alex then said without hesitating, "60%." Years have passed since those days and the volume is higher. I was shocked that there were people playing "games" with stocks in my 401K. It put an uncomfortable feeling on stocks as an investment. I left that conference thinking about the risk of everyone's retirement funds being in stocks without being aware of the risk. Memories of Oct '87 lingered on when portfolio insurance and program trading were blaimed for the 22.6%% drop in the DOW. So with some more googling questions were asked about Sept-Oct 2019. First a deviation. Back in those days higher speed internet had not reached my rural area. Dial up was unthinkable for trading. So I was using a DTN satellite dish and their Chameleon software. RT Software had versions of MetaServer to interface TradeStation Omega4 and TS2k Prosuite, but not for data from DTN satellite. So I contacted Andrew Nazarov in Moscow to custom build me such a MetaServer. For $99 he sent me a DDE Spy, an Excel interface, that monitored all the data bits. I sent him copies of the data recordings and he quickly modified his Metaservers to do the job. I could then feed TradeStation Prosuite, also known as TS2K with stock, futures, options data with a satellite feed. The advantage of using options data from DTN is they provided it for all the options exchanges in the US. With TradeStation Easylanguage I created an exchange composite option sentiment for all the exchanges. Near the end of summer 1987 that ratio was extremely bearish even though stock indexes were looking bullish, constantly making the doomsayers like Prechter look foolish. As well as Arch Crawford, an astro tech who was talking about August's Mayan Conjunction. It was a great time to be trading. Back to the volume, Oliver, and what might have happened that changed his life. This url may have part of the answer https://www.nyse.com/equities-insights . 2018-2019 had historically high volume. Scroll down to Oct 3 and Sept 19, 2019. September 19, 2019 NYSE Pillar Migration: Adding Efficiency to the Marketplace.
I would also like to add, learn to chart the trade and then trade the chart. Its not easy but the idea is fascinating. Although I not a fan of Jim Cramer founder of Street.com because he is infamous for pump and dump strategy but he is known to have a chart day in his office every week where every employee has to analyse charts or something similar on that day of the week. Good luck.
Admin: Please delete the IPL posts not related to thread.
This happens all the time. People come in moaning and groaning that their strategy is dead in the H20. They appear to be asking for help but never post a chart or describe their strategy. Then they disappear into the ether and leave everyone scratching their head as to why the guy posted in the first place!
Waste of time.
I don't think we will hear from him again. He just wanted to vent.
Persistence! Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not ... nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not ... Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not ... The world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent! Calvin Coolidge