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Please for the love of God anybody struggling or thinking the market isn't fair or just need to get to the next level.... READ THIS BOOK!
If anyone wants the true HOLY GRAIL!
The GRAIL OF ALL GRAILS!
THE ONE GRAIL TO RULE THEM ALL...
(all joking aside) It's the mastery of ONESELF. That's the ONLY holy grail.
YOU are the trader. YOU make the decisions to get in or out. Hence YOU are the soul responsiture of your trading outcome. Full stop. No blame. No misunderstanding. It's your fault.
How would you like to trade without guilt? Without remorse. Without anger, sadness or worse depression?
You can and how you do it? By knowing when your body is sending you signals that something is wrong or needs attention.
Thats what we call stress. Chemicals such as adrenaline and cortisol start floating around in our brians literally causing us to feel stress.
It's our bodys way of signaling us something dangerous could be near and need to focused attention and remove anything from attention thats not necessary.
Primal mode. Terrible state to trade in. Almost guaranteed to do the wrong thing to protect yourself.
Hello brother, I feel your pain (most of us have been around this block once or twice).
Never forget that EVERYTHING is an opportunity to grow, to become a better trader, to evolve into the BEST version of YOU.
Ask: "How does this serve me AS IT IS?" Make a list. Reap the benefits of this setback (or it's wasted). Make INNER changes, and then come back and CRUSH IT.
Metta,
Anagami
You are never in the wrong place... but sometimes you are in the right place looking at things in the wrong way.
Well as much as I agree I think it's a little more nuanced than that.
First off. The S&P is the benchmark. Why would you want to put the risk and effort in if you can't beat the benchmark? You'd be better off parking your money in the index.
So if you can get a better return than the index, not always but usually it's at the expense of the extra risk.
So one risk doesn't correlate to the other.
And Secondly Van Tharp in my mind is one of the greatest trading teachers in history and he doesnt even trade!
So yes and no. Nothings really that black and white.
Although you could be %100 in this situation. I don't know.
Even if a trader can get 10% return per year, then they need at least $1M to get about $100K to make decent money per year.
And that is the problem right there, nobody thinks about the end goal of what they are doing.
If a trader start trading with $10K account, first thing to write down as a goal : for the next 3 years I better beat the SP500 index returns. If I do not, QUIT and find another business to invest time and energy into.
The problem is we don't listen. Lol. I'm just starting to make money somewhat consistently now after 6 years! Some take over a decade! And some sadly never make it to profitability let alone beat the S&P as a benchmark.
And I'm YEARS away from breaking even on what I've lost let alone what I've paid in courses, books and most importantly time I could have spent better elsewhere.
Yet I couldn't trade it for the world. We are weird creatures us humans.
I have to say that I dont really agree with this whole idea that "you'd better beat the S&P or go find something else" and that somehow if you eke out a few points over the S&P then you're a successful trader. Kind of a trite comparison (with all due respect to goodoboy). Of course people in the industry (ie who actually work on wall street for big institutions etc) will benchmark themselves this way as their organisations are likely managing huge portfolios where a small tweak may result in millions/billions of rotation but you and me are not in this situation. My view is that if you cannot significantly beat that benchmark trading independently (ie without the limitations attached to trading/investing huge portfolios) then you should probably try something else. On an average year trading independently you should probably be making more than 10 points on your money or else you'd need a hell of a lot of money to get by (goodoboy gave the example of having a million dollar portfolio to generate 100k per year - not many people will have that amount of capital at least to start off with). I guess my point is here that someone who knows how to use options effectively can likely generate more than 10 points per year on his/her margin (clearly not possible for an institution prohibited from investing in illiquid securities or options unless for hedging purposes). Anyway I'll leave that one to the experts...