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)
Wouldn't paint everyone with the same brush. Depends on the individual and their capacity to learn.
Some people might have a "knack" for trading and "just get it" and can trade successfully after a few months. Others might take 5 or 10 years to figure it out. And other people might never get it.
10,000 hours is a myth IMO.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
This is incorrect. If trading mistakes always lead to loss of money they would be learned from quickly and rarely repeated. The problem with trading and most types of gambling is that mistakes are not always punished. Often you do stupid things and still win. In the short term that is. In long term those mistakes break your bank.
This is why it is important to focus less on how much we made or lost. It is hard to do, but it is much better and far more useful to analyse your trades interdependent of specific outcome. That is a wining trade is not necessarily a good trade and a losing trade is not necessarily a bad trade. Knowing the difference is very important. And I admit easier said than done
You're so right - just like basketball is totally easy. I'm mean, how hard is it to dribble around a few people and throw ball in a hole? Then you just do that again and again over the course of a game.
Sorry to pick on your post - but I just have to take exception to anyone who thinks trading is "easy". The reality is that it is not easy: due to the structure of markets (zero-sum game among motivated and capable participants) it cannot be easy. Anything that is easy would be done by a larger percentage of the participants and this would remove the "edge" of doing the easy things. It is simply impossible for trading to be easy - it cannot be easy according to the definition of "easy" and the structure of the market. I'm not sure why more people do not get this.
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. - Frank Herbert
Digging a bit deeper and looking round the corner here:
Even THIS zero game has winners and losers:
The main winners are the casino owners aka brokers - they get the money nearly without risk.
Then as a economist would put it:
Take the 20/80 rule and you have the percentage of winners.
For those who are not used to handle it: There are 20% winning traders who take the money from 80% losing
traders - that easy.
All of the winning traders are staying in the game while the rest is getting out of the game after having
burned from 1 to xx acounts.
But the show must go on... so be prepared to change to the winning team (with the help of futures.io (formerly BMT))
"See, I observed Escher
I love Basquiat
I watched Keith Haring
You see I studied art
The greats weren't great because at birth they could paint
The greats were great cause they paint a lot"
But, in the end, I do not believe that one can beat simple S/R. I've been working with my daughter, who wants to learn to trade as a summer project. I have her trading a small microlot account at fxcm. All she knows is what I have shown her - trendlines, support, resistance, highs, lows, prior highs, prior lows, and just a small bit of fibonacci (extensions not retracements).
She wouldn't know a stochastic if it jumped out of her closet or a MACD if it crawled out from under her bed. It has been very much like Rousseau's Emile. She is removed from the influence of all the Grail seekers (among whom I used to count myself) and the sellers of pseudo-grail systems (to whom I have generously contributed thousands of dollars over the years). She knows of no other way to make trade decisions other than what I have shown her - all of which may be found here at TL in my posts. I have nothing to hide and nothing to sell.
So, how is she doing? Well, she started trading live on Friday with $25 in the account. As of this moment, she has a balance of $42.70 - a feat she accomplished by trading 1 microlot/trade, which is worth 10 pennies/tick (that's $0.10/pip for you forex "purists"). She buys breakouts above resistance and shorts breakouts below support. She trails her stops according to the natural stops the market provides. She has an average profit of 59 ticks/trade.
Oh, and did I mention that she is nine years old and just finished the third grade?
I'm starting the thread to encourage participation on this subject. Many people say you need "10,000 hours" of hands-on trading experience before you can become adept enough on the subject to be in a position to be any good at it.
Most people who work 40 hour work weeks in a "day job" work approximately 2,000 hours a year. This equates to roughly 5 years of experience to equal the 10,000 hour mark, if you put in 40 hours a week with 2 weeks off per year.
Thoughts?
Mike
If you watch the market 16 hours a day you can cut that time down in half.
Prop shops give traders 12 weeks of training & then let them work SIM till they get good enough to be let loose on 1 or 2 lots. Some people are there on week 12 and some never get there.
3 months, not 5 years.
There wouldn't be ANY professional traders anywhere if it took 5 years of full time commitment to get profitable.
Think about it people, how would a firm be able to survive if if they had to pay people for 5 years before they got a return? How would prop traders on a stipend of $750 a month survive for 5 years on that pittance before they made enough money to buy a few new shirts, or eat.
What is it that occurs at hour 10,000 that is so special? Why not 5403 or 1726 or 8983?
It's just a myth perpetuated on teh interweb in my opinion.
Yea, but I'm not trading for a firm. Nobody is paying my rent by giving me a paycheck. Nobody is giving me money and telling me what to do and when. I am all alone with only myself and my computer and my survival for company.
Trading must be quite unique. Retail traders learn by trial and error. It's more like a research project than learning a skill because we don't have access to the expertise. What other careers are like that?
I spent a lot of money on training. This was after a couple of years of spinning the wheels. I started out with John Carters book and I programmed every strategy and every strategy in the book was totally useless when applied mechanically (which is how it was described in the book too). After that book, I still focused on mechanical stuff because that is where my head was at and where my non-trading expertise was at. I tested a lot of stuff that people said worked to find that it was no better than random.
I had to get ripped off a few times before I learnt the pattern of a BS Artiste. Even then I still spent money on worthless stuff. For me, I didn't want a research project, I wanted to find out what traders actually did.
In the end, it was only when I stopped trying to use my non-trading skills in trading. I made a promise with myself to focus on discretionary trading - no programming, no sitting in my comfort zone, no automation. Once done, it really narrowed the field down of who I could learn off. Most people were offering magic bullets.
It took 5 different people to drum the message in, one of whom charged me $6k to teach me that "this guy is worse than me". So I guess you could say it's 4 people.
In the end, I found out some stuff that I was able to apply but I paid for the info. Perhaps if I'd had the info up front, I would have spent less time. That's the gut feel but no-way to test it.
In terms of hours I put in - I have absolutely no idea. I tend to stop when my wife starts growling.
You're a funny man DT. You argue that 10,000 hrs is ridiculous and one can easily learn to trade profitably much sooner. Yet here you tell us that your own path involved a long and apparently frustrating road. You spent a lot of money and a couple of years just spinning your wheels. I assume that was before your wife started to growl. And even then, you continued to spend even more money. I'd have to say, that all sounds like 10,000 hrs to me.