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Broker: Advantage Futures, Ninja/TT and InvestorRT/IQFeed.
Trading: Treasury futures
Posts: 312 since Nov 2010
Thanks Given: 194
Thanks Received: 912
Sorry, not only are you wrong about the business part, you fundamentally do not understand this business if you think it is about taking other traders' money. The futures business exists to allow commercial participants, eg farmers, grain companies, primary dealers at the Fed, and similar businesses to reduce exposure of their inventories to price risk. The big players in the game are not speculators at all, interested in making a speculative profit, but hedgers who don't care in the least if they make or lose money on their futures positions. All they care about is that they make money from the operations of their normal business activities; storing grain, moving Federal borrowing into market channels, etc. They pay us speculators to take the price risk they cannot afford to take.
It may feel like a game to you, but it is not one. It is a serious business, with a serious business purpose.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows..."
the key is the emotional attitude to risk, and no desire or hard work in the world can attain that or pshycological mind training. true there are many other important factors needed to be a success but with out this it wont happen.
Sounds like you are referring to Baldy. I was standing next to him when he took 5000 bonds long into unenjoyment. The Bonds broke 2 points on the number and TB was down 10MM. The clearing association sent someone into the pit, pulled him out, and made him write a check on the spot. He then came back into the pit and traded out of his position like nothing happened, except he was pissed off, for getting pulled out of the pit.
I have to laugh. I sit here and read these reply's and wonder who is really telling the truth about trading with a live account and who is really profitable. No one really knows other than yourselves. My philosophy is never to take advice from anyone who is at the same level or below myself. Not that any of you have to prove anything to any other person in this forum, but how do we really know that you know what you're talking about or if you're just full of shit and trading is just a hobby or if you're a wannabe's? So with that said I will say no more on the matter. I believe in the proof. At some point I am willing to share my monthly account statement with others and I bet none of you are.
Enough said, it all comes down to the individual person if their just dreamers or if they're for real. What I mean is only the individual person knows if they have what it takes to be a successful trader or not. We all know our DNA, our weakness and strengths. And if we can overcome from being an unsuccessful trader to becoming a successful trader. Nothing that any of you say can change another person only the individual person can overcome failure to success.
Isn't all this debate just a question of semantics. Does it really matter if we refer to trading as a business or a game? Personally, I think an argument can be made for both classifications. Obviously, it is a very large and important business whether it's futures trading or equity trading. They both serve the functions of price discovery and risk transference, and in the case of equities, capital formation. Trading is also a game for obvious reasons; you are competing against the market, you are keeping score, there are winners and losers, etc. What is universal in both cases, is trading is a performance based activity, and if you do it for a living, a very serious activity.
And can we all agree, that to achieve a high level of performance, which would result in a subsequent high degree of success, it requires an integrated approach. In other words, there are many factors or components in this process that must be be mastered in order to achieve maximum performance, i.e, Planning and Preparation• Evaluation• Market Monitoring• Trade Selection• Trade Management• Trade Exits• Mental State/Emotional Control (Focus, Confidence, Patience,Discipline)• Physical State (Energy, Health and Well-being), and Learning and Education.
Also can we all agree that it is under our own control how we deal with these factors, and that it is up to us to work on the skills that may need improvement. But, that ultimately, becoming adept at these skills, will give us the best possible outcome in our trading?
Broker: Advantage Futures, Ninja/TT and InvestorRT/IQFeed.
Trading: Treasury futures
Posts: 312 since Nov 2010
Thanks Given: 194
Thanks Received: 912
That's a famous story. I think he talked about it in "Market Wizards" and I had heard it elsewhere as well. What happened to him in the end is a cautionary tale to us all.
Did you go to the lecture he gave about trading for the CBOT Education Department? There were hundreds of us there. I asked him a question about how you know when it's time to get bigger and I was never satisfied with the answer he gave, which was basically that when it's time, you know. I was already a large local in my own pit, and I had done it very incrementally, in just the manner I've discussed in this forum. Given that his own story was that he got big really fast, I always wondered how much luck was involved at the beginning of his career. Obviously he was one of the all time greats, but it seems that's a career that might never have gotten off the ground if some big event had swept him away in the early days.
How well do you know him?
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows..."
I stood next to him for years, both in the South room and in the old grain room, but not in the new building. Rob and John Moore brought him into the business, and he was a cocky s.o.b. from day one. Initially we traded the same size, but he left me standing in the dust when he started taking 500 at a crack and then thousand lots. I really wasn't comfortable trading more than 50's outright, but I would have as many as 2000 spreads on during roll. Tommy got big so quickly, because he would never turn down a trade from a broker, no matter how big the order. It used to literally freak me out, the kind of size he would trade. Of course, the bigger the size of the order, the bigger edge he demanded, and I also used to freak at the size of the edges he would get. But, he always manged to get the quote out. IMO, Tommy's "skill" had more to do with the size of his balls and his ego, than his technical trading skills, but I guess that's just another example of how important the mental aspects are to successful trading.