Thanks Justisan. Nice to have a less technical chat going on this forum.
I don’t think it’s remotely arrogant to suggest you know where to fish/trade. You’ve simply done a lot of hard work to get here and we are where we are and ever improving.
I took up fishing with the kids this year to:
a) Bide my time whilst I was auto only for 9 months due to family circumstance.
b) Get better at waiting and hunting to improve my ability of the same skills in markets.
Yes, you read that right. I actually took up the slowest sport I could find to improve my trading by emptying my mind. A far cry from the action sports Downhill Mtb and Moto Trials and Autocross of which I am long retired.
To add my own thoughts on your topic, any activity or non-activity can be directly applicable to markets and the skill sets required provided it encompasses the full journey from beginner to mastery. No doubt every mid to long term trader now knows, life is trading. This is why my children are being taught critical thinking from a quantitative perspective. This includes topics such as ‘Doing nothing, thinking nothing’ all the way to Taoist riddles such as ‘If a tree falls in the forest and no creature was around to hear it, did it still make a sound?’….to Algebra and subtle pattern recognition in all life forms. Just think, a tree being strongest underground and its root system matching the expanse of its branches sort of thing.
For me as a scalper, it was directly comparable to DH racing. I’d spend months during the off season training on my private trails and features for the next performance. 10hr days out on the hills (we do not really have mountains, yes I have spent time in Europe), to shuttle up and ride a 3 min course maybe 8-10 times if nobody went to hospital. Weeks were spent on an XC or road bike 10-12 hours p/w. When race season came around, even with that preparation…it all came down to a 3-5min race run in whatever form we turned up in on the day. Then that was the result. You get what you get and don’t get upset!
When I moved on from pump’n’dumps on small caps and started scalping synthetic futures (cash mrkt), I was pretty trigger happy. Only to realise very quickly that I needed to apply the same formula for success as my racing. Loads of research, data collection and eventually true quantitative analysis before having the real conviction to scale. Training if you will. When I now shuttle up to the top of the mountain being the market open auction, those next 1-20mins will seal my fate for the day. Then I regroup mentally and check in on my monkey in my head. If I have beaten him into submission and read the chart correctly I can go again if I’m triggered to do so. If not, and my monkey wants to do something silly like be rewarded with a look at my equity curve or worse, the dollar amount then I must stop for the day. You see, racing also requires an empty mind with 100’s of hours of dedicated training and rehearsed performances of feature/pattern ID. Then if you do all this, no doubt the results take care of themself and you’ll be in the top 8% of your field.
But the 1-3%? That’s something entirely different. This is the difference to being paid to Race, or in our case, make real money. More than replace a job or small business. I once asked a national XC champion, “Does it get easier in A grade Elite Men Category as a professional?”
He replied saying “It actually hurts just as much, but you go a lot faster and you know your result will be competitive so that makes it more fun…making it easier to do the hard work to maintain your speed over many seasons”
It took me 3 years (after a decade) to get to A grade speed in the top 10%. Undoing early bad habits like covering brakes mid corner that separates A grade from B grade riders. That is just to be a fast local.
It’s taken 4 years to quantify my discretionary edge and entrench it so deep in my belief system that with an empty mind I just execute what I have trained to see. I had to completely (and still must), do much work to maintain the person I am now, not the poor me that was.
And that’s it really. A momentum sport like downhill racing requires what we called a death grip to carry speed through a rock garden. NO brakes allowed. I catch myself now occasionally hovering over the ‘0’ key to close position when the trade is not done, I may have to sit through one more flush first. So now I tell the monkey where to go, then step back and go ‘Death Grip’, handlebars only and look through the rock garden to the next drop off. I pegged a target that has an 85% chance of hitting in the first hour. My data bank is large getting larger and it shouldn’t be hard to execute with that backing.
@PeterSt is an ex rally guy and he has used metaphors/analogies from his sport too. They make total sense to me as he will now know if he reads this. You don’t learn much by not putting real money live in trading just as you can’t catch a fish if you don’t have your line in. Ever written a bot and turned it on only to question the logic/theory of it’s design when live? I have, but mostly not. I have 2 from 14 bots that need to prove themselves before scaling the portfolio. One has taken 9 consec losses and I still have full conviction with my trade. It’s in line with what I expect from a short tail strategy and if it wins before it hits its max loss cut-off then the losses will be vapourised. A calculated bet. Death grip.
I used to have my Trials bike in my living room and service the suspension fork on my kitchen bench. Then I’d practice balancing it against the couch whilst watching TV. After I would do chin ups from a bar hanging off the ceiling rafters. I’d go to sleep in my riding kit to make it easier to get out training in the morning before work. All in pursuit of edge for a weekend sport.
Now, I have a journal beside my bed..next to my charts methodically categorised into the 4 regimes I have identified and trade everyday. My computer is NEVER off, just in case I need to check/code something.
Whilst this may sound extreme, I think it may be normal to some people here maybe they can relate to this level of obsession to strive for success against themselves. It is certainly normal to anybody at the top of their game in pursuit of mastery.
My edge, manually is averaging a 76% WR with 2-4 Profit factor 4 out of 5 days and I don’t feel arrogant saying that. I know what the chart is set-up for before I trade it and what systems I am allowed to take and at what time they can be taken. It’s simply the outcome of the above described lifestyle choices and it has taken YEARS to arrive here to only be at the beginning of true wealth creation. I long to achieve this algorithmically but do not yet have the combined skills displayed here on the forum.
Now if you could please help me catch a fish my youngest would be most grateful because I am completely hopeless with that. We just want a little Sooty Grunter for a fish bite, even once to say we did it.
