So, what do traders do with their time?

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rnicoll

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Tonight's random question... what do traders do all day?

I mean... my best approach to trading so far is swing trading on currencies. I'm figuring I limit myself to four trades a day to ensure I make them good trades. Most of my analysis can be done in 20 minutes at the start of the trading day, and then in 5 minutes at around hourly intervals, plus occaisionally being interrupted by the trading application as key prices are breached. Even taking into account time to read news, I figure this will leave my time about half utilised at best.

So... am I missing something? Or do traders just read more news when they have time? Or something else?
 
Thats quite appealing ... you could actually use a mobile phone to trade if it was that slow.

Go fishing.
 
rnicoll said:
Tonight's random question... what do traders do all day?

I mean... my best approach to trading so far is swing trading on currencies. I'm figuring I limit myself to four trades a day to ensure I make them good trades. Most of my analysis can be done in 20 minutes at the start of the trading day, and then in 5 minutes at around hourly intervals, plus occaisionally being interrupted by the trading application as key prices are breached. Even taking into account time to read news, I figure this will leave my time about half utilised at best.

So... am I missing something? Or do traders just read more news when they have time? Or something else?
Click to expand...

You could go out and get a job.
 
having several screens means you can trade, and watch porn at the same time. Great way to pass the days. If you're a swing trader and only trade for say, 20 mins a day, then just close your trading app qwhen your done and log onto swingers.com with no other distractions.
 
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Arbitrageur said:
having several screens means you can trade, and watch porn at the same time. Great way to pass the days. If you're a swing trader and only trade for say, 20 mins a day, then just close your trading app qwhen your done and log onto swingers.com with no other distractions.
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Or take a look at pornhub.com and never ever look back. You'll thank me for this one.
 
pornhub.com is good one, but for laughs look at the clips on bangbus.com


:LOL:
 
nine said:
Thats quite appealing ... you could actually use a mobile phone to trade if it was that slow.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I think I may have mis-phrased my question. What I meant was, I'm clearly missing a giant piece of what takes up trading time, I'm sure, but anyone got any idea what it is?
 
Even on my small intraday time frames, (using 1min trigger, with a 30min trend time frame) trading is 90% preparation and 10% action. Most of my time at the desk during trading sessions (5hrs generally) is spent appraising myself of the potential support/resistance on my intermediate and trend t/f charts. This includes noting previous swing hi and lo areas as well as keeping appraised of fibs, potential bids/offers reported by 3rd parties (mni, thompson-reuters.)

Inbetween reading the boards, catching up on some education, watching west wing repeats and generally waiting for a set-up, that is a typical trading session.

I don't think you are missing anything at all, it can be boring between set-ups.
 
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bbmac said:
Even on my small intraday time frames, (using 1min trigger, with a 30min trend time frame) trading is 90% preparation and 10% action. Most of my time at the desk during trading sessions (5hrs generally) is spent appraising myself of the potential support/resistance on my intermediate and trend t/f charts. This includes noting previous swing hi and lo areas as well as keeping appraised of fibs, potential bids/offers reported by 3rd parties (mni, thompson-reuters.)

Inbetween reading the boards, catching up on some education, watching west wing repeats and generally waiting for a set-up, that is a typical trading session.

I don't thik you are missing anything at all, it can be boring between set-ups.
Click to expand...

Okay, that's very good to know, thanks!
 
Skill Leverage said:
especially if you don't live alone.
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Dont have to worry about this if you trade in an office.

One of my early memories of Refco was a guy sat on another aisle across from me, would regularly watch some hardcore porn after his lunchtime coffee. I have no idea how he managed this because the office firewall seemed to be tighter than a gnats chuff in this respect, but I remember spectating with a bemused mix of interest and horror as he observed a long series of girls licking guys bumholes, only to have receive the pleasant reward for their efforts of a loud wet fart onto their tongues.:eek:

Adds a new level of meaning to spreading the Bund :cheesy:

Happy days!
 
Ah, the car-crash effect. You want to look away, but somehow curiousity gets the better of you.
 
Strange question for a java programmer to be asking! Let me see the test coverage report from your auto-trader program and if it's up to 90% then I might consider the question seriously ;)
 
ahardy66 said:
Strange question for a java programmer to be asking! Let me see the test coverage report from your auto-trader program and if it's up to 90% then I might consider the question seriously ;)
Click to expand...

Eep, I feel a little stalked...

The auto-trader is proving... problematic. It can handle the heavy lifting of scanning for setups, and providing good basic parameters for the trade (entry price, limit/stop prices), but judging where in the spread to put the limit order, and actually exiting on the stop price (as opposed to considerably past it) is proving... hard.

So, I'm looking at taking 2 days a week off work to do a variety of things, which includes trading by hand. Work my theories out in a more real world case, to improve the turn-around time for testing. However, before I start doing that, I wanted to clear up some uncertainties I had about where time was spent while trading, make sense?

Edit: Put another way, when you think something's going to take a fraction of the time everyone tells you it will, good to find out why :)
 
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