Time for Fishing

An extract from a post, hoping it will help:


Someone really good at trading once said: “There is time to go long, time to go short and time to go fishing”, and from today up to Sunday is time to go fishing for me.

As a trader you are free, you could trade 24/7, at anytime there is an underlying that you could trade. It’s up to you to decide what is good for you. As I said in one of the previous posts you have to ask yourself, what is in your best interest. Why do you think professional poker players are not playing all the hands? The answer is easy, they know when to fold.

And this is for us time to fold, triple witching day, elections in Greece these are all variables that come into play in our game. It’s important to understand first of all the difference between an investor and a trader.

The investor has a different time horizon than a trader, both study the political framework, the underling economics and once he made his/her mind he/she will pull the trigger, but the investor will stay in the position as long as he/she thinks that the underlying assumptions have not changed. On the other side we as short term traders we play the probability of a move intraday or on a time span of few days if we are swing trader, but we never keep a position longer than that. Because we are surfers and we know that the shore is near, have you ever seen a surfer who start riding the wave miles from the shore?

We play based on the assumption that “there is a random distribution between wins and losses for a given set of variables that define an edge”. Therefore if there are new variables in the game the probability that our edge works decreases exponentially.

oookeee.......so what is your point 77 ?

can you sum up please?

Thank you for the question, my point is that in a sound plan, each one of us must specify what conditions have to be met to not trade. Ie trading the friday before the Greece election weekend was just betting, which is different from trading. It was a post made to let people think about their trading

Why not trade on the day before the greek election ?

we are Traders.....we hunt volatility......

N

You are perfectly right, but one thing is volatility and one thing is gambling, with triple witching and greek election on friday the trades were a low probability ones. Because investors were placing bet on european outcome, in that case you would have been better off betting with william hill or bwin. It s my opinion that s all.

You choose the perfect title anyway thanks for sharing and i have no question about it.

thank you. I hope the message was clear. My idea is to share with you what i have learned in working for a decade in the industry