Re: What's stopping you from being a BSD ? Quote:
Originally Posted by Shakone I think the last line I've quoted is a bit silly. You cannot realistically mean caused here. Procrastination is widespread in society and by people who have never read a trading forum in their life. Inexperience is a lack of experience doing a particular activity, in this case trading and a lack can't be placed there by reading something. Stupid and delusional behaviour again widespread and from people with nothing to do with trading forums. How many people voted in Obama thinking he'd be the 'saviour'. How many people in the UK believe all of these exaggerated Daily Mail hate stories?etc etc.
In terms of an appreciation of random chance, well you'd need to have an idea of probability. A large % of people believe that if you toss a coin and get 100 heads, the next one is more likely to be tails. And even if you do speak to people who understand how wrong that is, then another large % still won't get conditional probability or Monty Hall problem and so on. Even if you do understand, there is still some inherent behavioural psychology biases with probability (maximising wins rather than expectation for example). Don't we all have some of these?
People might read a newspaper and start worrying about crime and being shot, when they're probably more likely to die of a heart attack or in a car accident, and yet that won't stop them eating a big mac or messing around with their phone while driving, or for some idiots, even drinking and driving.
Lack of understanding of probability is already there. Almost all of the list is already there in some form before you read T2Win. The majority aren't caused by Trade2Win. Perhaps trade2win doesn't do enough to get rid of them (or perhaps reinforces some), but then that's a difficult task even individually (never mind communally), when as I've said above, you have so many of these that are already built into people.
It's hard intellectually. It's hard emotionally. It's hard to make a reasonable living unless you have very good capitalisation to start with (or what's left after the learning period). It's hard to be consistent, not in results but in your performance every day. It's hard that important factors relating to your results change over time/seasonally/time of day etc. It's hard to overcome costs for a day trader. The competition is of course very tough too, and it's hard overcoming the hard wired behavioural biases. With all of these difficulties, T2Win pales in comparison to the reason why there's very few BSDs here. |
Very nice post.
Can I be even more simplistic and just say that humans also struggle to understand, visually, basic geometry. I'm yet to show anyone an example of a smooth MA crossover who, looking at the trades taken, think it isn't overall profitable and are always surprised to find that the ranging periods are actually often more harmful than the trending periods are profitable. The same logic applies to visual confirmation of breakouts, support and resistance, key areas etc. The brain somehow blots out what they don't want to see. Institutions don't trade anything they can't test empirically (any instrument that has been around for years anyway - ignore certain ETFs and exotic indices traded by a certain Whale for this example). Yet retail traders do on the basis that it 'looks right' and all they need to do is sort out their psychology. This, for me, is the most startling difference and a tragic mistake. Method trumps psychology every time. Laziness and ignorance of technology can barely be tolerated in this industry these days - you must be able to thoroughly test your ideas. Go to almost any IB's careers page and see if they are looking for entry level traders. No, they want developer associates and the odd VP P&L controller. Nearly all senior traders will be ex Python dorks in another induction cycle and frankly they deserve it. Market forces at work.... |