I have been studying the financial markets for quite some time now.. done my fair share of trading whilst at it.. Tried prop firms, tried my own accounts throughout all of it.. I have lost money. and not been able to use a strategy that produces consistent results…
Now , I know that trading the stock, futures, crypto and fx market obviously can work because there are huge financial institutions formed around these markets..
My question is.. is there strategy, that is proven to work.. that I can follow, in order to start making money in one of these markets.
Simply, can I follow a set of rules.. apply them.. and start making money?
If so please could you attach a link to the material.. or simply share the strategy..
I have bought course after course.. book after book.
I am just looking for something that works.
Many thanks,
Adam
If you've been searching with what you've described above for a few years. You're not alone. Plenty of us have felt no method or something or the next thing we've tried ever seemed to work to be consistent in our first three to seven or more years. Only after more lessons learned and learning to manage trades and manage and expect losing trades and temper impatient expectations, usually after more years can some of us manage a break-even year, or even one or two years (never guaranteed successive) of actual decent profits (avg 10's of k's) to have to report to the IRS for the tax season.
So sharing a bit how it went for me after seven years before finally having a break-even year and multiple past busted accounts. Like another post above mentioned, no one is ever going to share something that works. If it worked consistently so well for them, they wouldn't even posting on forums anymore (except maybe vaguely to inwardly gloat perhaps). And 99% of those who claim success after a few months are either wishful who want to believe they reached consistency that fast, OR in actuality the next new failed retail traders who become another the plethora of snakeoil gurus and shady vendors who make a show of it and sell products and subs, but have long since stopped trading live for themselves and prey and depend on the next month and year of fresh new dupes to retail trading. Anything that actually works would be so personally or company guarded (real prop firms and hedge funds' strategies kept under "proprietary" corporate secret privacy and not the stupid ads and snakeoil in the general retail trading public) and of course working ideas and edges never last long if exposed, like if thousands of retail traders were trading the same method entry, of course in today's massive instiutional HFT cheating, it would be quickly eroded due to frontrunning and stop hunting as the locals of the markets recognize the sheep driven crowd of retail volume trying the next publicly "revealed" working idea. That's why several popular ideas have failed in past decades eventually, even without hft until post 2008. For myself after over a decade perusing forums such as here, bigmikes/future.io, elitetrader, etc. no one really shares and are usually daydreaming about future consistency, or what they share hasn't been self-tested enough. Even those one or two successful if they really are, they don't share details. It's a rulthless and competitive world even outside of trading in business and that carries over into the trading world. All the chicanery and fraud charlatans vendor snakeoil "industry" selling to newbs have always seemed to misinform that trading is somehow "community" shared or minded for decades, when in reality, while I don't believe daytrading is immediately real-time "zero-sum" in any given trading session day, the overall motivations of trading is after all, close to 'zero-sum' like most business in the real world - and it's even more individual where daytrading is hardly ever like a team sport and always more of an individual competitive sport in the closer analogy , in my opinion.
So what I'd suggest is to look over your books and courses whether you went through 40 different ideas or a hundred books and courses. And pick up pieces here and there that seemed solid or more proven then the others. Mix some ideas together if you can, maybe 3 to 5 ideas and THEN work on your losses and trade management. If your edge(s) are 55% w/l, even working on your trade management, with examining and improving stoploss or take profit strategies and "discipline" to not break your rules, you can leverage your edge(s) w/l % to possible average 65, 75% which can then be workable depending on your performance consistency for the day. So this is basically "creating your own system/strategies" from other ideas or coming up with a few of your own with ideas that may pop up in your head creatively during your trading journey. And of course I don't need to mention the self-testing of one's strategy and ideas before putting big money for your account on the line. smallest or miniscule leverage to start with until you truly feel and trust your working 'self-made' systems.
A good modern recent book on trade psychology and the reality of daytrading outside of the fraud and hype is "Best Loser Wins" by Tom Hougaard, I would highly recommend and I prefer it far more than the "trading in the zone" book which I always felt wasn't that practically or experienced justified to be that popular a book in the past. There is also the 'daytrading' subreddit on reddit which has a lot of active discussion, which may have taken over older forum sites of the past in activity. Good luck.
