A little spooky. Are you my long lost twin or something?

itrade2win, I wish you all the best. But you sound like a little too overconfident, what I read from you did not made me profitable, it was not only psycho stuff, so probably I take your money faster in this game than you can blink your eyes.

Why ? Because you will be focused on your psycho strength and you will have that in the back in your mind while trading, and meanwhile I will have your money.

The only psychological thing for me is that there is no emotion left anymore. Zero.

People do not become profitable because they read the right books, believe in themselves or treat trading as a business. These 3 items are heavily overrated. In fact, normal business rules don't apply to trading, that's why TREATING TRADING AS A BUSINESS IS PLAIN BULLSHIT.

I was not actually the one who brought up Jordan in the first place, but being from Chicago and having watched him in his glory years I like to use his skill set as a metaphor for a trader who has it all. Jordan played great offense, great defense, was a great clutch player and a great team player, and was a motivator for his teammates. Steve Kerr was a role player who made critical contributions to the team, but he did not "have it all" like Jordan.

The trader you aspire to be is Michael Jordan-like, i.e. someone who has it all. Your work ethic will get you far but it will not guarantee that you have it all. Superstars like Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Cristiano Ronaldo worked hard like you do but they also have huge talent or preparation from such an early age that it's indistinguishable from talent. My point was that even if you don't "have it all", for example if you discover that no matter how hard you try you simply can't make money in CL and GC but you do consistently well in ZN, ES, and 6E, or that you can make money day trading but not position trading, you can still make a huge fortune with the proper business plan. And trading in the privacy of your office, no one but you will know, and no one but you will care, if you "have it all". But if you have a successful business from trading with all the lifestyle perks that come with it, i.e. nice home, nice vacation home, nice car, nice spouse, etc. and most importantly the time to enjoy all those nice things, you will have the envy and the respect of everyone who knows you, as long as you are not a total dickhead. You will have made that mark, even if there is some aspect of the business you can not master.

I spent 6 years in cash grain trading offices, 16 years in the pits, and 6 years trading in arcades with other professional traders. Like tigertrader, I have spent my entire adult life, over 30 years, being exposed to probably a thousand other traders. I've seen traders with huge talent but huge egos and poor discipline make 8 figures on a single trade and then be in debt two years later. I've seen traders with much less talent but a great work ethic make a solid, high six figure income, never be considered a superstar, but still be in possession of their money and a very nice lifestyle indeed after 20 years in the business. I've seen one of the biggest names in the game, one of maybe the two most famous names in this business in Chicago with probably a nine figure lifetime income from trading, one of Jack Schwager's "Market Wizards", lose all his money in an unrelated business.

What all this exposure to other traders over decades gives a person is perspective. Not only have I had to win my own psychological and financial battles, I've gotten to witness hundreds of other traders coping with those issues in their own way. This is unfortunately a perspective that is does not exist for the trader laboring in the privacy of his or her own office.

So, after all this, I'm just saying, you can make your mark in this business just fine with a limited skill set, as long as you have the right business plan, and you can utterly fail in this business with a terrific skill set and a bad business plan. Don't give the plan short shrift because you spend all your effort at analysis.

Sorry, not only are you wrong about the business part, you fundamentally do not understand this business if you think it is about taking other traders' money. The futures business exists to allow commercial participants, eg farmers, grain companies, primary dealers at the Fed, and similar businesses to reduce exposure of their inventories to price risk. The big players in the game are not speculators at all, interested in making a speculative profit, but hedgers who don't care in the least if they make or lose money on their futures positions. All they care about is that they make money from the operations of their normal business activities; storing grain, moving Federal borrowing into market channels, etc. They pay us speculators to take the price risk they cannot afford to take.

It may feel like a game to you, but it is not one. It is a serious business, with a serious business purpose.

Sounds like you are referring to Baldy. I was standing next to him when he took 5000 bonds long into unenjoyment. The Bonds broke 2 points on the number and TB was down 10MM. The clearing association sent someone into the pit, pulled him out, and made him write a check on the spot. He then came back into the pit and traded out of his position like nothing happened, except he was pissed off, for getting pulled out of the pit.

It's clear you never created a succesful business, because if you would you would understand that trading is a complete different ballgame

That's a famous story. I think he talked about it in "Market Wizards" and I had heard it elsewhere as well. What happened to him in the end is a cautionary tale to us all.

Did you go to the lecture he gave about trading for the CBOT Education Department? There were hundreds of us there. I asked him a question about how you know when it's time to get bigger and I was never satisfied with the answer he gave, which was basically that when it's time, you know. I was already a large local in my own pit, and I had done it very incrementally, in just the manner I've discussed in this forum. Given that his own story was that he got big really fast, I always wondered how much luck was involved at the beginning of his career. Obviously he was one of the all time greats, but it seems that's a career that might never have gotten off the ground if some big event had swept him away in the early days.

How well do you know him?