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Traders with 5-10 years of experience but still not profitable
I just do the opposite of Kevinkdog, and sure I have had drawdowns, but I end up profitable at the end of the week. Joking aside, Kevin is spot on.
Sody.
PS> Don't ever follow any advice or wisdom I share.
"The great Traders have always been humbled by the market early on in their careers creating a deep respect for the market. Until one has this respect indelibly engraved in their makeup, the concept of money management and discipline will never be treated seriously."
@xsamanthax , I understand your frustration. Let me see if I can touch on a few items and the utility of a forum like FIO.
A good number of the active users here can see through the BS, which is why they are active participants. Some are still figuring it out. This community has expert traders, newbs, and everything in between. The community serves the purpose of supporting one another no matter where they are in their journey. There are idiots, morons, and nutjobs here, but the supermods keep them in check.
Why do people just post to a forum anyway?
Why are you here? Everyone has their motivations, reasons, and needs. I post to my journal because it helps me keep track of things I'm doing, it may motivate or inspire others and I get feedback from folks who help me think about things I had not considered. I respond to posts and questions because I feel the need to give back, since so many others here have helped me on my trading journeys.
I have nothing to offer, which is why I usually stay away from places like this.
Just by contributing here, you are offering something. Everyone has to start somewhere. I look back at my old journal here and cringe at how naive I was about certain things. You'll get better at this, but takes time and dare I state, patience.
There are 'trading rooms'. This concept has been around for a very long time, but they typically have a price to join. You could start your own Discord community and see if you could assemble like minded individuals for what you describe, though you would have to be careful to keep the vendors and shills at bay. You could go work as a trader or at a trading firm, though that seems kind of old-fashioned these days. Go work for a hedge fund. These are all communities built around working on and in trading.
Well, you can go to Harvard, get a degree in finance or similar degree, then try to get hired on Wall Street, but you won't make a 250k (about half of that is closer to the reality, with 60-80 hour work weeks as the norm). What they know is that they have to put in the time, which started in middle school, get the grades to put you on the path, put in the incredibly long hours.... blah blah. For every junior banker hired on Wall Street, there are probably 10 or more who did not make the cut. For most successful traders, striking it rich was a long and drawn out process. Yes, there will be spectacular stories like the Big Short, but most successful traders have gone the slow and steady route. If you want a very interesting look at someone who has done it successfully, with spectacular failures along the way, I suggest reading Linda Bradford-Raschke's auto-biography, Trading Sardines.
If you don't have patience, trading is probably not for you. My trading is performed as a business. So if you want to start a trading business or any other business, you have to learn how to run that business. Whether you are discretionary or systematic (as I am), you have to figure out how the business will run.
There will be losing days. Weeks. Months. Years. We are playing an infinite game when we trade. To paraphrase Laurent Bernut, the only way to win an infinite game is to stay alive, which is done through money management. To quote others, trading is the hardest way to make easy money. You won't get filthy rich unless you are properly capitalized. A $100k account making a 30% return per year gives you $30k per year. The S&P 500, the gold standard and alpha for many investors, has returned about 11-12% per year, 7% or so inflation-adjusted returns. If you can consistently pull 30% out of the market each year, investors will beat a path to your door and throw their money at you to invest.
I am not sure how old you are, but if you want to be filthy rich by the time you are 50 or retired or whenever, max out your 401k or IRA every year, dumping those funds into index ETF's, and let the market do the work for you. If you want to be a trader, you have to be willing to put in the time, accept failures with the successes. There are plenty of resources around here and plenty of successful traders who are doing it every day.
Ideas abound everywhere on things you can trade, methods you can use, etc. Let me know and I can point you to some free sources of focused information.
Great advice as always @vmodus, but I'm pretty sure it was not what @xsamanthax wants to hear. Reading through all his/her posts, I get a certain vibe.
I can say in 34 years since my undergrad degree, I've seen that vibe usually does not equate to long term success in any field.
In my old career, I remember interviewing someone for an entry level position who told me "in 2 years, I'll have your (upper management) job." Got hired over my objections. Lasted 3 days before walking out in frustration, since apparently everyone in the company was a buffoon (sure, a bunch of buffoons who made about $150K PROFIT per employee per year).
- A certain number of total posts
- A certain ranking within the total membership based on "Thanks" received -- which is taken as a proxy for the value received and acknowledged by others
- How long you've been a member
- A general measure of activity
At one point you are a "Market Wizard," and at another point you are a "Legendary Market Wizard." This is why some members have a red background to their names ("Market Wizards"), and some are also labeled "Legendary."
It is dynamic, in that if you are inactive you lose it. If you come back, it can come back fairly quickly, based on past history.
Many who earn these designations add a custom designation as well, but the system keeps the "Legendary" label, which is applied to any custom title, because it is meant to signify something.
If you go to the top of the page and click on UserCp > Your Profile > Statistics, and scroll down to Forum Reputation, you will get an overview.
Sure, these designations are hokey. But they do mean that someone has done some things, over an extended period of time, that the other members thought was noteworthy and that they valued. They measure contribution, perhaps in only a rough way, but in a useful one, and are based on general community assessment. They mean something.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
