From the first half of the news trading note we learned some ways to estimate what is priced in by the market. We learned that we are trading any gap in market expectations rather than the result itself. A good result when the market expected a fantastic result is disappointing! We also looked at second order thinking. After all that, I hope the reaction of prices to events is starting to make more sense to you. Before you understand the core concepts of pricing in and second order thinking, price reactions to events can seem mystifying at times We'll add one thought-provoking quote. Keynes (that rare economist who also managed institutional money) offered this analogy. He compared selecting investments to a beauty contest in which newspaper readers would write in with their votes and win a prize if their votes most closely matched the six most popularly selected women across all readers: It is not a case of choosing those (faces) which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinions genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. Trading is no different. You are trying to anticipate how other traders will react to news and how that will move prices. Perhaps you disagree with their reaction. Still, if you can anticipate what it will be you would be sensible to act upon it. Don't forget: meanwhile they are also trying to anticipate what you and everyone else will do. Part II
Preparing for quantitative and qualitative releases
Data surprise index
Using recent events to predict future reactions
Buy the rumour, sell the fact
The trimming position effect
Reversals
Some key FX releases
Preparing for quantitative and qualitative releases
The majority of releases are quantitative. All that means is there’s some number. Like unemployment figures or GDP. Historic results provide interesting context. We are looking below the Australian unemployment rate which is released monthly. If you plot it out a few years back you can spot a clear trend, which got massively reversed. Knowing this trend gives you additional information when the figure is released. In the same way prices can trend so do economic data. A great resource that's totally free to use This makes sense: if for example things are getting steadily better in the economy you’d expect to see unemployment steadily going down. Knowing the trend and how much noise there is in the data gives you an informational edge over lazy traders. For example, when we see the spike above 6% on the above you’d instantly know it was crazy and a huge trading opportunity since a) the fluctuations month on month are normally tiny and b) it is a huge reversal of the long-term trend. Would all the other AUDUSD traders know and react proportionately? If not and yet they still trade, their laziness may be an opportunity for more informed traders to make some money. Tradingeconomics.com offers really high quality analysis. You can see all the major indicators for each country. Clicking them brings up their history as well as an explanation of what they show. For example, here’s German Consumer Confidence. Helpful context There are also qualitative events. Normally these are speeches by Central Bankers. There are whole blogs dedicated to closely reading such texts and looking for subtle changes in direction or opinion on the economy. Stuff like how often does the phrase "in a good place" come up when the Chair of the Fed speaks. It is pretty dry stuff. Yet these are leading indicators of how each member may vote to set interest rates. Ed Yardeni is the go-to guy on central banks.
Data surprise index
The other thing you might look at is something investment banks produce for their customers. A data surprise index. I am not sure if these are available in retail land - there's no reason they shouldn't be but the economic calendars online are very basic. You’ll remember we talked about data not being good or bad of itself but good or bad relative to what was expected. These indices measure this difference. If results are consistently better than analysts expect then you’ll see a positive number. If they are consistently worse than analysts expect a negative number. You can see they tend to swing from positive to negative. Mean reversion at its best! Data surprise indices measure how much better or worse data came in vs forecast There are many theories for this but in general people consider that analysts herd around the consensus. They are scared to be outliers and look ‘wrong’ or ‘stupid’ so they instead place estimates close to the pack of their peers. When economic conditions change they may therefore be slow to update. When they are wrong consistently - say too bearish - they eventually flip the other way and become too bullish. These charts can be interesting to give you an idea of how the recent data releases have been versus market expectations. You may try to spot the turning points in macroeconomic data that drive long term currency prices and trends.
Using recent events to predict future reactions
The market reaction function is the most important thing on an economic calendar in many ways. It means: what will happen to the price if the data is better or worse than the market expects? That seems easy to answer but it is not. Consider the example of consumer confidence we had earlier.
Many times the market will shrug and ignore it.
But when the economic recovery is predicated on a strong consumer it may move markets a lot.
Or consider the S&P index of US stocks (Wall Street).
If you get good economic data that beats analyst estimates surely it should go up? Well, sometimes that is certainly the case.
But good economic data might result in the US Central Bank raising interest rates. Raising interest rates will generally make the stock market go down!
So better than expected data could make the S&P go up (“the economy is great”) or down (“the Fed is more likely to raise rates”). It depends. The market can interpret the same data totally differently at different times. One clue is to look at what happened to the price of risk assets at the last event. For example, let’s say we looked at unemployment and it came in a lot worse than forecast last month. What happened to the S&P back then? 2% drop last time on a 'worse than expected' number ... so it it is 'better than expected' best guess is we rally 2% higher So this tells us that - at least for our most recent event - the S&P moved 2% lower on a far worse than expected number. This gives us some guidance as to what it might do next time and the direction. Bad number = lower S&P. For a huge surprise 2% is the size of move we’d expect. Again - this is a real limitation of online calendars. They should show next to the historic results (expected/actual) the reaction of various instruments.
Buy the rumour, sell the fact
A final example of an unpredictable reaction relates to the old rule of ‘Buy the rumour, sell the fact.’ This captures the tendency for markets to anticipate events and then reverse when they occur. Buy the rumour, sell the fact In short: people take profit and close their positions when what they expected to happen is confirmed. So we have to decide which driver is most important to the market at any point in time. You obviously cannot ask every participant. The best way to do it is to look at what happened recently. Look at the price action during recent releases and you will get a feel for how much the market moves and in which direction.
Trimming or taking off positions
One thing to note is that events sometimes give smart participants information about positioning. This is because many traders take off or reduce positions ahead of big news events for risk management purposes. Imagine we see GBPUSD rises in the hour before GDP release. That probably indicates the market is short and has taken off / flattened its positions. The price action before an event can tell you about speculative positioning If GDP is merely in line with expectations those same people are likely to add back their positions. They avoided a potential banana skin. This is why sometimes the market moves on an event that seemingly was bang on consensus. But you have learned something. The speculative market is short and may prove vulnerable to a squeeze.
Two kinds of reversals
Fairly often you’ll see the market move in one direction on a release then turn around and go the other way. These are known as reversals. Traders will often ‘fade’ a move, meaning bet against it and expect it to reverse.
Logical reversals
Sometimes this happens when the data looks good at first glance but the details don’t support it. For example, say the headline is very bullish on German manufacturing numbers but then a minute later it becomes clear the company who releases the data has changed methodology or believes the number is driven by a one-off event. Or maybe the headline number is positive but buried in the detail there is a very negative revision to previous numbers. Fading the initial spike is one way to trade news. Try looking at what the price action is one minute after the event and thirty minutes afterwards on historic releases.
Crazy reversals
Some reversals don't make sense Sometimes a reversal happens for seemingly no fundamental reason. Say you get clearly positive news that is better than anyone expects. There are no caveats to the positive number. Yet the price briefly spikes up and then falls hard. What on earth? This is a pure supply and demand thing. Even on bullish news the market cannot sustain a rally. The market is telling you it wants to sell this asset. Try not to get in its way.
Some key releases
As we have already discussed, different releases are important at different times. However, we’ll look at some consistently important ones in this final section.
Interest rates decisions
These can sometimes be unscheduled. However, normally the decisions are announced monthly. The exact process varies for each central bank. Typically there’s a headline decision e.g. maintain 0.75% rate. You may also see “minutes” of the meeting in which the decision was reached and a vote tally e.g. 7 for maintain, 2 for lower rates. These are always top-tier data releases and have capacity to move the currency a lot. A hawkish central bank (higher rates) will tend to move a currency higher whilst a dovish central bank (lower rates) will tend to move a currency lower. A central banker speaking is always a big event
Non farm payrolls
These are released once per month. This is another top-tier release that will move all USD pairs as well as equities. There are three numbers:
The headline number of jobs created (bigger is better)
The unemployment rate (smaller is better)
Average hourly earnings (depends)
Bear in mind these headline numbers are often off by around 75,000. If a report comes in +/- 25,000 of the forecast, that is probably a non event. In general a positive response should move the USD higher but check recent price action. Other countries each have their own unemployment data releases but this is the single most important release.
Surveys
There are various types of surveys: consumer confidence; house price expectations; purchasing managers index etc. Each one basically asks a group of people if they expect to make more purchases or activity in their area of expertise to rise. There are so many we won’t go into each one here. A really useful tool is the tradingeconomics.com economic indicators for each country. You can see all the major indicators and an explanation of each plus the historic results.
GDP
Gross Domestic Product is another big release. It is a measure of how much a country’s economy is growing. In general the market focuses more on ‘advance’ GDP forecasts more than ‘final’ numbers, which are often released at the same time. This is because the final figures are accurate but by the time they come around the market has already seen all the inputs. The advance figure tends to be less accurate but incorporates new information that the market may not have known before the release. In general a strong GDP number is good for the domestic currency.
Inflation
Countries tend to release measures of inflation (increase in prices) each month. These releases are important mainly because they may influence the future decisions of the central bank, when setting the interest rate. See the FX fundamentals section for more details.
Industrial data
Things like factory orders or or inventory levels. These can provide a leading indicator of the strength of the economy. These numbers can be extremely volatile. This is because a one-off large order can drive the numbers well outside usual levels. Pay careful attention to previous releases so you have a sense of how noisy each release is and what kind of moves might be expected.
Comments
Often there is really good stuff in the comments/replies. Check out 'squitstoomuch' for some excellent observations on why some news sources are noisy but early (think: Twitter, ZeroHedge). The Softbank story is a good recent example: was in ZeroHedge a day before the FT but the market moved on the FT. Also an interesting comment on mistakes, which definitely happen on breaking news, and can cause massive reversals.
eToro: impressions, doubts and (ignored) lessons from copy trading
(no promotional content, no affiliate links) Hi, exactly four years ago, I started copying eToro investors / traders that I selected using the broker's built-in search engine (profitable in last two years, already being copied by others), followed by manual filtering, to take into account fluctuations in yearly returns, composition of their portfolios etc. With that, I got a list of 10 people whom I started to copy on a demo account: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u52f0XHfr-LauIscKcFDYF0yGTTUr6VY/view?usp=sharing In the screenshot you can see that in case of the first two of them the amount invested was $10,000, while for the rest it was just $100. This is because I started copying the first two a couple of weeks earlier; eventually I changed this into $100 the same day I made the screenshot and this is when my calculations start - so this thing is irrelevant, I just cannot travel in time to make another screenshot. What I did after that? Well, within the next six weeks my profits oscillated between -$11 and +$9.50 (the biggest profit was on Nov 9, a day after US presidential elections). I found this "boring" and discontinued experimenting with copy trading. Today I looked back at those ten traders. Here is what I found. Firstly, seven of them are not with eToro anymore; investorNo1, Simple-Stock-Mkt, tradingrelax, 4exPirate, primit, Gallojack, xjurokx. The other three traders are:
toppertrader: not being copied by anyone and for a good reason: his loss this year alone is 61.16%!
Jean-marcLenfant: copied by only 67 people; his loss this year is -1.09% but in general he is quite successful, with yearly profits ranging from 3.57% to 7.32%.
Girem2: he has no copiers, his profit this year is 41.45% but in 2018 he experienced a loss of 83.15%!
My observations and thoughts are as follows:
Seven out of ten traders are not with eToro anymore, which makes me wonder why. I have no proof but my guess is they simply performed poorly, lost their copiers and closed their accounts. This is already alarming but what if they opened another account? Or, even worse, multiple accounts? They could be investing small money and try different risky approaches, hoping that at least one account will turn out profitable in the long turn, attracting potential copiers. (I'm not claiming that those 7 particular traders did this, it's just my general suspicion regarding some of eToro traders)
I'm unable to calculate what would be my profit if I never stopped copying them, because I cannot check at what day and with what profit those seven traders left eToro. I'm guessing this would be an immense loss. On the other hand, considering the three traders who are still with eToro, I would lose more than a quarter of my assets!
What now? I must be a quite adventurous person or at least an incorrigible optimist, because a month ago (exactly on Aug 26th) I started copying three traders with real money. Here is who they are. rubymza (Heloise Greeff)
invests in stocks, with GOOG, INTC, BLDP, MA, MSFT, AMZN, V, MU, IBM and NXPI making up 50.3% of her portfolio (allocation of each of them is in between 3.02% and 6.85%)
active since 2016 (only the year 2016 ended with a loss)
has 3044 copiers and $2M-$5M of copy assets under management
strategy (her own words): "My investing strategy focusses mostly on US indices, tech and pharma, promising future (5-10years) growth. My trades are based on technical analysis using machine learning to understand patterns and trends in the markets. I prefer to keep a diverse portfolio to spread risk while achieving great returns."
he is a Forex trader, making typically 21 trades per week; his favorite currency pairs are EURCHF (12% of trades), CADCHF and GBPUSD; the trades, however, typically make up below 5% of his portfolio (at least whenever I'm checking it), making most of my funds unused
active since January 2017: surprisingly enough, he has every single month profitable, though monthly profits are in the range of 0.03% to 3.34% only
has 8977 copiers and more than $5M of copy assets under management
strategy (his own words): "I monitor currency pairs all day to find the best entry. There is some management/scaling position for perfect entry. The risk control is a big part of my strategy," (quite vague, to be honest)
commodities compose 76% of his portfolio and his favorite assets are Gold and Oil (at the moment, Gold makes up half of invested amount)
active since July 2016, with the following yearly profits, starting from 2016: 6.56%, 10.05%, 13.09%, 32.26% and -2.03% (the current year)
has 1493 copiers and $1M-$2M of copy assets under management
strategy (his own words): "My system is based on patterns, and a variety of technical analysis tools and some fundamental analysis. I primarily trade in commodities. " (quite vague as well)
own experience: my profit with rayvahey is 2.56%
What was my strategy to hand-pick these particular traders? First I did some basic scanning using eToro's built-in search engine. The most important filter was that the trader was profitable within the last two years: unfortunately, eToro does not allow to reach details of earlier performance automatically. To know how the trader performed before 2019, I had to look at stats in the profile of each of them. I was also taking into account how often they trade (to avoid those who do only a couple of trades yearly), whether they were trading recently and whether they write posts regularly in their feed. With this, I got a list of fifteen candidates to copy:
olivierdanvel
marianopardo
rubymza
rayvahey
martidg97
overit
misterg23
knw500
jianswang
reinhardtcoetzee
miyoshi
alderique
jarodd76
benson9904
big-profits
As you already know, I finally chose three of them. Rubymza seemed to be the most trustworthy stock trader, based on profits, posts feed and regular trading, among other things. Regarding OlivierDanvel, his uniqueness is the ability to record continuous profits with the Forex market. Finally, with rayvahey I wanted to increase my exposure to the commodities market. Wish me good luck! Michael P.S. You might find those copy-trading related readings interesting:
Copy trading with eToro: impressions, doubts and (ignored) lessons
(no promotional content, no affiliate links) Hi, exactly four years ago, I started copying eToro investors / traders that I selected using the broker's built-in search engine (profitable in last two years, already being copied by others), followed by manual filtering, to take into account fluctuations in yearly returns, composition of their portfolios etc. With that, I got a list of 10 people whom I started to copy on a demo account: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u52f0XHfr-LauIscKcFDYF0yGTTUr6VY/view?usp=sharing In the screenshot you can see that in case of the first two of them the amount invested was $10,000, while for the rest it was just $100. This is because I started copying the first two a couple of weeks earlier; eventually I changed this into $100 the same day I made the screenshot and this is when my calculations start - so this thing is irrelevant, I just cannot travel in time to make another screenshot. What I did after that? Well, within the next six weeks my profits oscillated between -$11 and +$9.50 (the biggest profit was on Nov 9, a day after US presidential elections). I found this "boring" and discontinued experimenting with copy trading. Today I looked back at those ten traders. Here is what I found. Firstly, seven of them are not with eToro anymore; investorNo1, Simple-Stock-Mkt, tradingrelax, 4exPirate, primit, Gallojack, xjurokx. The other three traders are:
toppertrader: not being copied by anyone and for a good reason: his loss this year alone is 61.16%!
Jean-marcLenfant: copied by only 67 people; his loss this year is -1.09% but in general he is quite successful, with yearly profits ranging from 3.57% to 7.32%.
Girem2: he has no copiers, his profit this year is 41.45% but in 2018 he experienced a loss of 83.15%!
My observations and thoughts are as follows:
Seven out of ten traders are not with eToro anymore, which makes me wonder why. I have no proof but my guess is they simply performed poorly, lost their copiers and closed their accounts. This is already alarming but what if they opened another account? Or, even worse, multiple accounts? They could be investing small money and try different risky approaches, hoping that at least one account will turn out profitable in the long turn, attracting potential copiers. (I'm not claiming that those 7 particular traders did this, it's just my general suspicion regarding some of eToro traders)
I'm unable to calculate what would be my profit if I never stopped copying them, because I cannot check at what day and with what profit those seven traders left eToro. I'm guessing this would be an immense loss. On the other hand, considering the three traders who are still with eToro, I would lose more than a quarter of my assets!
What now? I must be a quite adventurous person or at least an incorrigible optimist, because a month ago (exactly on Aug 26th) I started copying three traders with real money. Here is who they are. rubymza (Heloise Greeff)
invests in stocks, with GOOG, INTC, BLDP, MA, MSFT, AMZN, V, MU, IBM and NXPI making up 50.3% of her portfolio (allocation of each of them is in between 3.02% and 6.85%)
active since 2016 (only the year 2016 ended with a loss)
has 3044 copiers and $2M-$5M of copy assets under management
strategy (her own words): "My investing strategy focusses mostly on US indices, tech and pharma, promising future (5-10years) growth. My trades are based on technical analysis using machine learning to understand patterns and trends in the markets. I prefer to keep a diverse portfolio to spread risk while achieving great returns."
he is a Forex trader, making typically 21 trades per week; his favorite currency pairs are EURCHF (12% of trades), CADCHF and GBPUSD; the trades, however, typically make up below 5% of his portfolio (at least whenever I'm checking it), making most of my funds unused
active since January 2017: surprisingly enough, he has every single month profitable, though monthly profits are in the range of 0.03% to 3.34% only
has 8977 copiers and more than $5M of copy assets under management
strategy (his own words): "I monitor currency pairs all day to find the best entry. There is some management/scaling position for perfect entry. The risk control is a big part of my strategy," (quite vague, to be honest)
commodities compose 76% of his portfolio and his favorite assets are Gold and Oil (at the moment, Gold makes up half of invested amount)
active since July 2016, with the following yearly profits, starting from 2016: 6.56%, 10.05%, 13.09%, 32.26% and -2.03% (the current year)
has 1493 copiers and $1M-$2M of copy assets under management
strategy (his own words): "My system is based on patterns, and a variety of technical analysis tools and some fundamental analysis. I primarily trade in commodities. " (quite vague as well)
own experience: my profit with rayvahey is 2.56%
What was my strategy to hand-pick these particular traders? First I did some basic scanning using eToro's built-in search engine. The most important filter was that the trader was profitable within the last two years: unfortunately, eToro does not allow to reach details of earlier performance automatically. To know how the trader performed before 2019, I had to look at stats in the profile of each of them. I was also taking into account how often they trade (to avoid those who do only a couple of trades yearly), whether they were trading recently and whether they write posts regularly in their feed. With this, I got a list of fifteen candidates to copy:
olivierdanvel
marianopardo
rubymza
rayvahey
martidg97
overit
misterg23
knw500
jianswang
reinhardtcoetzee
miyoshi
alderique
jarodd76
benson9904
big-profits
As you already know, I finally chose three of them. Rubymza seemed to be the most trustworthy stock trader, based on profits, posts feed and regular trading, among other things. Regarding OlivierDanvel, his uniqueness is the ability to record continuous profits with the Forex market. Finally, with rayvahey I wanted to increase my exposure to the commodities market. Wish me good luck! Michael P.S. You might find those copy-trading related readings interesting:
I've reproduced 130+ research papers about "predicting the stock market", coded them from scratch and recorded the results. Here's what I've learnt.
ok, so firstly, all of the papers I found through Google search and Google scholar. Google scholar doesn't actually have every research paper so you need to use both together to find them all. They were all found by using phrases like "predict stock market" or "predict forex" or "predict bitcoin" and terms related to those. Next, I only tested papers written in the past 8 years or so, I think anything older is just going to be heavily Alpha-mined so we can probably just ignore those ones altogether. Then, Anything where it's slightly ambiguous with methodology, I tried every possible permutation to try and capture what the authors may have meant. For example, one paper adds engineered features to the price then says "then we ran the data through our model" - it's not clear if it means the original data or the engineered data, so I tried both ways. This happens more than you'd think! THEN, Anything that didn't work, I tried my own ideas with the data they were using or substituted one of their models with others that I knew of. Now before we go any further, I should caveat that I was a profitable trader at multiple Tier-1 US banks so I can say with confidence that I made a decent attempt of building whatever the author was trying to get at. Oh, and one more thing. All of this work took about 7 months in total. Right, let's jump in. So with the papers, I found as many as I could, then I read through them and put them in categories and then tested each category at a time because a lot of papers were kinda saying the same things. Here are the categories:
News Text Mining. - This is where they'd use NLP on headlines or the body of news as a signal.
Social data - Twitter Sentiment/Google Search/Seeking Alpha. Again, some were NLP, for google trends they just used the data.
Technical Analysis & Machine Learning together. Most of these would take the price, add TA features, then feed into a ML model.
Other machine learning (as in, not using TA). Just using the price and some other engineered features.
Analyst Recommendations. Literally just taking the recommendations from banks/brokers and using that as the signal.
Fundamental data. So ratios from the income statement/balance sheet,
Results: Literally every single paper was either p-hacked, overfit, or a subsample of favourable data was selected (I guess ultimately they're all the same thing but still) OR a few may have had a smidge of Alpha but as soon as you add transaction costs it all disappears. Every author that's been publicly challenged about the results of their paper says it's stopped working due to "Alpha decay" because they made their methodology public. The easiest way to test whether it was truly Alpha decay or just overfitting by the authors is just to reproduce the paper then go further back in time instead of further forwards. For the papers that I could reproduce, all of them failed regardless of whether you go back or forwards. :) Now, results from the two most popular categories were:
*Social data.*A lot of research papers were extensions of or based off of a paper by Johan Bollen called "Twitter mood predicts the stock market". It literally has 3,955 citations and is complete and utter horse shit; the paper is p-hacking to the extreme. Not only could I not reproduce the results, but given the number of sentiment indicators he uses I regularly found correlations between sentiment and my data based on how I engineered it. None of these correlations held over longer time periods. Every paper that's a derivative of this one or cites it has the same issues.
*Technical analysis & machine learning.*Every paper would do something along the lines of.. take past price data for some asset (stocks, forex), then add technical analysis indicators as "features". Then either they'd run through a feature-selector that figures out the best features then put the best ones into a model OR they'd dump this data straight into the model and afterwards select the subset of instruments that it "worked" on. None of these would hold if you k-fold test them or test on different subsets of data outside of the ones used in the paper. The results are always based off of selecting favourable subsets of data.
The most frustrating paper: I have true hate for the authors of this paper: "A deep learning framework for financial time series using stacked autoencoders and long-short term memory". Probably the most complex AND vague in terms of methodology and after weeks trying to reproduce their results (and failing) I figured out that they were leaking future data into their training set (this also happens more than you'd think). The two positive take-aways that I did find from all of this research are:
Almost every instrument is mean-reverting on short timelines and trending on longer timelines. This has held true across most of the data that I tested. Putting this information into a strategy would be rather easy and straightforward (although you have no guarantee that it'll continue to work in future).
When we were in the depths of the great recession, almost every signal was bearish (seeking alpha contributors, news, google trends). If this holds in the next recession, just using this data alone would give you a strategy that vastly outperforms the index across long time periods.
Hopefully if anyone is getting into this space this will save you an absolute tonne of time and effort. So in conclusion, if you're building trading strategies. Simple is good :) Also one other thing I'd like to add, even the Godfather of value investing, the late Benjamin Graham (Warren Buffet's mentor) used to test his strategies (even though he'd be trading manually) so literally every investor needs to backtest regardless of if you're day-trading or long-term investing or building trading algorithms.
PART 2 : https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/g0sd44/what_is_the_bottom/ PART 3: https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/g2enz2/why_the_printer_must_continue/ Edit: By popular demand, the too long didn't read is now at the top TL;DR SPY 220p 11/20 This will likely be a multi-part series. It should be noted that I am no expert by any means, I'm actually quite new to this, it is just an elementary analysis of patterns in price and time. I am not a financial advisor, and this is not advice for a person to enter trades upon. The fundamental divide in trading revolves around the question of market structure. Many feel that the market operates totally randomly and its’ behavior cannot be predicted. For the purposes of this DD, we will assume that the market has a structure, but that that structure is not perfect. That market structure naturally generates chart patterns as the market records prices in time. We will analyze an instrument, an exchange traded fund, which represents an index, as opposed to a particular stock. The price patterns of the various stocks in an index are effectively smoothed out. In doing so, a more technical picture arises. Perhaps the most popular of these is the SPDR S&P Standard and Poor 500 Exchange Traded Fund ($SPY). In trading, little to no concern is given about value of underlying asset. We concerned primarily about liquidity and trading ranges, which are the amount of value fluctuating on a short-term basis, as measured by volatility-implied trading ranges. Fundamental analysis plays a role, however markets often do not react to real-world factors in a logical fashion. Therefore, fundamental analysis is more appropriate for long-term investing. The fundamental derivatives of a chart are time (x-axis) and price (y-axis). The primary technical indicator is price, as everything else is lagging in the past. Price represents current asking price and incorrectly implementing positions based on price is one of the biggest trading errors. Markets ordinarily have noise, their tendency to back-and-fill, which must be filtered out for true pattern recognition. That noise does have a utility, however, in allowing traders second chances to enter favorable positions at slightly less favorable entry points. When you have any market with enough liquidity for historical data to record a pattern, then a structure can be divined. The market probes prices as part of an ongoing price-discovery process. Market technicians must sometimes look outside of the technical realm and use visual inspection to ascertain the relevance of certain patterns, using a qualitative eye that recognizes the underlying quantitative nature Markets rise slower than they correct, however they rise much more than they fall. In the same vein, instruments can only fall to having no worth, whereas they could theoretically grow infinitely and have continued to grow over time. Money in a fiat system is illusory. It is a fundamentally synthetic instrument which has no intrinsic value. Hence, the recent seemingly illogical fluctuations in the market. According to trade theory, the unending purpose of a market is to create and break price ranges according to the laws of supply and demand. We must determine when to trade based on each market inflection point as defined in price and in time as opposed to abandoning the trend (as the contrarian trading in this sub often does). Time and Price symmetry must be used to be in accordance with the trend. When coupled with a favorable risk to reward ratio, the ability to stay in the market for most of the defined time period, and adherence to risk management rules; the trader has a solid methodology for achieving considerable gains. We will engage in a longer term market-oriented analysis to avoid any time-focused pressure. The market is technically open 24-hours a day, so trading may be done when the individual is ready, without any pressing need to be constantly alert. Let alone, we can safely project months in advance with relatively high accuracy. Some important terms to keep in mind: § Discrete – terminal points at the extremes of ranges § Secondary Discrete – quantified retracement or correction between two discrete § Longs (asset appreciation) and shorts (asset depreciation)
Technical Indicators
- Technical indicators are often considered self-fulfilling prophecies due to mass-market psychology gravitating towards certain common numbers yielded from them. That means a trader must be especially aware of these numbers as they can prognosticate market movements. Often, they are meaningless in the larger picture of things. § Volume – derived from the market itself, it is mostly irrelevant. The major problem with volume is that the US market open causes tremendous volume surges eradicating any intrinsic volume analysis. At major highs and lows, the market is typically anemic. Most traders are not active at terminal discretes because of levels of fear. Allows us confidence in time and price symmetry market inflection points, if we observe low volume at a foretold range of values. We can rationalize that an absolute discrete is usually only discovered and anticipated by very few traders. As the general market realizes it, a herd mentality will push the market in the direction favorable to defending it. Volume is also useful for swing trading, as chances for swing’s validity increases if an increase in volume is seen on and after the swing’s activation. Therefore, due to the relatively high volume on the 23rd of March, we can safely determine that a low WAS NOT reached. § VIX – Volatility Index, this technical indicator indicates level of fear by the amount of options-based “insurance” in portfolios. A low VIX environment, less than 20 for the S&P index, indicates a stable market with a possible uptrend. A high VIX, over 20, indicates a possible downtrend. However, it is equally important to see how VIX is changing over time, if it is decreasing or increasing, as that indicates increasing or decreasing fear. Low volatility allows high leverage without risk or rest. Occasionally, markets do rise with high VIX. As VIX is unusually high, in the forties, we can be confident that a downtrend is imminent.
Trend Definition Analysis
– Trend definition is highly powerful, cannot be understated. Knowledge of trend logic is enough to be a profitable trader, yet defining a trend is an arduous process. Multiple trends coexist across multiple time frames and across multiple market sectors. Like time structure, it makes the underlying price of the instrument irrelevant. Trend definitions cannot determine the validity of newly formed discretes. Trend becomes apparent when trades based in counter-trend inflection points continue to fail. Downtrends are defined as an instrument making lower lows and lower highs that are recurrent, additive, qualified swing setups. Downtrends for all instruments are similar, except forex. They are fast and complete much quicker than uptrends. An average downtrend is 18 months, something which we will return to. An uptrend inception occurs when an instrument reaches a point where it fails to make a new low, then that low will be tested. After that, the instrument will either have a deep range retracement or it may take out the low slightly, resulting in a double-bottom. A swing must eventually form. A simple way to roughly determine trend is to attempt to draw a line from three tops going upwards (uptrend) or a line from three bottoms going downwards (downtrend). It is not possible to correctly draw an uptrend line on the SPY chart, but it is possible to correctly draw a downtrend – indicating that the overall trend is downwards.
Time Symmetry
Now that we have determined that the overall trend is downwards, the next issue is the question of when SPY will bottom out. Time is the movement from the past through the present into the future. It is a measurement in quantified intervals. In many ways, our perception of it is a human construct. It is more powerful than price as time may be utilized for a trade regardless of the market inflection point’s price. Were it possible to perfectly understand time, price would be totally irrelevant due to the predictive certainty time affords. Time structure is easier to learn than price, but much more difficult to apply with any accuracy. It is the hardest aspect of trading to learn, but also the most rewarding. Humans do not have the ability to recognize every time window, however the ability to define market inflection points in terms of time is the single most powerful trading edge. Regardless, price should not be abandoned for time alone. Time structure analysis It is inherently flawed, as such the markets have a fail-safe, which is Price Structure. Even though Time is much more powerful, Price Structure should never be completely ignored. Time is the qualifier for Price and vice versa. Time can fail by tricking traders into counter-trend trading. Time is a predestined trade quantifier, a filter to slow trades down, as it allows a trader to specifically focus on specific time windows and rest at others. It allows for quantitative measurements to reach deterministic values and is the primary qualifier for trends. Time structure should be utilized before price structure, and it is the primary trade criterion which requires support from price. We can see price structure on a chart, as areas of mathematical support or resistance, but we cannot see time structure. Time may be used to tell us an exact point in the future where the market will inflect, after Price Theory has been fulfilled. In the present, price objectives based on price theory added to possible future times for market inflection points give us the exact time of market inflection points and price. Time Structure is repetitions of time or inherent cycles of time, occurring in a methodical way to provide time windows which may be utilized for inflection points. They are not easily recognized and not easily defined by a price chart as measuring and observing time is very exact. Time structure is not a science, yet it does require precise measurements. Nothing is certain or definite. The critical question must be if a particular approach to time structure is currently lucrative or not. We will complete our analysis of time by measuring it in intervals of 180 bars. Our goal is to determine time windows, when the market will react and when we should pay the most attention. By using time repetitions, the fact that market inflection points occurred at some point in the past and should, therefore, reoccur at some point in the future, we should obtain confidence as to when SPY will reach a market inflection point. Time repetitions are essentially the market’s memory. However, simply measuring the time between two points then trying to extrapolate into the future does not work. Measuring time is not the same as defining time repetitions. We will evaluate past sessions for market inflection points, whether discretes, qualified swings, or intra-range. Then records the times that the market has made highs or lows in a comparable time period to the future one seeks to trade in. What follows is a time Histogram – A grouping of times which appear close together, then segregated based on that closeness. Time is aligned into combined histogram of repetitions and cycles, however cycles are irrelevant on a daily basis. If trading on an hourly basis, do not use hours. Yearly Lows: 12/31/2000, 9/21/2001, 10/9/2002, 3/11/2003, 8/2/2004, 4/15/2005, 6/12/2006, 3/5/2007, 11/17/2008, 3/9/2009, 7/2/10, 10/3/11, 1/1/12, 1/1/13, 2/3/14, 9/28/15, 2/8/16, 1/3/17, 12/24/18, 6/3/19 Months: 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10, 11, 12, 12 Days: 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 5, 8, 9, 9, 11, 12, 15, 17, 21, 24, 28, 31 Monthly Lows:3/23, 2/28, 1/27, 12/3, 11/1, 10/2, 9/3, 8/5, 7/1, 6/3, 5/31, 4/1 Days: 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 5, 23, 27, 27, 31 Weighted Times are repetitions which appears multiple times within the same list, observed and accentuated once divided into relevant sections of the histogram. They are important in the presently defined trading time period and are similar to a mathematical mode with respect to a series. Phased times are essentially periodical patterns in histograms, though they do not guarantee inflection points*.* We see that SPY tends to have its lows between three major month clusters: 1-4, primarily March (which has actually occurred already this year), 6-9, averaged out to July, and 10-12, averaged out to November. Following the same methodology, we get the third and tenth days of the month as the likeliest days. However, evaluating the monthly lows for the past year, the end of the month has replaced the average of the tenth. Therefore, we have four primary dates for our histogram. 7/3/20, 7/27/20, and 11/3/20, 11/27/20 . How do we narrow this group down with any accuracy? Let us average the days together to work with two dates - 7/15/20 and 11/15/20. The 8.6-Year Armstrong-Princeton Global Economic Confidence model – states that 2.15 year intervals occur between corrections, relevant highs and lows. 2.15 years from the all-time peak discrete is April 14th of 2022. However, we can time-shift to other peaks and troughs to determine a date for this year. If we consider 1/28/2018 as a localized high and apply this model, we get 3/23/20 as a low - strikingly accurate. I have chosen the next localized high, 9/21/2018 to apply the model to. We achieve a date of 11/14/2020. The average bear market is eighteen months long, giving us a date of August 19th, 2021 for the end of the bear market - roughly speaking. Therefore, our timeline looks like:
11/14/20 - yearly low (selected from histogram averages, 11/15/20, and the 8.6 Year Confidence model)
7/28/21 - End of bear market (18 month average of 8/9, averaged with histogram date of 7/15)
4/14/22 - lesser correction.
As we move forward in time, our predictions may be less accurate. It is important to keep in mind that this analysis will likely change and become more accurate as we factor in Terry Laundry’s T-Theory, the Bradley Cycle, a more sophisticated analysis of Bull and Bear Market Cycles, the Fundamental Investor Cyclic Approach, and Seasons and Half-Seasons. I have also assumed that the audience believes in these models, which is not necessary. Anyone with free time may construct histograms and view these time models, determining for themselves what is accurate and what is not. Take a look at 1/28/2008, that localized high, and 2.15 years (1/4th of the sinusoidal wave of the model) later. The question now is, what prices will SPY reach on 11/14? Where will we be at 7/28? What will happen on 4/14/22?
So I've been trading for years. Anything from stocks/ETFs and CFDs to Forex and crypto using a mix of technical and fundamentals analysis. I've had mixed results primarily due to poor discipline and/or psychology. I recently got interested in options trading as I was attracted to the ability to trade mechanically and be able to create clearly defined strategies that can help me be a more disciplined trader. In short, I believe trading options may better suit my style. Regarding options trading, I've spent the last few months reading and researching intensly. I think I have a solid foundation and understanding of the basics like spreads/straddles etc, effect of IV, the greeks, setting strikes, choosing expirations and so on. In principle, I understand how to select a trade that yields a good (high?) probability of profit with a good risk/reward ratio so that when trading often and selecting the right capital stake % I can maximise my chances of success in the long run. I also know how managing trades and adding fundamental analysis of the underlying can add further to your probabilities of success. The only problem is I can't find many opportunities where the numbers stack up and my assumption on the move of the underlying (or non-move) doesn't factor in largely to the equation. So my question is am I missing something? How do you successful traders get your edge? Not looking for your secrets, just some advice about whether I am on the right track or I have missed something fundamental. For arguments sake, given a particular strategy, say you wanted to place a call credit spread with a strike width of $1. You would want to collect at least $0.33 in premium and ensure you PoP is >70% in order to have the long term odds in your favour. These opportunities appear to be few and far between. I'd have to either go futher ITM and reduce my PoP or go further OTM and take a lower premium. Both of these mean I have to make a strong assumption of the underlying. It's technically zero-sum game and I know it's not that straight forward otherwise everyone would be successful. How do you get an 'edge' without being able to predict the market?
I've reproduced 130+ research papers about "predicting bitcoin", coded them from scratch and recorded the results. Here's what I've learnt.
ok, so firstly, all of the papers I found through Google search and Google scholar. Google scholar doesn't actually have every research paper so you need to use both together to find them all. They were all found by using phrases like "predict bitcoin" or "predict stock market" or "predict forex" and terms related to those. Next, I only tested papers written in the past 8 years or so, I think anything older is just going to be heavily Alpha-mined so we can probably just ignore those ones altogether. Then, Anything where it's slightly ambiguous with methodology, I tried every possible permutation to try and capture what the authors may have meant. For example, one paper adds engineered features to the price then says "then we ran the data through our model" - it's not clear if it means the original data or the engineered data, so I tried both ways. This happens more than you'd think! THEN, Anything that didn't work, I tried my own ideas with the data they were using or substituted one of their models with others that I knew of. Now before we go any further, I should caveat that I was a profitable trader at multiple Tier-1 US banks so I can say with confidence that I made a decent attempt of building whatever the author was trying to get at. Oh, and one more thing. All of this work took about 7 months in total. Right, let's jump in. So with the papers, I found as many as I could, then I read through them and put them in categories and then tested each category at a time because a lot of papers were kinda saying the same things. Here are the categories:
News Text Mining. - This is where they'd use NLP on headlines or the body of news as a signal.
Social data - Twitter Sentiment/Google Search/Seeking Alpha. Again, some were NLP, for google trends they just used the data.
Technical Analysis & Machine Learning together. Most of these would take the price, add TA features, then feed into a ML model.
Other machine learning (as in, not using TA). Just using the price and some other engineered features.
Analyst Recommendations. Literally just taking the recommendations from banks/brokers and using that as the signal.
Fundamental data. So ratios from the income statement/balance sheet,
Results: Literally every single paper was either p-hacked, overfit, or a subsample of favourable data was selected (I guess ultimately they're all the same thing but still) OR a few may have had a smidge of Alpha but as soon as you add transaction costs it all disappears. Every author that's been publicly challenged about the results of their paper says it's stopped working due to "Alpha decay" because they made their methodology public. The easiest way to test whether it was truly Alpha decay or just overfitting by the authors is just to reproduce the paper then go further back in time instead of further forwards. For the papers that I could reproduce, all of them failed regardless of whether you go back or forwards. :) Now, results from the two most popular categories were:
*Social data.*A lot of research papers were extensions of or based off of a paper by Johan Bollen called "Twitter mood predicts the stock market". It literally has 3,955 citations and is complete and utter horse shit; the paper is p-hacking to the extreme. Not only could I not reproduce the results, but given the number of sentiment indicators he uses I regularly found correlations between sentiment and my data based on how I engineered it. None of these correlations held over longer time periods. Every paper that's a derivative of this one or cites it has the same issues.
*Technical analysis & machine learning.*Every paper would do something along the lines of.. take past price data for some asset (stocks, forex), then add technical analysis indicators as "features". Then either they'd run through a feature-selector that figures out the best features then put the best ones into a model OR they'd dump this data straight into the model and afterwards select the subset of instruments that it "worked" on. None of these would hold if you k-fold test them or test on different subsets of data outside of the ones used in the paper. The results are always based off of selecting favourable subsets of data.
The most frustrating paper: I have true hate for the authors of this paper: "A deep learning framework for financial time series using stacked autoencoders and long-short term memory". Probably the most complex AND vague in terms of methodology and after weeks trying to reproduce their results (and failing) I figured out that they were leaking future data into their training set (this also happens more than you'd think). The two positive take-aways that I did find from all of this research are:
Almost every instrument is mean-reverting on short timelines and trending on longer timelines. This has held true across most of the data that I tested. Putting this information into a strategy would be rather easy and straightforward (although you have no guarantee that it'll continue to work in future).
When we were in the depths of the great recession, almost every signal was bearish (seeking alpha contributors, news, google trends). If this holds in the next recession, just using this data alone would give you a strategy that vastly outperforms the index across long time periods.
Hopefully if anyone is getting into this space this will save you an absolute tonne of time and effort. So in conclusion, if you're building trading strategies, simple is good :) Also one other thing I'd like to add, even the Godfather of value investing, the late Benjamin Graham (Warren Buffet's mentor) used to test his strategies (even though he'd be trading manually) so literally every investor needs to backtest regardless of if you're day-trading or long-term investing or building trading algorithms. EDIT: in case anyone wants to read more from me I occasionally write on medium (even though I'm not a good writer)
[LONG] My Story of Disillusionment with and Disappointment in the World and Myself
Intro. This might be a long one. I hope someone reads the thing, I put like 3 hours into writing it. A brief story of my life and how it all led up to this moment, where I am disillusioned with my self-image, my life choices, and certain aspects of the world, and have no idea what to do next. Warning: this whole thing might be a little depressing to read. Childhood. I am a 20yo Russian male. During my childhood, I was made to believe that I am capable of doing something great and doing better than anyone. At the same time I developed a very non-conformist life stance and very often rejected things and ideas simply because they were too popular for my taste, and I couldn't feel special whilst enjoying them. Of course, in turn, society rejected me, as it does with anyone who doesn't play by the rules. Oh well. My only redeeming quality was that I considered myself pretty smart. Which is even easier to assume, when at the same time you think that you're different from everyone else. Now, I know that to some extent, I was indeed smarter than most people in certain areas. Unlike most people I knew back then, often with bare minimum efforts I was able to maintain near perfect grades at school. I was also enjoying learning new things and reading more than an average person. So, let's just say, I had a basis to assume I was a smart dude. I wasn't happy and content with my life, though. I never had real friends, because I only hung out with people when they were my classmates/roommates/co-workers, and after we parted ways, I rarely if ever contacted them afterwards. I always enjoyed doing things you usually do in solitude more, because when I was alone, I wouldn't be afraid that someone could hurt me for being different. Because of that, I was never in a romantic relationship. High School. Still, life was going okay. By the end of school, I kind of accepted my social deficiency and I wanted to focus on improving the world and become a successful person - for myself. I was facing a dilemma, though. Despite the fact that I was doing great in school, the idea of having to invest four years of my time into studying something really specific, and then having to work another 20-30 years on the same job was terrifying, because I had no idea what I liked to do! Nothing seemed interesting to me, I didn't have a passion for doing anything... Thanks to my video game addiction, which made me lazy as fuck, probably. I also needed to meet my criteria for success with my future job, which included being financially successful. I grew up in top 1% income family, so... I always felt the pressure to outperform or at least match my parents' income. Enter trading. My dad discovered investing several years ago (we don't live in US, so most of the people aren't as financially savvy, so he never thought about investing before then). I was always curious about financial independence and markets, but now I was seeing it all done in front of me, I realized that it might be a good opportunity to make a lot of money and become successful without being socially adept, which is something absolutely required in business or politics. So, I asked my father to open a brokerage account for me in the US, and started swing trading (trading in weekly/monthly time frames). I could only trade slow and small because of the trade restrictions put on accounts <$25k and <21yo in the US. Still, it was going well, but in hindsight I was just lucky to be there during a great bull market. Even before I thought trading and more importantly investing were the ways smart people make money. I thought simply because I was conventionally smart, I had a talent or an innate ability to pick innovative stocks and do venture investing when I grow some capital. I truly believed in that long before I was introduced to financial markets, I believed that my surface level understanding of multiple areas of cutting edge and emerging technology would give me an edge compared to all the other investors. US Community College and Return Back. In the end, I've decided I want to go to a US community college and study finance and become a trader and later an investor, but I didn't want to work for a fund or something like that (lazy ass). I wanted to use my knowledge and skill and my own money to grow my net worth and make a living. I didn't really like the process of trading, I just needed the money to live by while I was trying to figure out what else to do with my life. Because I thought I were smart, I thought this would come easily to me. Boy was I wrong. From the nicest of conditions in my hometown, I was suddenly moved into a foreign setting, on the other side of the planet away form my family and mates, with a video game addiction and laziness that ruined my daily routine and studying as well. The fact that I didn't like my major was not helping. My grades fell from A- in the first quarter to C+ in the last. I gained +30% from my normal weight. I was stressed out, not going outside and sitting at my computer desk for days at a time, skipping all the classes I could if they were not absolutely essential for my grades, living on prepared foods. I never got out of my shell and barely talked to anyone in English, all of my friends were Russian speaking. I wasted an opportunity to improve my speaking, although aside from that my English skills satisfy me. By the end of community college, last summer, I was left with B grades that wouldn't let me transfer anywhere decent, and the extreme stress that I put myself through started taking a toll on my mental health. I was planning to take a break and go back to Russia for several months, and transfer back to a US uni this winter. Needless to say, you can't run from yourself. It didn't really become much better after a few months in Russia. I didn't want to study finance anymore, because it was boring and I was exhausted. I still had the video game addiction, still was lazy and gained some more extra pounds of weight. I was not sleeping at all, extremely sleep deprived for months. Because of this and lack of mental stimulation I started to become dumber. And all that was happening where I didn't really have to do anything: not study or work, just sit around the house and do whatever I wanted. Turns out, these conditions didn't help me to get out of the incoming depression. Finally, around November, when I already sent out all of my transfer applications and already got some positive answers from several universities, I knew I didn't have much time left at home, and I had to leave soon. But I really, really didn't want to go back. It was scarier than the first time. I was afraid of new changes, I just wanted for the time to stop and letting me relax, heal... I was having suicidal thoughts and talked about it with my family and my therapist. They were all supportive and helped me as much as they could. But I was the only person who could really help myself. If I wanted to breathe freely, I had to admit defeat and not go back to the US to continue my education. It was extremely hard at first, but then I just let go. I decided to find a temporary job as an English tutor and give myself time to think. Then I remembered that I had a bunch of money in my trading account. I still thought that I was pretty smart, despite failing college, so I figured, why not try move it to Russian brokers who don't have trading restrictions, and do it full time? Which is exactly what I did. And I started to study trading all by myself at a fast pace. I was now trading full time and it was going sideways: +10% in December, -20% in January. Then, something incredible happened. I was already in a shitty place in life, but I still had some hope for my future. Things were about to get much worse. I'm in the late January, and I discovered for myself that the whole financial industry of the world was a fraud. Brief Explanation of My Discoveries. In the image of the financial industry, there are several levels of perceived credibility. In the bottom tier, there is pure gambling. In my country, there were periods when binary options trading and unreliable Forex brokers were popular among common folk, but these were obvious and unsophisticated fraudsters who were one step away from being prosecuted. There are also cryptocurrencies that don't hold any value and are also used only for speculation/redistribution of wealth. There is also a wonderful gambling subreddit wallstreetbets where most users don't even try to hide the fact that what they are doing is pure gambling. I love it. But the thing is, this is trading/investing for the people who have no idea what it is, and most people discredit it as a fraud, which it, indeed, is. These examples are 99% marketing/public image and 1% finance. But these offer x10-1000 returns in the shortest time span. Typical get-rich-quick schemes, but they attract attention. Then, there is trading tier. You can have multiple sub levels here, in the bottom of this tier we would probably have complex technical analysis (indicators) and daily trading/scalping. I was doing this in the DecembeJanuary. At the top would be people who do fundamental analysis (study financial reports) and position trade (monthly time frames). Now, there is constant debate in the trading community whether technical analysis or fundamental analysis is better. I have a solid answer to the question. They work in the same way. Or rather, they don't work at all. You'd ask: "Why you didn't discover this earlier? You were in this financial thing for several years now!" Well, you see, unlike on the previous level, here millions of people say that they actually believe trading works and there is a way to use the available tools to have great returns. Some of these people actually know that trading doesn't work, but they benefit from other traders believing in it, because they can sell them courses or take brokerage fees from them. Still, when there are millions around you telling you that it works, even a non-conformist like me would budge. Not that many people actually participate in the markets, so I thought that by being in this minority made me smart and protected from fraudsters. Lol. All it took for me to discover the truth is to accidentally discover that some technical indicators give random results, do a few google searches, reach some scientific studies which are freely available and prove that technical and fundamental analysis don't work. It was always in front of me, but the fucking trading community plugged my ears and closed my eyes shut so I wasn't able to see it. Trading usually promises 3-15% gain a month. A huge shock, but surely there was still a way for me to work this out? Active investing it is! The next level, active investing, is different from trading. You aim for 15-50% yearly returns, but you don't have to do as much work. You hold on to stocks of your choice for years at a time, once in a while you study the markets, re balance your portfolio, etc. Or you invest your money in a fund, that will select the stocks of their choice and manage their and your portfolio for you. For a small fee of course. All of these actions are aimed at trying to outperform the gain the market made as a whole, and so called index funds, which invest in basically everything and follow the market returns - about 7-10% a year. And if I ever had any doubts in trading, I firmly believed that active investing works since I was a little kid (yes I knew about it back then). And this is where the real fraud comes in. The whole Wall Street and every broker, every stock exchange in the world are a part of a big fraud. Only about 10-20% of professional fund managers outperform the market in any 15 year period. If you take 30 years, this dwindles to almost nothing, which means that no one can predict the markets. These people have no idea what they are doing. Jim Cramer is pure show-business and has no idea what's going on. Warren Buffet gained his fortune with pure luck, and for every Buffet there are some people who made only a million bucks and countless folks who lost everything. Wall Street. They have trillions of dollars and use all that money and power and marketing to convince you that there is a way to predict where the stocks are going without being a legal insider or somehow abusing the law. They will make you think you can somehow learn from them where to invest your money on your own or they will make you believe that you should just give it to them and they will manage it for you, because they know how everything works and they can predict the future using past data. They won't. They don't. They can't. There are studies and statistics to prove it countless times over the span of a 100 years. But they will still charge you exchange fees, brokerage fees and management fees anyway. And they also manipulate certain studies, lobby where and when they need it, and spread misinformation on an unprecedented scale, creating a positive image of themselves. And everyone falls for that. Billions of people around the globe still think it's all legit. Passive index investing is the last level. You just put your money in the market and wait. Markets will go up at a predetermined rate. If there's a crisis, in 10 years no one will even remember. Markets always go up in the end. But passive index investing can only give you only 7% inflation-adjusted returns a year. Not enough to stop working or even retire early, unless you have a high-paying job in a first-world country. I don't. Despite all that, to put it simply, this is the only type of investing that works and doesn't involve any kind of fraud or gambling. It's the type of investing that will give you the most money. If you want to know why it is like that and how to do it, just go to financialindependence. They know this stuff better than any other sub. Better than investing, trading or any other sub where non-passive-index investing is still discussed as viable strategy. Back to me. My whole being was fucked over, my hopes and dreams and understanding of success and how this world works were shattered. I realized, I had no future in financial industry, because only middlemen make money in there, and I quit college needed to get there. Frankly, I wouldn't want to work there even if I had the opportunity. The pay is good, but the job is boring and I wouldn't want to be a part of this giant scheme anyway. But even if I wanted to go back, I also couldn't. Russia is in a worsening crisis and my parents could no longer afford a US university and now with coronavirus it's even worse. Good thing I quit before it all happened. I learned a valuable lesson and didn't lose that much money for it (only about 10% of my savings). God knows where it would lead me if I continued to be delusional. But now that my last temporary plans for the future were scrapped, I had no idea what to do next. The future. With the reality hitting me, I would lie if I say it didn't all come full circle and connect to my past. I realized that I was stupid and not intelligent, because I was living in a made-up world for years now. But even if I were intelligent, pure wit would not give me the success and fortune that I was craving, because trading and active investing were a no-go for me, and business/politics require a very different, extroverted mindset, different education and interest from my own. My only redeeming quality in a hopeless introvert world, my perceived intelligence was taken away from me and rendered useless at the same time. Besides, failing at that one thing made me insecure about everything and now I think of myself as an average individual. So, if 8 out of 10 businesses fail, I shouldn't start one because I will probably fail. And if most politicians don't get anywhere, why should I bother? If average salary in my country is X, I shouldn't hope for more. I stopped believing in my ability to achieve something. First, I failed at education and now I failed... Professionally? I don't know how to describe it, but my life recently was just an emotional roller coaster. I just feel like a very old person and all I want calmness and stability in my life. I was very lazy before just because, but now I feel like I also don't want to do anything because I feel I would just fail. It feels better now I don't have to worry about trading anymore and I got rid of that load... But I am still miserable and perhaps worse than ever, maybe I just don't understand and feel it because I've become slow and numb. The only positive thing that happened to me recently, is that I finally started losing weight and about 1/4 of the way back to my normal weight. As for my future, am looking at several possibilities here. So far the parents are allowing my miserable life to continue and they let me live with them and buy me food. I don't need anything else right now. But it can't go on like this forever. The thought of having a mundane low-paying job in this shithole of a country depresses me. I will probably temporarily do English tutoring if there's demand for such work. My old school friends want me to help them in their business and my dad wants me to help him in his, I and probably should, but I feel useless, pathetic and incapable of doing anything of value. And business just seems boring, difficult and too stressful for me right now. Just not my cup of tea. I am also looking at creative work. I love video games, music, films and other forms of art. I love the games most though, so I am looking into game dev. I don't really like programming, I have learned some during school years, but the pay would probably be higher for a programmer than an creator of any kind of art. However, I think I would enjoy art creation much more, but I don't have any experience in drawing and only some limited experience in music production. And I am not one of these kids who always had a scrapbook with them at school. Having to make another life choice paralyzes me. I am leaning towards art. I don't feel confident in my ability to learn this skill from scratch, but I think it's my best shot at finding a job that would make me happy. So perhaps, when this whole pandemic is over, I'll go to Europe and get my degree, get a job there and stay. American Dream is dead to me, and Europe is cheaper, closer, safe and comfortable. Just the thing for a person who feels like they are thrice their real age. Outro. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Special thanks if you read the whole thing, it means a whole lot to me, an internet stranger. But even if no one reads it, feels good to get this off my chest. I actually cried during writing some parts. Holy shit, this might be the longest and smartest looking thing my dumbed down head could manage to generate since college. I hope that you're having a great day. Stay healthy and be careful during this fucking pandemic. All the best.
https://medium.com/@sergiygolubyev/crypto-exchange-trade-remember-psychology-6d4433569d9d Crypto Exchange is a high-tech platform in which all trade transactions are conducted using modern software created based on the latest IT solutions. The emergence of new types of currencies, in particular cryptocurrencies, gives a chance for the rapid development of the world economy as a whole. In turn, structural changes in the international economic system gave impetus to the emergence and development of new types of exchange technologies. Thus, crypto exchanges appeared which allowed its participants anywhere in the world to buy, sell and exchange one cryptocurrency for others, or for fiat of other countries. Each crypto exchange tries to offer customers convenient ways to convert financial instruments, and provides the ability to conduct transactions on its own terms. The high rates of development and distribution of cryptocurrencies, which are based on Blockchain, as well as the gradual wide recognition by the world community and leading economists, ensure the further improvement of exchange technologies. This means that in an effort to provide the most comfortable conditions for its customers, each crypto exchange will take them to an ever-higher quality level of service with innovative nuances. But at the same time, within the framework of the technological process of stock trading, which is available to users (from professional traders to amateurs), the question of psychology and its role in the decision making has not been canceled. Successful trading depends on 70% primarily on the psychology of a trader and only 30% on the trading scheme/strategy. Trading on the exchange, it is necessary to develop discipline, self-control and be able to respond quickly to changing stock charts. All this will allow you to earn and minimize your losses more effectively. Everyone should remember, from the amateur to the professional, that in the financial markets you can not only earn money, but also lose money. Cryptocurrency rates are still subject to political and regulatory influences; their value is influenced by the reputation of the company's founders, informational insertions about blockchain projects and plans for their further development, scandals and disclosures. Nevertheless, there are simple rules for successful trading from the field of psychology, which will reduce the risks when trying to make money on cryptocurrency and not only. There are a number of problems that always hinder every beginner - amateur: · Excitement · Fear · Greed · Unwillingness to learn new things · Imaginary visualization of results All these problems have psychological aspects. Emotions, feelings and desires significantly influence the trading decisions made by the trader. This happens all the time, not only on traditional exchanges, but also in the cryptocurrency sphere as well. Excitement is an emotional state when it seems to a person that he is lucky, and as the series of successful transactions continues, he performs larger by volume financial transactions. Often, the excitement motivates to turn away from long-term transactions and trends, and look towards short-term operations. After all, it seems that the more often you successfully complete operations, the more capital you earn. Not at all! The more often you make mistakes, leading to a default on your account. Money only is earned on long-term trends and operations. Traders are often worried, fearing an unsuccessful deal closing. Of course, a loss is bad, but sometimes it is better to close a position in minus than to lose a large amount only because of the hope of a quick price reversal. Therefore, fear often pushes for the wrong strategic decisions. Fear of loss as a result becomes a sentence for your positioning in profit. On the same face with fear, if not strange, is the factor of greed. Having essentially a different source of inspiration, greed, like fear, leads to a generally pitiable result — to the default of your trading account. The reluctance to learn new strategies, technologies, and denial of forecasting also leads to failure. Successful is who always strives to learn new things, and perceives the fact and necessity of continuous learning. Since learning is a process of striving for the progress of its results and professional qualities. Another scourge - Wish list or visualization. Everyone wants to see the price move in the right direction. This is pretty dangerous. By visualizing the price jump in the right direction, you can dream and invest too much in cryptocurrency. This will lead to losses. Here you should always remember to diversify your investments. Remember your psychological portrait even when you program your trading strategies, algorithms and bots. After all, your algorithm is essentially your psychological portrait. Finally, the above-mentioned flaws, especially in the strategy can dominate and damage your deposit and reputation. The main signs of competent crypto-trade are the same as on other exchanges (such as FOREX). This is a kind of algorithm for a sustainable profit strategy: · Risk no more than 10% of the deposit · Use risk per trade of 5% or less · Do not close profitable deals too early · Do not accumulate losing trades · Fix quick speculative profit · Respect the trend · Pay more attention to liquid assets (cryptocurrency) · Set your personal entry and exit rules for trades and stick to them · Long-term trading strategy gives you maximum steady profits · Do not use the principles of Martingale tactics if there is no experience. You cannot double the volume of the transaction, if it closed in the red zone. If a loss was incurred, then the cryptocurrency market situation was predicted incorrectly and it was necessary to work on improving the analytical skills, and not to conclude a larger deal, which probably also closes in the negative It is obvious that the psychology of trading significantly affects the performance of stock speculation both in the traditional market and in the field of cryptocurrency. It is important to remember that the success of a person in any field of activity depends on the emotional component, namely the internal balance. Exchange trading is a nervous activity, and if you do not learn to take emotions under control, the results can be disastrous. The basis for achieving success in stock trading, in my opinion, are two fundamental factors. The first factor relates to the field of formulation of the trading idea, and the second - to the area of its implementation. To formulate a trading idea, on the one hand, methods of technical and fundamental analysis are used to select an exchange instrument and determine the moment of opening and closing a position on it. On the other hand, capital management methods are used to determine the optimal size of the position being opened. As you know, without these two crucial moments it is impossible to achieve stable success in stock trading. As experience shows, for the most part, people have enough intelligence to master all the necessary theoretical knowledge of technical and fundamental analysis in a few months of intensive training. There are no special intellectual difficulties. But, as the same experience shows, this is clearly not enough for successful exchange trading, since all knowledge may turn out to be a useless load if the second success factor is not sufficiently present - the practical implementation of trading ideas, which is no longer based on the intellectual sphere, and psycho-emotional. It is within this area that the main problem arises for many traders, which prevents the receipt of stable profits. As a rule, this is due to the psycho-emotional profile of a person. It depends on how the trader will behave in the psychologically stressful situations that the exchange trading is full of. Inherent in all human emotions and feelings - fear, greed, excitement, envy, hope, etc. very often have a decisive influence on the behavior of traders, not allowing them to follow strictly the trading strategy and plan, even if they have one. From a psychological point of view, the process of stock exchange activity can be divided into stages, after which the trader can return to the starting point. The above scenarios and risk factors are one of the options for the behavior of an exchange speculator; however, it often happens exactly the opposite. Having suffered losses from his first transactions in the market, the trader loses interest in exchange trading, he gives up and he falls into despair. In this case, the first step to victory is the admission of defeat. It would seem silly and ridiculous, but it works. After that, there are two options: either the trader leaves the exchange forever, or returns to the battlefield. Such “returns” may occur more than once. In addition, at some other time, after repeated analysis of his actions, mistakes made and their consequences, a person from a beginner begins to turn into an experienced trader, which is marked by the stability of his activity and, perhaps, by slow, but surely growth of his deposit and profit. The psychological basis for success in trading, which leads to victory and the absence of which is equivalent to defeat, are as follows: · It is not only the lack of self-control, discipline and focus on the process that causes the defeat · Self-control, discipline and ability to concentrate is not enough to achieve success · To achieve success, it is equally important to be able to adapt to changes In principle, one can consider the idea that traditional approaches to the psychology of trading are limited. In the majority of benefits for traders, the key qualities necessary for successful exchange trading are only self-control and discipline. Of course, these qualities are necessary in any field of business activities. Trading is not an exception, especially considering that it is in the risk zone. But self-control and discipline are not enough to achieve success. Trading is a business. Moreover, any business does not stand still. You cannot find a formula for success and use it forever. You will need to monitor trends and constantly look for new successful solutions. The main feature of a successful trader is adaptability to changes. The lack of development leads to defeat, large monetary losses. Many technology companies continued to produce stationary computers when laptops became popular. The same companies continued to produce laptops when tablets appeared and became popular. The products of these companies were of high quality, and their employees organized pre-set tasks in an organized manner. But they lost large sums due to the fact that they could not adapt to changes in demand. If we draw a parallel with the sphere of investment, the similarities will become noticeable. The stock market, like any other subject to change. One period is replaced by another. Those methods that allowed achieving success in the previous period can lead to failure in the current. The key concept in stock trading is volatility. The change in this indicates the onset of a new period. When volatility increases, trade becomes more risky. Accordingly, with a decrease in this indicator, the degree of risk during trading operations decreases. With a high level of volatility, trends most often unfold. Strong and weak positions can be swapped out. With a high level of volatility, trends continue for some time. From the foregoing, it should be concluded that market processes and methods during periods of high and low volatility differ strongly. You cannot use the same methods during changing market trends. Often it is the adherence to the previous methods, excessive discipline leads to collapse as well. The fact that the investor was defeated does not mean that he suddenly became morally unstable, unorganized. Trading is trading. Therefore, we have every right to assert that under the psychology of trade in the markets is meant human preparedness for the risks that inevitably accompany any activity. Trading on the stock exchange is based on the interaction of the three most important components: capital management, analysis, and the psychology of trading (which cannot be considered in conjunction with the other aspects of trading). The psychology of human behavior is a source for understanding what is happening in financial markets. The source for understanding the events occurring in the financial markets and the behavior of traders during exchange trading is the psychology of the human person. Emotions — greed, fear, doubt, hope, a sense of self-preservation — are peculiar to any person in life — are clearly manifested in the hard rhythm of decision-making during the dynamic course of exchange trading (which was partially considered above). Knowledge of the human psychology and their behavioral characteristics must be used to achieve success. The psychology of a trader is formed from a multitude of grains - it is a belief in what one does in the stock market, in one’s actions, in own system of one’s decisions, in trading method. In addition, the psychology of a trader is that one can unload oneself emotionally, one does not accept the intellectual challenge that the stock market carries. On the contrary, becomes restrained, calm when making decisions on operations in the stock market. There are many situations where a trader expresses his attention and focus; he does not disperse it on the tracking of news factors or on the receipt of stimuli from the news agencies. Consequently, the crowd psychology is the factor that makes prices move, therefore, in addition to assessing one's own psychological state, one must be sensitive to changes in the mood of other market participants, move in the flow, not against it, and then success will not take long. Of course, you can argue that why do I need this psychology? After all, besides creating your own strategies and individual work, some exchanges (including crypto exchanges) allow minimizing risks by following the strategies of experienced traders; this service is called a PAMM account. PAMM provides an opportunity for clients (Subscribers) to follow the trading strategy of experienced and professional traders (Providers). Provider's trading results are publicly available. With the help of the rating of accounts, graphs of profitability and reviews of other traders, you can choose the most suitable Provider and begin to follow his strategy. Again, in this case, the provider is a human with all the ensuing consequences. And psychological aspects are not foreign to professionals as well, including victories and mistakes. The financial market attracts people the possibility of obtaining independence, including financial. A successful trader can live and work in any country in the world without having either a boss or subordinates. The motivation of people on the exchanges can be different: from getting a higher percentage than from a bank to making several thousand dollars a day. At the same time, there are two main categories of people in the financial market (including cryptocurrencies): investors who acquire assets or currency for a relatively long period, and speculators who profit from changes in the prices of certain assets for short periods. Many believe, an easy way to make money is not for everybody. First, the skillful use and manipulation of the psychological aspects of a human make it possible to become a speculator. And this, of course, in addition to knowledge and analytical skills. Experience shows that successful speculation is the right state of mind. It would seem that this is the simplest thing that can be acquired by human. But in fact, this self-tuning is available to very few. It is also necessary to distinguish the psychology of the market and the personal psychology of the trader. The behavior of the market as a whole depends on people, since it is the stock market crowd that determines its direction. However, quite often traders lose sight of the most important component of victory - managing their personal emotions, that is, their psychology. Without control over oneself, there can be no control over one’s trading capital. If a trader is not tuned to the trend range of the stock crowd, if he does not pay attention to changes in her psychology, then he will also not achieve significant success in trading. To succeed on the exchange, one needs to take a sober look at exchange trading, recognize its trends and their changes, and not waste time on dreams or lamenting about failures. Any price of a financial instrument is a momentary agreement on its value, reached by a market crowd and expressed in the fact of a transaction, i.e. it is the equilibrium point between the players for a rise and a fall, or the "equilibrium" price. Crowds of traders create asset prices: buyers, sellers and fluctuating market watchers. Charts of prices and trading volumes reflect the psychology of the exchange. In addition, this is always worth remembering! After all, the main purpose of the presence of the analysis of psychology in stock trading is not the quantity, but the quality of transactions. A person striving to become a good trader needs to remember the words of DiNapoli, a well-known stock exchange trader: “The most important trading tool is not a computer, not a service for supplying information, or even methods developed by a trader. It is he himself! If a trader is not suitable for this - he should not trade at all”! Therefore, before pushing orders on the trading platform, think about whether you are suitable for this role. Join chat — https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAE84vCXg5PK-VpHADg Sergiy Golubyev (СергейГолубев) EU structural funds, ICO projects, NGO & investment projects, project management, comprehensive support of business
A Day in the Life of a Stock Trader - Blog | Horizon Institute
Section 1 – What does a stock trader actually do The life of a trader is often glamorised by films such as The Wolf of Wallstreet and Margin Call – a view that is shared by many who have no direct experience with the wider investment industry. It is also true that different types of traders have very different workloads. Trading emerging markets is not the same as trading FTSE stocks or the forex markets. Let’s start by defining what traders, broadly speaking actually are: “Professionals in finance who buy and/or sell assets on the financial markets.” A day in the life of a trader: Behind the scenes These are people who usually have a background in finance, either through traditional education (think degrees in finance, accounting, economics, investment management etc) or through practical experience at companies working within financial services. This is to say that the day-to-day activities of a trader is to either buy assets (such as stocks, futures, commodities) or to sell assets (such as stocks, forex, bonds). Two distinct roles in trading can be summed up in the Buy side, and the Sell side in terms of execution. A broader categorisation would include participants within the financial markets who trade securities. This encompasses independent traders working from home to large multinational financial institutions which see billions of dollars a day flow from and to their order books. The Buy Side The Buy side is concerned with purchasing assets, and this generally involves taking orders from management or clients and then sending those orders to the broker to be executed. This role is being gradually replaced by technology, specifically automation and AI, and its hard to see a future for buy side traders 20 years from now. There is also a distinctly bad reputation associated with buy side traders, these are often just messengers, and have been known to treat brokers with incredible hostility and bitterness over recent years. The Sell Side Alternatively, the Sell side is just the opposite – these traders are only concerned with selling positions either the firm or the firms clients holds. Again technology is eliminating this role over time, and today both buy and sell side traders simply take message, and pass it along either electronically through an online platform or via telephone for the perhaps more traditional establishments. Private Hedge fund managers Many successful traders have gone on to start hedge funds with private companies and from private investors. This is a highly privileged position to be in, as hedge fund managers are in control of both the broad strategy for the investments and receives the greatest compensation should the strategy be profitable. Private Portfolio Managers Portfolio managers working at a private company (such as a large hedge fund) is again a much sought after position. Portfolio managers generally create a positive or negative selection portfolio, which allows them to implement their own strategy to make the best returns with the lease risk – although these parameters are often set outside the control of the individual portfolio manager. The same also exists within commercial banking, but it is usually more focused on creating a very balanced portfolio that exists to hedge risk as opposed to making real returns. Analysts Analysts do the number crunching and quantitative prep work for the portfolio or hedge fund managers. This role involves applied finance and taking a close look at various assets fundamentals. This includes the balance sheet, income statement and cashflow statement for analysts looking at stocks. This is usually a relatively junior role, and those who are successful here tend to become traders, portfolio managers and eventually hedge fund managers over the course of a successful career. Investment Banking There are still plenty of traders left at investment banks, despite the decline over the last few decades. As much as 90% of the time is spent dealing with clients such as Hedge and Pension Funds. Investment Bank Traders As much as 90% of the time is spent dealing with clients such as Hedge and Pension Funds. The trader is then Making Markets in Assets the clients want to buy/sell, such as stocks, currencies, commodities and bonds. The other 10% of time is Proprietary trading, utilising the banks large balance sheet to create a positive selection portfolio. Market Makers (Agency) Market making is the primary task of an investment trader (~80% of market making business) Split into two sections: Agency Business – Client holds risk Risk business – Investment Bank holds risk Investment Bank charges commission on these activities at a typical rate of 5 basis points or 0.05% Example – Buy £10,000,000 of BP stock at £100 per share = 100,000 BP shares. Commission for bank - £10,000,000 X 0.005 = £5,000 Risk free for bank – algorithm executes trades based on client orders In terms of basis points, 100 = 1% Proprietary Trading This type of trading can happen in two ways, the first where small investors at home use their own capital to trade for a direct gain or commercially where a firm uses its own capital to make trades to be the prime beneficially of the rewards should the trade go well. This is in contrast to how hedge funds would normally just earn a commission, by also utilising internal capital the firm is able to take larger risks, which tend to come with the larger rewards. Here’s another interesting fact: “Only 6% of candidates end up making it as a professional trader” (Business Insider, 2011) This statement alone shows just how competitive the industry is, and to make a successful career is even harder, with only ~5% of traders ever making it to a managerial level. A day in the life of a trader: Behind the scenes Section 2 – How does 8 hours day break down? 6:00 AM Traders usually start the day at 6.30 AM and start to catch up on news that broke overnight that may A) affect current positions or B) provide opportunities for new positions. These changes are digested, and areas of special interest are noted for further analysis later. 7:00 AM Arrive at trading floor at 7:30, 30 minutes before markets open. This is the time where traders prepare themselves for the day. It also serves as an opportunity to talk to colleagues. For most hedge funds and other long-term traders, team meetings will happen in the morning to ensure all traders are up to speed and playing from the same game plan. 8:00 AM Markets open: based on overnight news there may be buying / selling activity to adjust the traders portfolio based on the latest information. Many traders prefer not to trade at the market open due to higher volatility as traders from around the world react to overnight news. 9:00 AM A common task around 9:00 AM would be to scan the market for short term opportunities, or to catch up on fundamental company analysis of companies in the watch list. 10:00 AM Continuation of analysis or opportunity seeking based on the traders own intuition, experience and judgement. This is also prime time for internal meetings with the team and meetings with clients, potential clients etc. 11:00 AM Here we see lower volume and volatility, and so short-term opportunities diminish, traders are thinking about lunch at this point. Finishing up financial models and analysis done in the morning. Another prime time for meetings with the team and clients. 12:00 PM Most long-term traders take lunch, some short-term traders will stay at the desk as timing can be critical to a successful day. 1:00 PM As investment banks and other major institutions return from lunch volatility in the markets increases and short-term traders get back to work. Long-term traders generally get back to analysis, risk management or strategy functions with only a cursory interest in the current market prices and volatility. 2:00 PM Day traders will spend this time monitoring positions and executing trades as necessary. Long-term traders use this period in a variety of ways, as mentioned above. 3:00 PM Short-term traders now think about closing existing positions and stop looking for new opportunities. This is also where the administrative functions of cancelling unfilled orders, or for long term traders, finalising analysis of the day and presenting it to stakeholders. This is the last chance to exit positions for the trading day. 4:00 PM The markets are now closed. Traders often look back at the day, seeing what went well (and what didn’t). Management will often check in and with-it bureaucracy and paperwork. 5:00 PM Time to leave the office and go home. The advent of mobile internet means most traders are now reading the latest financial news, following commentary and thinking about the strategy for tomorrow. 6:00 PM If all went well arrive home, if not then its likely the trader will still be at the office working to meet the deadline of the day, from financial models to briefing management and clients. 7:00 PM Outside of the general workday, traders will spend much of the evening doing research and analysis – everything from learning about the markets to experimenting with financial models to taking an advanced excel course. Section 3 – Why you might want to be a stock trader We meet a lot of traders, its what we do – and here are a few of the top reasons traders we spoke to continue to do what they do. Love the Game Many traders are extremely fond of the game that is the financial markets. Day traders talk about the rush as fast-paced action that runs from 8am to 4pm 5 days a week. The same holds true for long-term traders, and while lacking the constant adrenaline of day trading the highs of closing a trade that’s been on-going for months is just as great a feeling – the analogy one trader used was whereas day traders get Christmas every day, long-term traders get all of their Christmases at once, 4-5 times a year. Financial Freedom This is not just about the ability to make a living from trading and the financial markets, but from having the knowledge and understanding of the world of finance to make sound financial decisions, whether that be in deciding between a fixed or variable mortgage, or the best ways to allocate capital to save for school fees. Intellectual Challenge There is undoubtedly both an intellectual and an emotional challenge in trading successfully. While it is said that day traders trade emotion, long term portfolio managers trade on intellect and sound financial decision making. Style & Expression Traders all trade differently, from value investors to crypto speculators each trader develops a style and method of trading that fits their way of life and the perception they have of the world around them. If you are emotional in-tune with the wider world, then day trading can be exceptionally profitable. The same holds true for value investors like Warren Buffet, a trader who enjoys digesting and analysing reams of company reports to find what Buffet calls “Great companies at fair prices”. This post has hopefully given you an understanding of the typical day in the life of a trader. If you feel your ready to take the next step towards a career in trading and finance, Horizon provides a comprehensive introductory course on Investing for Beginners. https://blog.hioim.com/post/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-stock-trade
Although it might seem easy to invest in Forex nowadays, by just logging into an account with a broker, deposit some money and start actively trading; it has not always been like this, as forex industry has rapidly changed in the past three decades. Before technology and free-floating currencies took over the industry, world currency exchanges were operating under the Bretton Woods System of Money Management. This agreement established rules for commercial and financial relations among top economies, tying their currencies to gold. Hence, a currency note issued by any world government represented a real amount of gold held in a vault by that nation. When in July 1944 delegates from all over the world sign off the pact, the main goal was to reduce lack of cooperation between countries and therefore avoiding currency wars. This process of regulating the foreign exchange brought to the foundation of the international money fund (IMF) and the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), today part of World bank Group. However, in the early 70s the real-world economics outpaced the system, dollar suffered from severe inflation cutting its value by half. At that time unemployment rate was 6.1% and inflation 5.84%. Finally, in August 1971, U.S. government led by Richard Nixon took away gold standard, creating the first fiat currency and replacing Bretton Woods System with De Facto. Together with this there were other important measures taken by the USA president to combat that high inflation regime:
This decision was driven by many European nations asking to redeem their dollars for gold, till leaving Bretton Woods System. This had an enormous impact on USD which plunged against European currencies. Consequently, USA congress release a report suggesting USD devaluation to protect the currency from foreign gougers. However, dollar dropped again, and Treasury Secretary was directed to suspend the USD convertibility with gold; hence foreign governments could no longer exchange their USD with gold.
The inflation level was skyrocketing and one more action taken by Nixon was to freeze all wages and prices for 90 days, this was the first time since WWII.
Import surcharge of 10% was set up to safeguard American products ensuring no disadvantage in trades.
Today, USD dominates financial markets, accounting together with the EURO, for approximately 50% of all currency exchange transactions in the world. 1971 represents the beginning of a new forex trading era, bringing this market to be the largest and most liquid in the world, with an average of daily trading volume exceeding $5trn. All the world’s combined stock markets don t even come close to this, what does this mean to you? In an environment which is controlled by free-floating currencies moving constantly, following principles of supply and demand, there are constant and exciting trading opportunities, unavailable when investing in different markets. In this article are shared main features of what is forex trading today and how can be an incredible new source of income for everyone who is into financial markets.
What Is Forex?
Forex is the acronym for foreign exchange which intends to be a decentralized or over the counter (OTC) marketplace, where currencies from all over the world are traded 24 hours, five days a week. Main financial centres include New York, Chicago, London, Tokyo and Frankfurt for Eurozone. It is by far the largest market in the world in terms of volume, followed by the credit market. Being highly liquid is an important feature that allows traders to be able to enter and exit their positions very quickly. Nevertheless, while trading forex, an investor should be aware of several components: Dynamicity – forex is an extremely fast environment, this means that currency rates can move very fast, influenced by price action signals and fundamental factors. Therefore, going into forex trading, one needs to be aware of adopting serious risk and money management strategies in order to be effective, limiting losses. Zero Sum Game – trading forex is not like investing in the stock market but is known to be a zero-sum game. For example, going into the equity market buying some tech shares, they could both rise or decrease in value. In forex is different because currencies work in pairs; for instance, an investor decides Euro will go up he or she is doing it against another currency. Thus, in this specific marketplace one currency will rise while the other will fall, meaning an investor is buying the currency hoping it will appreciate to the other, or selling the one that will depreciate. See image below: Figure 1: Main traded currency pairs https://preview.redd.it/vu77ziuoyle31.png?width=574&format=png&auto=webp&s=9b1693bf27508fcb142705c309de1fc5b3e8fa19 Currency pairs are composed by a base and a price currency. Main forex trading principle is how much price currency an investor can buy using 1 unit of the base, thus, the base currency, which is the first one in line within the quotation, is always equal to 1. Because like every financial instrument currency pairs are driven by fundamentals of supply and demand, forex is intensively influenced by geopolitical and macroeconomic factors. Capital Markets – these are the most visible indicators of a country economic health, where usually the healthier the economy the stronger the currency. For example, a rapid sell-off from a country will show that nation is not economically stable, subsequently investors will think negatively of it depreciating its currency. Moreover, many countries are sector driven, this means that their currencies are strictly correlated with certain resources. For instance, Canada which is a commodity-based market, CAD is strictly linked to price of Brent and metals, a swing in those will affect the Canadian currency. Finally, credit market is also connected to forex since also relies heavily on interest rate so, a change in bond yield will have major impact on currency prices. like increase in yield will favour bullish market for USD International Trade – Trade levels serve as a proxy for relative demand of goods from a nation, a country which goods and services that are in high demand internationally, will experience an appreciation to its currency. This is an effect driven by all other countries converting their currencies into the one of that state to purchase its goods and services. Let’s say a product from USA is in high demand globally, all the other countries must sell their currencies to buy dollars to then see their goods shipped, thus USD will appreciate. Trade surplus and deficit also indicate a nation competitive standing in international trade. Countries with a large trade deficit are usually importers resulting in more of their currencies being sold to buy goods worldwide, thus they will see their currencies devaluate. Geopolitics – The political landscape of a nation places a major role in the economic outlook for that country and consequently, the perceived value of its own currency. Beside building up price action strategies, based purely on price levels, forex traders constantly look at economic calendars and news to gauge what could move currencies. A geopolitical event which is having a great impact on GBP, is the election of Boris Johnson as UK prime minister, driving the local currency to 2 years low, yesterday 29th of July 2019. Therefore, when investors observe instability from a nation political environment, there are high chances that the currency of that country will depreciate.
Why Trading Forex
Beside swapping from a gold standard to free-floating, which change the whole forex trading game, technology is another crucial factor that helped this financial sector to spread globally. With the introduction of internet in the 90s forex opened to retail investors giving access to various trading platforms. The introduction of online platforms and retail investments have increased forex market volume by 5%, up to $250bn of its daily turnover. Different traders may have different reasons for selecting forex, however, mostly is because this is a fertile market plenty of daily opportunities to gauge price action and profit from it.
Volatility
How traders profit from trading forex? Basics of trading are rather simple to understand. An investor buys an asset at a certain price hoping to get rid of it for a higher price. The more volatile is the market for that specific financial instrument, the more revenue is possible to make. Therefore, a trader is looking for long up and down moves rather than market fluctuating sideways. Volatility is great in forex and a trader can expect to regularly see prices oscillating 50-100 pips on major currency pairs almost any day of the week. Yet again, due to this enormous constant fluctuation, potential losses or gains can be very high thus, rigours money management must be applied to avoid major damages and become a profitable trader. To conclude, volatility is the main characteristic investors are looking at and that is why it is one of the main feature traders can take advantage. See image below: Figure 2: FDAX Volatility, H4 (30th May 2019, 16:00, 30th July 2019, 16:00)
Accessibility & Technology
While volatility is the most important element out in the market that tell us why forex is the best market to trade, accessibility comes straight after. This market is more accessible than all the others, trading forex requires an online desk position and as little as $100 to start off an account. In comparison with the other financial markets, forex requires a rather low trading capital. Moreover, trading forex can be easily accessible from your PC, tablet or mobile since most of retail broker firms operate online. Although, accessibility cannot tell the quality of the market by itself, it definitely shows a reason why many investors try their first trading experience on forex. Also, the rapid introduction of technology since the 90s, made trading much easier. There are every year more advanced online platforms to trade on with many possible updates and that is why trading forex is edging for many global investors.
Forex Players
Before the introduction of free-floating currency and more importantly cutting hedge technology, forex was a market that could have been traded only by institutional investors. Nowadays however, even retail and individual investor can take advantage of the huge volume forex offers every day. Banks Interbank market is the major responsible for the high volume registered daily in forex. This is the place where banks exchange currency among each other, facilitating forex transactions for customers and speculate for their trading desks.
Clients transactions: in this case banks of all size act as dealer for clients, where the bid-ask spread represents the profit for the institutions.
Speculation: currencies are traded to profit from their price fluctuations as well as to increase diversification on their portfolio
Because banking institutions are the biggest players in foreign exchange market, they are able to push up and down the price of currencies giving an extreme advantage and higher volatility to individual traders who are trying to gauge price moves. Central Banks Central banks representing their nation’s government, are crucial in forex. They oversee monetary and fiscal policies having massive influence on currency rates. A central bank is responsible for fixing the price level of its native currency on the market, in other words they take care of the regime currencies will float in the open market.
Floating: these are the currencies which price floats on the open market based on principles of supply and demand relative to other currencies
Pegged (fixed exchange rate): opposite to floating currencies pegged ones are not free-floating in the open market however, their government rather tie them to the value of a stronger foreign currency. Pegged currencies are more seen in developing countries (CYN to USD).
Because central banks manage interest rates in order to increase the competitiveness of their native nation to another.
Dovish: these policies will be lowering down interest rates. A central bank which applies dovish conditions aims to give economic stimulus and guard against deflation. Usually a policy intended to give economy stimulus will weakening the currency value.
Hawkish: on the other hand, hawkish policies lead to an increase in interest rate. A central bank that uses hawkish measures aims to reduce inflation. Typically, this kind of policies will reinforce the country currency value.
Investment Managers & Hedge Funds Portfolio managers and hedge funds are the second investors in forex after central and investment banks. They are hired by huge institutions such as pension to manage their assets. However while portfolio managers of pool funds will buy currency to speculate on foreign securities, hedge funds execute speculative trades as part of their strategies. Corporations Also international corporation play a big role in forex. Those firms operating globally, buying and selling goods and services are involved in forex transactions daily. Imagine an American company producing pipes that imports Japanese components and sell the finished product to China. After the sale is closed the CYN must be converted back to USD, while the American company must exchange USD into JPY to repay for the components supply. Moreover, company involved in international trade have an interest in forex in order to hedge the risk associated with currencies fluctuations making several foreign exchange transactions. For instance, the same American company might buy JPY at spot rate, or enter a swap agreement to obtain JPY in advance, overtaking the risk of the Japanese currency to rise in the future. Therefore, forex become crucial to run companies with many subsidiaries and suppliers all over the word. Individual & Retail Investors Even though this investor cluster brings to forex a very limited volume compared to financial institutions and corporations, it is rapidly growing in numbers and popularity. These base their trades on a mixture of fundamentals and technical analysis. Bottom line, main reason why forex is the most traded market in the world is because gives everyone, from top financial institutions to retail and individual trades, opportunities to make returns on capital invested from currencies price fluctuations related to global economy.
I have only just begun my serious study of Forex this last month, and while they taught us the basics in school, I'm learning now there is quite a bit more to it. As I attended a university that placed absolutely no stock in technical analysis, this is where I am focusing the bulk of my studies. I've been working through babypips, feeling out the subject, and I've been practicing some of the TA indicators they discuss. Using a site called chartgame.com (Which I believe I was directed to from this subreddit) I have come to the conclusion that I must be some kind of TA prodigy. Every chart I'm beating out the traditional 'buy and hold' mentality without even doing a lick of fundamentals (Which has to be even more impressive considering the charts are actually equity charts). And yet, when working with my demo account, my results are predictably sub par. So I'm beginning to think that the charts selected on this website are much clearer than they appear on average in the forex (and probably equity) market. Has anyone noticed the same? Are there other sites where I can test TA with immediate feedback, sites that may be truer to what we see in the real world?
Research > Stocks: Enter a symbol, select Snapshot . 9 . Stock Research Experience . What’s unique about it? • Provides a dashboard for you to easily access everything you need to help make investment decisions in one place • Displays quotes, news, dividends, earnings, company profile, and the Equity Summary Score by Thomson Reuters Starmine—all on one page • Provides Fundamental ... When choosing stocks for trading it is important to analyze those stocks as we are investing our hard-earned money in it. Stocks can be analyzed mainly by two methods- Fundamental analysis and Technical analysis. Fundamental analysis is a method that helps in finding the intrinsic value of the stocks. By finding the intrinsic value of the stock one can get to know if the price of the stocks is ... Join India’s best selling online fundamental analysis online course with 4.5 ratings.. Become an expert fundamental analyst in 13 hours. The course is simple to understand, covers the systematic investing approach, and simplifies practical classes of doing fundamental analysis of stocks.Our industry experts with 40 years of experience will teach you how to do stocks fundamental analysis in ... These are the first 2 websites I go to for analysis of stocks, both fundamental and technical. Stocks and ETFs CFDs NEW Islamic Forex Account ... Once you have selected your local time zone, it is now necessary to select a certain time span over which you are planning to perform your fundamental analysis. This time span depends on the type of a trader you are, yet it is highly recommended to look at least one week ahead. After this, you will be able to see a list of upcoming economic ... Fundamental analysis of stocks is a method of looking into the basics or fundamentals of a company at its financial level. The ratios which are calculated from these financials are helpful in determining the health and growth prospects of the company. Also, it gives you an idea about your stock. 3. Stocks, Cycles and Fundamental Analysis by Udemy . Offered by Interactive Brokers, this highly rated course is another option for new traders interested in acquiring foundational investing ... Fundamental analysis of stocks is about the analysis of real data of stock to find stock’s value. It is the best method to determine the health and growth prospect of the company. In this method, stock’s revenue, profit margins, return on equity , future growth and other data are used to get the company’s underlying value and growth prospects. In the financial world, fundamental analysis is the concept of investigating the financial statements of a company to help determine if its stock is a good investment opportunity. For stocks, financial statements include revenues, future growth, balance sheets, income statements, profit margins, cash flow statements, and other relevant data. Fundamental analysis can also lead to understanding market expectations and finding new stocks worth investing in. Most investors love buying undervalued stocks because it means that the stock price will likely increase fast, leading to higher profits. Fundamental analysis is not used by short-term traders or active traders for the most part ...
Fundamental Forex Trading: How to PROFIT from Data Release ...
How To Trade Fundamental Analysis In Forex ft. Brandon Turner Subscribe to the channel: https://goo.gl/4DpLu6 In this live video, I am joined by Bandon Turne... Fundamental analysis of stocks video you'll learn how to research stocks using a couple of simple to use stock resources. 📚 Take our FREE courses here: https... When it comes to trading a lot of people don’t know how to use fundamental analysis when analyzing companies and finding plays. This puts you at a huge disad... In this lesson, you'll learn how to analyze stocks using Fundamental Analysis. SUBSCRIBE TO RAYNER'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL NOW https://www.youtube.com/subscrip... This video shows how simple it is to analyse a Forex chart, with a USDJPY example we execute a top down analysis using strictly tools and price action. This ... Join our Trading Room where we discuss All Things Forex on a daily basis: https://bit.ly/2MLQoFE How does the forex market really work and what is behind the... HOW TO USE FUNDAMENTAL ANALYSIS IN FOREX TRADING - Duration: 6:11. ... #1 Free Stock Scanner: FINVIZ 🕵🏻♂️ - Duration: 15:48. ZipTrader 48,018 views. 15:48. Million Dollar Traders ... Fundamental analysis forex for beginners and dummies who are just starting out in trading. In this forex fundamental analysis course, I'm going to share with... Fundamental Analysis by Rowena Harris-Doughty of LCG http://www.financial-spread-betting.com/spreadbetting/LCG-compare.html Fundamental Analysis is a way at ...
