Quote:
Originally Posted by savant111
One benefit to frequent trading is I get more experience reading charts, reading financial statements, and weighing the pros vs con of potential investments all of which help speed up the learning curve.
This is laughable.
You can do all that without trading or a dime to your name. There is literally, ZERO benefit for you to trade frequently because you are not going to be in the top 1% or 0.1% who can benefit from doing so -- you simply will not be able to out-trade the market-makers and:
a) the smartest and fastest HFs in the world, HFT or not,
b) while paying the commissions and fees you're gonna pay,
c) and slippage,
d) and b-o spread,
e) and taxes.
It's amazing how many geniuses come out of the woodwork at 2p2 and other 'social' sites during a bull market talking about trading a lot, or how much they've been making, and 99.9999% of them are not around for the bear market, or simply don't report results, or get short too early and go busto. I've been watching it happen for ~12 years now and it's never going to change.
No diff than the people here who think they can beat the fx market, or futures, or trade on high leverage or etc. If you're doing more than ~25 trades a year you're doing it wrong* [counting legging in/out of a position as 1 trade.]
Frankly, you'd be well ahead of the game to admit upfront
you cannot beat the pros, look to learn from them, figure out how they can beat you in ways you cannot match,
focus on the areas where you can be superior [ultra micro-caps, spc sit, pure arbs] none of which require frequent trading.
I say this as a recovering over-trader, who runs a big book, and someone who doesn't mind speculating on binary events. I bot PCLN today a few minutes before the close - easily could have been down now as up, but got it right this time. I'm not saying never take a punt but it should be rare as in 1-2 a year as a pure spec.
* Obvs, there may be internal/external exogenous events that require you to make a liquidation of most/all of your portfolio, or a sudden cash windfall that allows you to buy a more diversified portfolio, etc. These are rare, generally life-changing events.