Not to be a dick, but this isn't like a 2 outer, this is a description of a complete lack of having a clear cut plan, guiding rules, and stoplosses. All of which are a complete disaster for Forex trading.

I'm not doing this to belittle and berate you, but moreso that there are a lot of people on this forum interested in trading and I'd hate for them to see a post like that and think it's normal. Albeit, I suppose it's buyer beware if you're going to take advice from someone with 12 posts, or from a forum for that matter.

EDIT: Seems OP already beat me to it.

You've never entered a trade, went and done something else, and then came back hours later and noticed that something happened that caused a 200-300 pip spike and triggered your stoploss before the trend you were trading on continued? I really didn't think that comparing that scenario to a poker bad beat was that outrageous, but I guess I have no idea what I'm talking about. BTW, I'm glad that the number of posts I have is more important than the fact that I've been around these forums since at least 2005 (that's what my reg date says at least) and directly determines if I have any idea what I'm talking about.

Originally posted just to say that I believe forex trading is more difficult than poker. It is a zero-sum game and there are no limits like poker. You are trading with everyone in the market, just as if poker had no limits and the guy you are trading against might be a 50-100 reg. There are also an enormous amount of chart patterns and indicators you can use to aid your trading process, and you can always learn something new. I also was trying to be on the other side of the OP's opinion that forex trading was "easy." I, like you (apparently), was worried someone would stumble across this post, think that trading forex was so easy, and go dump a bunch of money because he had no idea what he was doing.

I guess all of my thoughts are so ridiculous though, so I'll just leave this to all of the experts on this board.

Amazing how I see so many people always talking about ta. You can't make money from ta, it is all bollocks...im sure your broker loves you.

How much are you willing to bet on this?

This just shows you dont have a plan, thats the point. All the good traders I know have clearly defined risk and reward parameters, they never got caught off guard. I mean particularly currencies look at the Euro yesterday, it ran up 150 ticks in 2 minutes? If you arent prepared for absolutely *anything* to happen I dont think its possible to trade profitably long term. Trading events dont occur on a normal distribution, ANYTHING can and does happen.

I will leave the gambling to you. You are already making your broker rich.

There will always be a tiny sample that get lucky. The real way to make money is by investing in a great company at a decent price, with solid fundamentals and by adopting a buy and hold strategy.

There are people claiming they make money long-term daytrading too. LOL.

lol, you're so right, how can you gain an edge on a market full of people it's just too random

we trade w/o technicals. we're probably giving up EV in terms of optimal entries as i have seen/read enough to be willing to bet at even money that TA does indeed work for at least the basis i have in mind.

the issue is opp cost of time and passion for it (or lack thereof).

Barron

There are two very distinct people in this world, those who don't know the answer to something so they research it, and those who just make **** up to fill the void that is their ignorance.

When I first learned about TA, I learned about it all wrong. I learned the patterns, the setups, all the crap that is useless unless you learn how to read market and price. It lead me to believe that TA was crap/bollocks/hocus pocus. But there was no denying that people made money using it. So I asked here, and got some great responses as to what makes TA work. Of course, some people wanted to go on saying that TA is crap, and that's fine.

But the reality is, if there exists one person, just one person that has traded thousands of times and has a significant winrate... it becomes on the order of 1 in millions of trillions that they luckboxed the entire thing.

In fact, to have a winrate of say, 70% and a Amount Won/Amount Lost ratio above 1 over even 100 trades is staggeringly improbable if TA is a losing proposition. Try it with a binomial distribution of 49% success to 51% fail and see how many samples have 70+ successes.

I did in Excel and it returns 1.0204 x 10^-5

I know people who have had results like that. I know of people who have had sustained results for years over lots of different market conditions and thousands upon thousands of trades.

I don't understand Rocket Science, but I do have the humility to say "well ****, there's rockets in space, therefore it works".. maybe I don't understand it, but me understanding it is never a prerequisite for it being true or not.

I will say, that in defense of the TA haters, the way TA is taught and presented it will make it difficult for the average person to ever succeed. It'd be extremely difficult to be profitable on just a price pattern without consideration of context.

Well then do some real research and debunk all of the academics. Debunk weak-form EMH, you would surely receive some sort of award. We would then have some sort of 'MasterLJ' theorem taught at universities. I won’t hold my breath though…

How much would you be willing to bet that I cant generate $2000/month for every contract I trade with a holding time of less than 10 minutes? If you are so sure it should be an easy bet. I could also stipulate that at no point could I be down more than $2000 per contract traded, you seem so very certain of yourself but you arent wiling to make any money off your certainty?

How much do you claim that you beat the market by...consistently?

I claim nothing, I am offering you a bet to prove/disprove whether TA exists or not. That would be a very improbable thing to be able to accomplish if TA doesnt exist considering commissions, slippage etc therefore that is the what I am "claiming" I can do.

You do know I was talking about getting stopped out of one trade right? Not busting your entire account on one trade? I agree... anything CAN and WILL happen, which is why you use stoplosses in the first place. Just like in poker, how you don't put your entire bankroll at one table, because a spike of variance could bust your account. One huge "act" of volatility (a spike in forex) or (a hand in poker) can be annoying, but if you're experienced, you know how to weather the tiny storms for the big picture. That was my whole point. I agree with everything you said which is why I don't see how you could've possibly understood what I was trying to say. Maybe I just originally didn't convey my point that well.

Yea my bad seems I didnt understand what you were saying.

See, we both know this bet would not work.

I am claiming that you can’t earn abnormal returns over a long period of time relying on ta, and that ta does not beat the market.

I am also claiming that day trading (lol) is impossible to earn money at long-term due to all of the consistent fees you pay ironing you out.

Ill bet on both of those things, what are your terms?

Happy to see this thread getting more on track again.

Sorry random for coming at you like an ******* in my last post but I still disagree with most of what you say because you always talk about bad traders.
That's most likely the last thing I'll say to you.


About the subject of forex being harder than poker..
I am not saying forex is easy, I have been studying and learning it for a long time and also payed for some education to get to where I am.

But I don't think it's harder than poker.
I never really got to the stage of being able to play poker professionaly.

What I want to explain now is going to be really hard but..
Poker you play against a person "sitting infront of you".
You can't just have a strategy that you comfortably go through every hand.
You have to keep adapting every second.. Learn how he thinks, You might of seen him bluff in a certain spot but next time that spot comes across he might not of been bluffing because he thought you would notice this.
And it's not just 1 player you playing against, Unless it's HU, There's many difficult things to learn in poker for beginners like how to play 3bet pots.
Proper Aggression.. It's hard for beginners to know the difference between Aggro and maniac.
I mean, The journey from being a donk in poker to becoming a breakeven player and then the huge step to becoming a pro is very hard and long.
I mean you wont even be able to start taking advantage of the fishes and donks in poker before you're at least a break even player.

I definatly don't think forex is harder than poker.

And TA does work, I can't say this for sure but there's so many simple or simple advanced systems out there you find.
I never tried one of them out because I prefer making my own strategy.
But I don't think you can be succesful with those simple strategies you can find.

You have to make it "very" advanced first and be ready however the chart develops, Just like in poker you have to know how to play every hand you're dealt, every kind of flop (all board textures).
If you don't agree with that, It's possible you don't have a advanced strategy.
When my strategy was in it's more basic stages I thought it was advanced but when I later learned the really advanced stuff (payed education) It was like "ohhhhh!" in my mind. Sort of like when I learned how powerful a delayed cbet is in poker against someone who calls all cbets. (cb being the previous thought to be advanced strategy and delayed cb being the really advanced stuff)

So in forex, If you are doing it correct with a good strategy after you start on a live account, There should never be a time you are not sure what to do.

In poker you should be unsure what to do sometimes/often since it's always adapting and different players.

If you don't think forex is harder than poker you don't really understand forex.

Art,

At the end of the day it's an opinion that is hugely subjective on style... well, for both. Obviously there is nothing hard about playing poker, but beating poker is more difficult. Obviously it's not tough to beat nl10, but it's super difficult to beat 500/1000.

Some styles of trading are way more difficult than others. You seem to be a really bright guy who likes to really get analytical and it apparently works well for you. I'm not like that at all.

I tend to agree with what River Royale said in his last post itt... poker can be more difficult because it's more subjective. I think it's a perfectly valuable argument, but again, we need to come to an agreement on what "difficulty" means in this context. I'd say the easiest argument would be to compare the money making potential. Is it easier to make $100k in a year playing poker, or trading Forex? From there, again, I think the answer will vary wildly. Some will say poker, some will say Forex, and it depends on too many factors to ever give an absolute answer.
EDIT: Another way to gauge it, is if 100 random people tried to learn to make $100k/year playing poker and $100k/year trading Forex, how many would succeed?

I'm in a transitionary period, but I have been a poker pro with a decent knowledge of Forex trading. Right now, I'd say Forex is easier but I'm not fully qualified to make that statement.

Your wrong... I have made 5-20 trades a day (Monday-Thursday only) for the past year and have won ~70-80% of them with my winners and losers being relatively the same size.

Also I agree with you about the fees. They are enormous when you are a retail trader. However I am only paying $10/million due to the volume I trade. If I were able to increase my volume even higher I would be able to get that down to ~5 or lower.

You don't know what you are talking about. You took a finance class in college by a prof making $70-200k a year. There are traders out there making many multiples at that. Who is smarter?

There have been countless successful options traders who disregard the Nobel Prize winning Black-Scholes model. The one in particular I'm thinking of, found that the distributions pertaining to options pricing isn't normal due to human psychology... humans gravitate towards certain prices, which is exactly why TA works.

Stop killing my action IMO!

lol forex

I've done some light googling and it seems to be an "active" source of income, requiring a lot of time/effort every day, unlike poker where once you learn to beat the donks, you can always beat the donks. Do I have this wrong?

I was interested in getting into this and just playing around with a play money account for a couple of years until I've got enough money to do anything with, but I thought it was would be more like a hobby thing once I was able to show consistent profit over a period of 1-2 years. Like poker, learn to play and then play at will.

You really have to treat this like a full-time (or all-the-time) job if you actually want to profit, don't you?

Also, I'm still really ignorant on this topic. Would math/CS skills have any application to this? That would make it a lot more interesting to me.