The trading app? Yeah. I toyed around a little with it when I was demo trading stocks once upon a time. It’s just for equities, right?

Still, I didn’t think you could even trade penny stocks with that small an amount. I thought they had a minimum deposit of $500?

that’s the joke.

you can literally deposit $5 and buy whatever you can with $5.

I have Robinhood gold (it’s free too, you might have to qualify for it somehow, I can’t remember) that gives you 2x margin. I also just (finally) got crypto trading.

I think the point was the whole, “literally the only environment where you can trade with $100” thing...robinhood was built for that exact, specific reason, and is by fa(aaaa)r the most well-known way to do so.

go get ‘em, champ

Why don't you just trade forex and not go on monkey tilt when you hit $1000 dollars this time?

He didn't go on monkey tilt. He never had an edge, long or short. It was always pure variance. He built up huge narratives around each win and loss, but there was never anything going on other than a random walk.

And he did keep trading forex (put more money in) for months and got raped again and again. Poor guy can't take any more and now wants to try ES futures (yeah, that's how ****ing dumb he is).

Wait, so what happened. Did OP trade $100 into $1k in a year and then lose it all in a week?

I traded $100 into $1K in about 3 months, then made a boneheaded mistake and got into a trade before a news decision which blew through and eradicated my stop loss and wiped out half my account. After that, yes, I revenge traded a bit which never works out well.

And in regards to TS’s ramblings - I did put in money on one other occasion after the initial run-up. This was an experimental/gambling type of approach that capitalized on high probability wins, but will eventually blow up due to the extreme risk/reward ratio. That was only a couple pages back in the thread.

You’re hilarious, man. I put in less than $500 over the course of a year and a half, admiting the whole time that what I was doing was -EV over any more than the short term, and you make it sound like I’ve traded away half my net worth since the inception of this

I think you’re still salty that you told me over and over again that I’d fall flat on my face back at the very start, and I didn’t. I proved you and others itt wrong (random walk or not). You strike me as the kind of person who can’t handle being wrong about something. Even as trivial as this.

The reason people can beat the micros is because they are (mostly) playing against the very worst players only.

The markets don't work like this and all the players are in direct competition with each other, so a more realistic poker analogy would be:

"Playing against nosebleed stakes players, paying 20 bb/100 in rake and only being able to see one of your hole cards."

Good luck beating that.

Juk

So if you genuinely enjoy the trading / trading w/ $100 then I think its fine no matter what you trade. Its an experience and hopefully you are learning.

But if you goal is to really learn the money has to matter for you to learn yourself and your emotions.

TS may or may not be right about your edge and the random walk stuff. And while trying to be objective and think probabilistically...Id say he probably is right.

But the individual is different from the crowd, and certainly people of all walks of life succeed in trading. But for those that do theres probably at least 10 that dont.

All these rationalizations and stories are comical. There were no boneheaded mistakes and no good trades. You rode a wave of luck up and down and created confirmation biased/plausible stories about each success and failure. It's quite funny actually.

The trades that you rode up and the trade where you made $400 on luck were "good solid trades" and the one where you lost the same amount was a "boneheaded" mistake. Then you lost the rest through 'revenge trading", not merely the normal flip side of your earlier extreme luck that ran you up 1000%.

If I corralled a random bunch of cucks and made them trade random walks, they'd have the same rationalizations. It's what humans do.

If you want to make money by taking risk and have limited capital you are better off playing and learning poker.

Then once you have a bank roll, you can trade. Again if you just really enjoy the process, take like $5k and trade equities.

If you want to learn derivatives you should be comfortable trading and possibly losing $5k - $10k (at a minimum).

Yeah, this is why you don't trade forex or ES. Your counterparties are smarter than you, more knowledgeable than you, crunch 100,000x the data you do, and are faster than you. Good luck with that.

Tesla options on the other hand...your counterparties are mouth breathing morons, and the options are priced very dumbly by a computerized historical volatility formula that has no real world analysis in it, and hence diverges sometimes.

Table selection, bro. CandyCreep is too much of a dumbass to understand this even when someone lays it out for him. This is one reason why technical analysis is dumb - it makes you see opportunities everywhere in the lines, and ****s up your mind into thinking you can beat stuff that fails a basic table selection test.

There's alot of truth here. But did we discuss / determine whether or not you can make money trading a random walk with good risk management skills?

I haven't given this too much thought, I don't think markets are random walks.

But also think you probably can make money on noise / randomness with good risk management (lets say frictionless environment obviously).

This.

It seems really weird to me how otherwise rational poker players seems to completely lose their minds when they come to this sub-forum.

If anybody posted a sample of poker hands like the OP's trading history they'd be (rightly) laughed at in pretty much every other sub-forum here.

It's even worse when you consider the prior probability of being a winning trader is about one order of magnitude lower that the prior probability of being a winning micro-stakes poker player (ie: 0.01 vs 0.1), so if anything these "lolz, sample size" posts should be ridiculed EVEN MORE in this sub-forum than they are elsewhere!!!

Juk

Was there a mention of "Shannon's Demon" in this discussion? If not, then search google for this as there are a couple of really interesting threads/articles about this (no wiki page on it surprisingly?).

Juk

It's just a fancy way of selling vol. People find fun new ways of doing it all the time but ev is still ev. 'Risk/money Management' can't ever overcome lack of edge unless you're gambling with other people's money.

Obviously, outside of the greater fool theory it doesn't make sense socially.

But as an individual, for a thought experiment, I think you can do it.

Like a fixed max loss per trade, exit 1/2 position at a fixed level, move stops up to break even, and let the winners run while trailing a stop.

Probably works...

I understand that point and I even explained to you that I understand and agree with that point in post #257 itt. But what you’re failing to see is that it is not ONLY about good/bad variance. That trade I made on USD/CAD where I lost half my account absolutely was a boneheaded mistake. The first rule in FX (for someone who trades technicals) is to know when major economic events are taking place in the currencies you’re trading and then stay the **** out when they occur. Historically, this is something I’ve been mindful of and these are scheduled releases we’re talking about, not random ones. So, failing to realize the absolute biggest type of event for currencies (interest rate announcement) is coming up... that is absolutely a mistake and not just the bad side of variance. If you can’t see that, I really don’t know what else to say except that you obviously understand a lot less than you think about the FX market.

It’s like misreading your hand in poker. That’s not bad variance - that’s just you doing something inexcusably stupid.

Now, I’m not saying there aren’t random events that can decimate your account. There are, certainly. But that trade was not one of them.

By probably works do you mean it will work in the majority of cases? Yes thats trivially true. And the losing universes will be worse than the winning ones, with the average being zero.

Once again, just another way of selling vol... doesn't seem too interesting to me

I've always been on the fence as to whether you're a stinkypete gimmick account. I really hope you are, for your own sake.

Thinking you can profit off random walks is the same as believing in perpetual motion machine.

Im about as sure that they are the same as I am that I want to have this conversation. But.........

I assume that an arbitrary strategy in one of your random walks is EV neutral. And you are saying that you don't think that by managing risk you can improve that?

I am not talking about zero sum, multiple actors. We literally talk a random walk, I write an algorithm...and we see.

I would not be interested in doing the math on statistically significant results. But I might write the algorithm if you give me a freeroll. Probably I am busy.

But as a qualitative aside. I used to play professional poker. I and I was good in college / becoming a pro. Right around then I would have a noisy equity curve. +$3k, -$2.5k, +$4k, -$5k etc. You know what was arguably the biggest improvement in my bottom line that I ever made?

A $1k stop loss. Now granted, my play wasn't noise, I "had a winning strategy" (called dont bluff the fish...).

But say your random walk (as ones you often generate, literally) has an upward bias. You don't think simple risk management can add value to an otherwise neutral scenario?

Im not talking after inflation or transactions costs. This is a thought experiment. I will only BTO, STC. I will use mechanical orders & generate a statistically significant return...

Its not that hard or that interesting. You remove the upward bias and it becomes more interesting, but I still think its OK.

So what, 1 case run infinitely long therefore oscillates around the zero line?

I am not so sure. I think it trends. Ha but like I said, I am not sure if you remove the upward bias.

Lets see if TS wants to argue with me about currency depreciation / asset inflation. Markets are now random walks except for:
-tax loss selling & the january affect
-daily cycles
-weekly cycles
-monthly expirations
-quarterly earnings
-an upward bias due to Fed policy (so use leverage & get long, long term + EV right there...)
-crop reports
-oil inventories
-GDP data & employment data
...all come out cyclically...

There's not really anything to discuss. This is very simple. It is not possible to gain an edge on a random walk. And on a random walk with a directional bias (an EV), it is not possible to beat the EV.

Believing otherwise is the same as believing in perpetual motion machines. It's actually worse since this is a pure mathematical fact whereas perpetual motion machines at least have an out to some other mysterious energy source from some other dimension.

What is instructive is that you'e building up these complicated TA concepts about how to exploit a random walk. If you try to do that on something that's impossible, how are you not ****ing up stuff where it's harder to know that you're wrong?

Its not your fault, but you misrepresent my position. I actually don't believe it. In this context I am a skeptic. I also certainly do not believe your side just because you say so.

My hunch / intuition is that you can. But that is all it is. The only real work someone has mentioned / posted, from Claude Shannon, who was the man, was investigating the opposite side to yours.

In my eyes, your case is further weakened by your consistent claim that markets are a random walk or a random walk with a bias. Honestly, its rather ridiculous. There is no random walk and there is no EMH. Those are models and theories we use to approximate the reality. And in these cases, the implications / conclusions of those models and theories are actually pretty poor IMO.