Please don't do this. There are a lot of VERY smart people doing this with much bigger bankrolls and faster internet connections than you have. Build something in an area where you have interest or industry knowledge.
It's more that very smart people who've been doing it for 20+ years, are world experts at automated trading and have billion dollar funds to play with still go bust on a very regular basis.
This kind of finance is a game you play with other peoples' money, not with your nest egg.
Best advice ever, wish someone gave it to me 20 years ago. the is the best life stile business, location independent, no employees, no clients, no bosses
Let me be perfectly blunt about this: your trading system is probably the equity equivalent of picking up nickels off of train tracks. A year's worth of living expenses isn't enough to get average investment results, live off the gains, and not engage in high-risk behavior.
Let me be blunt as well: I have been doing this for years and it changed my life forever in a sense that my family will never have to worry about money and talking generations here... and it cost me almost nothing, but time to develop...
Please stop, if you don't want to try, it doesn't mean it is not possible... the truth is that the market efficient hypothesis is not valid and there are plenty examples of people beating the market consistently
Maybe I need to make some background assumptions more explicit. Have you heard of reference class forecasting [1]? The "outside view" of historical results of similar activity is significantly more effective in predicting the results of your actions compared to using the "inside view" of analyzing the details of your plan. Everyone who chooses to buy and sell individual stocks does so because they think it's better than their other choices, so the proper reference class, by default, is "active investors as a whole". The average result of active investors as a whole is the overall movement of the market. Since that's what I expect any stock-picking scheme to yield, I might as well pick the least risky and lowest cost system for it.
Efficient market hypothesis has nothing to do with my opinions here. Whether or not it's possible to beat the market has nothing to do with it either. It's simple averaging - I expect than if I pick individual stocks, I'll get an average result for stock pickers as a group, and that average result is the same as the market as a whole.
Want to know my investment strategy? It's taking every dollar from working that's in excess of my expense budget, immediately putting it long a total stock market index, and sitting on it for about two decades. I don't look at the news, I barely look at the index price, and I'll continue doing this if I lose half my money over the next year. I'll get as good of an expected return, except paying less money in fees and leaving my deferred capital gains invested.
I bet the Japanese felt the same way 20 years ago when Japan was the second largest economy in the world... let me give you a great quote from a so so book:
"When you went to medical school did you ever want to graduate with a C average?” The doctor said, “No.” Vandergrift replied, “Do you want to send your kids to a C school?” He said, “No.” Vandergrift countered, “Then why are you doing that with your money? The S&P is an average. It’s an average of the 500 largest companies in the United States. It’s an average. It’s a C index. Why would you want to invest to get average returns?”
That's a generic anecdotal story that exhorts people to try to do better than average that could've been used as a response to anything. I'm not even sure that you're reading my posts other than seeing "pro-indexing" and trotting out random active investing arguments.
Reference class forecasting. Have you heard of it? Do you know that it reliably improves the accuracy of your predictions? What makes you a better investor than everyone else trying to beat the market?
I feel if you want to participate in this community you should have the courtesy to add a disclaimer to your comment that you run a trading school (the link in your profile) when you make comments like this.
Also, to me personally, it seems like you're kind of making up what you just said (to get people to go to your trading school). Can you post some proof that your family is set for "generations"? (For example can you show the order of magnitude of your accounts via an anonymous screenshot?)
By the way I don't share the view of others in this thread who say that your advice is "terrible", the only thing that bothers me is that you did not add a disclaimer and have an incentive to make up what you've written (to generate traffic to your school).
I think people reacted this way, because perhaps your suggestion to OP was not appropriate for this thread.
But I do remember reading your comment on the books discussion page few days ago. Actually, I have been thinking along the lines of what your bio description says. And I even bought a book, from the ones you suggested (the history of hedge funds, one). So thanks!
I am interested in that area, but constrained for bandwidth. As I also want to pursue cryptocurrency and/or ML. So not easy to choose, as realistically will have bandwidth to do only one of the three areas. And that too ensuring current project goes in a near 'self driven' way. Nothing is easy :)
Hey, it was just an idea, I don't think any better or worse than some of the others like go "travel the world" or "go hike" or "feel better", at the end the more ideas the person has, the better would be for him...
For the book, I hope you like it and find it as inspirational as I did... Good luck, think outside the box and don't listen to the naysayers :-)
All right. If you want to send anonymous proof (you can blank out your details) of the size of your accounts, you can email me at the email in my profile. I'll then post here saying I've verified your claim, if you want. Until then it seems like you are still primarily trying to promote your web site here and I don't have any reason to believe your claim about how much money you've made trading. Overall your claims seem false to me at the moment, since nobody else spends as much time promoting their approaches here on HN as you do. (Of course, you could just be enthusiastic.) You seem to have a very direct conflict of interest which you don't mention at all in your comments, unlike everyone else who posts on questions related to their projects or work.
I can photoshop a statement showing gazillion dollars in my account, but how about first you go into my profile and show the community exactly how I am running a trading school, because this is how you came out swinging at me unprovoked 2 posts ago...
I don't like bullies in real life and even less hidden on the net...
What website? the link in my profile? did you ever bother to look at it to see that this is not a trading school website and I am not associate with it in any shape or form, you can go ahead and ask the owner...
The only reason this site is in my profile is to show the naive people interested in the stock market that they should never ever pay for a trading school or trust a trading guru, because all of them are failed traders out to scam and steal... Just read trough the heart breaking stories and maybe just maybe someone in the community can help put some of those people in jail... Thant is the whole idea, but I bet you wouldn't understand...
Firstly, I'd like to apologize to you again for misinterpreting the link in your profile as being a site you run (you could put in your profile that you are unaffiliated). Lots of people here run sites, so you will understand that I thought it was to your site.
The warning you just linked (it's down at the moment but here is an archive[1]) says "If [someone says] that he consistently makes $1,000 per day, well that’s great. But have them show you proof in the form of account statements."
So I don't see why you became so upset with me when I asked for a similar proof from you - I was fine if you make it anonymously! (Blanking out all of the identifying information).
I would assume that you are being honest, and after all you do have a bit of karma here. So what I asked for is exactly what the site you linked suggests - just some indication of the size of your portfolio, even if you make it anonymous.
Sorry again about misinterpreting your link as a site that you run.
If this is the case I don't understand why you don't want to give some indication of the "order of magnitude" of your accounts, which you phrased in your original suggestion to original top-level OP (that he should start trading) as, "I have been doing this for years and it changed my life forever in a sense that my family will never have to worry about money and talking generations here."
As you correctly point out, I am putting faith in you because you could photoshop whatever you wanted, but I am asking you not to do so, just show what size you're talking about about. I still have no idea what size that is to you, and asked out of curiosity.
Sorry that I misinterpreted you to be running that site. Most people here put links to their own site in their profile, since a lot of people here run web sites. (And it is, after all, your profile.)
I would appreciate the anonymous proof I asked for. you can post an anonymized screenshot. I would like to follow your advice which you've written in some detail in numerous comments.
