Hello FF community,
As I press ahead on my journey, as I continue to learn, I am continually humbled in that I realize how much there is that I don’t know. I’ve studied order flow analysis (OFA) for the last year and a half and have come to the following conclusion: I need to become a programmer. Even if I want to trade statistical occurrences within price data i.e. chart patterns, I need to have a robot trading for me. I can put in hundreds of hours trading manually, making the inevitable mistakes and burning my retinas or I can put in a fraction of the time and put a 100% manual strategy into code.
OFA for example, when done “right,” (I define “right” as maximum efficiency) is done via a robot. I am still pursuing this end, and plan on eventually trading FX futures on the CME. You can’t trade order flow with no information available about orders. Enough about OFA for now…
One other huge barricade I’ve run into is this: I need to learn statistics and probability theory. Haha. Many of you are laughing now, well, I’ll laugh with you. For those of you who think you can trade without being proficient in statistics while profitable at the same time are either liars or criminals—Google “Martha Stewart inside trading.” You just can’t find success in trading without knowing what the odds are. Most novice traders are trading patterns that lose on average. You can’t look back and forth on a chart, see a few “winners” and then assume you have a winning strategy. Any system that requires trading regularly needs to be backed up by solid statistical evidence.
I’ve been spending the majority of my time lately in statistics textbooks and in Microsoft Excel. It’s amazing what can hide right under your nose in everyday price data. For learning’s sake, I’ve been sifting through daily EU data and have found several specific occurrences that happen greater than 90% of the time. With my eyes beginning to open, I’m realizing that learning to trade the right way is spilling over into other aspects of my life. Take all the math and programming for example-- that’s something you can carry with you and use in many other areas of life. My point in all of this is mainly for beginners and those who have some trading experience but are stuck adrift in the mighty trading waters without any hope of success:
If you are not profitable, you need to stop throwing money at the hungry monster. If you insist on throwing your money still, throw it at some books. Go down to your local college book store, or better yet, abebooks.com (cheap textbooks, I have no association with them), and get your hands on some used statistics textbooks. . Spend time with your new books like you used to spend time playing around on price charts. Familiarize yourself with all the concepts within. If you want to mess around with trading, play with a demo account. One good thing about an MT4 account is the access to free .csv data for you to apply your new knowledge on. If you will do this you might start to enjoy the prospect of trading again.
To prevent this thread from going in several different directions, I’d like to keep the topic this time focused on advice from those who have experience with the prerequisites of trading, and the resources and links to those resources. I’m talking about the mathematics that you feel are essential, the programming resources you feel are important, the best types of programming for trading, and anything else I’m obviously missing.
Here are some online resources I have found helpful for those who might not have the means to buy books:
Statistics:
http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/basic-statistics/
Thanks and good luck,
Jim
As I press ahead on my journey, as I continue to learn, I am continually humbled in that I realize how much there is that I don’t know. I’ve studied order flow analysis (OFA) for the last year and a half and have come to the following conclusion: I need to become a programmer. Even if I want to trade statistical occurrences within price data i.e. chart patterns, I need to have a robot trading for me. I can put in hundreds of hours trading manually, making the inevitable mistakes and burning my retinas or I can put in a fraction of the time and put a 100% manual strategy into code.
OFA for example, when done “right,” (I define “right” as maximum efficiency) is done via a robot. I am still pursuing this end, and plan on eventually trading FX futures on the CME. You can’t trade order flow with no information available about orders. Enough about OFA for now…
One other huge barricade I’ve run into is this: I need to learn statistics and probability theory. Haha. Many of you are laughing now, well, I’ll laugh with you. For those of you who think you can trade without being proficient in statistics while profitable at the same time are either liars or criminals—Google “Martha Stewart inside trading.” You just can’t find success in trading without knowing what the odds are. Most novice traders are trading patterns that lose on average. You can’t look back and forth on a chart, see a few “winners” and then assume you have a winning strategy. Any system that requires trading regularly needs to be backed up by solid statistical evidence.
I’ve been spending the majority of my time lately in statistics textbooks and in Microsoft Excel. It’s amazing what can hide right under your nose in everyday price data. For learning’s sake, I’ve been sifting through daily EU data and have found several specific occurrences that happen greater than 90% of the time. With my eyes beginning to open, I’m realizing that learning to trade the right way is spilling over into other aspects of my life. Take all the math and programming for example-- that’s something you can carry with you and use in many other areas of life. My point in all of this is mainly for beginners and those who have some trading experience but are stuck adrift in the mighty trading waters without any hope of success:
If you are not profitable, you need to stop throwing money at the hungry monster. If you insist on throwing your money still, throw it at some books. Go down to your local college book store, or better yet, abebooks.com (cheap textbooks, I have no association with them), and get your hands on some used statistics textbooks. . Spend time with your new books like you used to spend time playing around on price charts. Familiarize yourself with all the concepts within. If you want to mess around with trading, play with a demo account. One good thing about an MT4 account is the access to free .csv data for you to apply your new knowledge on. If you will do this you might start to enjoy the prospect of trading again.
To prevent this thread from going in several different directions, I’d like to keep the topic this time focused on advice from those who have experience with the prerequisites of trading, and the resources and links to those resources. I’m talking about the mathematics that you feel are essential, the programming resources you feel are important, the best types of programming for trading, and anything else I’m obviously missing.
Here are some online resources I have found helpful for those who might not have the means to buy books:
Statistics:
http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/basic-statistics/
Thanks and good luck,
Jim