Things i learnt over 6 years of trading.

[cyxstudio]

I traded for a few years and then i gave it a break, and i am starting to trade again now, restarted around 8 months ago. I am by no means an expert nor as successful as many of you here but i feel I can share some of my experience.

1) If you invest the same time/effort you spend learning trading into developing a skill or starting a business, you'd probably make more money.
I know some of you may not agree, but this is true for me especially. I actually make more money from my day job than trading.

2) The way you set your life up has a lot of impact on your trading
It is true that psychology matters a lot in trading, but i always realise that the way you set your life up impacts your psychology while trading the most. If your life is chaotic, unordered, those emotions will come back and hurt you when you are trading. You will simply not be in the right state of mind to make decisions regarding your money. If you have psychopathic girlfriend or unstable/abusive relationships, you need choose in between that or your trading career, but not both.

3) The market is ruthless.
Trading is a zero sum game, actually, its a negative sum game, since the house gets their commission. In order to become successful, you have to be cold and calculative. You have to assume that the world is out there to get you. The market is ruthless, its filled with people who wants to take your money, this is no place for nice guys!. Whoever is on the other side of the trade, he wants to take your money , so dont feel bad when you take his.

4) Your strategy has to match your personality.
Many years ago i used to have this football strategy that involves backing unders if their league average goals , pre match stats and in play odds meet a certain threshold. The strategy works fine but it always blow up in the end. The reason is because i become anxious whenever i back unders. I would watch the game and shit myself everytime there is a shot. My heart ends up in my mouth when the teams attack. In the end it ruined my mental state and when the inevitable goal goes in i would become angry and double down to recoup the losses... and sods law determine that there will be a few more goals and i blew my whole bank. I never develop any strategy involving backing unders anymore. All my current strategies are betting for goals and i never blew my bank up again since you only lose when the game ends and when the game ends I cannot double down anymore. I do feel bored when there are no goals but better bored than nervous/angry.

5) Trading is 80% crunching data, 20% actually trading.
Trading is actually for the most part collecting, cleaning and crunching data. You goal should always always always be looking for mispriced market. Your edge should be the willingness to look deeper into the numbers. Say for example, just because one striker scores more goals than the other for the same game time doesnt mean he is a better goal scorer. He might just have more chances than the other. You need to be willing to dig deeper than other market participants, create your own rating system and then find if there are any mismatch in prices. The football market is fairly efficient, but its not impossible to find value. If you manage to find value, a straight bet is actually pretty sufficient.
Learning a programming language would help you greatly automate some of the tedious process. Python and SQL would be a good fit, and Excel too, tho not a programming language.

6) Trading should be for capital appreciation, not for income.
I never understood how people can trade for income. If you trade for income, you will have to take out money from your bank for food and bills and stuff every month. Then you will never be able to compound your winnings and grow your bank. Not to mention if you feel the need to make a profit because your livelihood depends on it, you might "force a trade" even when the circumstances does not provide one.

7) A lot of opportunities dont exists in the top flight football
The top division of each country's football league are always the most liquid, but also the most over analyzed divisions. its going to be more difficult to find value in those leagues. Opportunities exist more often in lower leagues or more obscure leagues such as championship , ligue 2, series B, Singapore, Japanese, Polish leagues due to the smaller amount of attention they get. Yes it also mean that those leagues are less liquid, its a trade off you have to accept. I forgot when was the last time i traded the premier league. Its too well priced because information for those in top flight football are too abundant. If you wish to find opportunities, look away from top flight football.

That's all. Thanks for reading

[Kai]

Always good to see different perspectives on trading

6) Trading should be for capital appreciation, not for income.
I never understood how people can trade for income. If you trade for income, you will have to take out money from your bank for food and bills and stuff every month. Then you will never be able to compound your winnings and grow your bank. Not to mention if you feel the need to make a profit because your livelihood depends on it, you might "force a trade" even when the circumstances does not provide one.

Not sure about #6, you'd imagine a fulltimer having enough excess capital and cash lying around without needing to take stuff out to cover his monthly expenses. If he's doing that on a monthly basis then he's probably doing it wrong, as there would not be much difference when compared to a regular dayjob, he would be one bad BF outage or something away from being skint for the month, or worse. Talk about trading under pressure, different months of the year generate different amounts of opportunities and forcing things is rarely a good idea.

Compounding winnings as well should be easy on paper, but many markets and opportunities cannot sustain endless scalability, and more importantly the comfort zones probably can't either.

[Trader Pat]

4) Your strategy has to match your personality.

It depends on your personality type. I can be fairly impulsive by nature so that would be a disaster in the markets. When I tried to transition from gambling to trading it was very difficult for that reason but I got there in the end. I can still be impulsive in the real world but never in the markets, at least not anymore!

[Derek27]

I traded for a few years and then i gave it a break, and i am starting to trade again now, restarted around 8 months ago. I am by no means an expert nor as successful as many of you here but i feel I can share some of my experience.

1) If you invest the same time/effort you spend learning trading into developing a skill or starting a business, you'd probably make more money.
I know some of you may not agree, but this is true for me especially. I actually make more money from my day job than trading.

2) The way you set your life up has a lot of impact on your trading
It is true that psychology matters a lot in trading, but i always realise that the way you set your life up impacts your psychology while trading the most. If your life is chaotic, unordered, those emotions will come back and hurt you when you are trading. You will simply not be in the right state of mind to make decisions regarding your money. If you have psychopathic girlfriend or unstable/abusive relationships, you need choose in between that or your trading career, but not both.

3) The market is ruthless.
Trading is a zero sum game, actually, its a negative sum game, since the house gets their commission. In order to become successful, you have to be cold and calculative. You have to assume that the world is out there to get you. The market is ruthless, its filled with people who wants to take your money . Whoever is on the other side of the trade, he wants to take your money , so dont feel bad when you take his.

4) Your strategy has to match your personality.
Many years ago i used to have this football strategy that involves backing unders if their league average goals , pre match stats and in play odds meet a certain threshold. The strategy works fine but it always blow up in the end. The reason is because i become anxious whenever i back unders. I would watch the game and shit myself everytime there is a shot. My heart ends up in my mouth when the teams attack. In the end it ruined my mental state and when the inevitable goal goes in i would become angry and double down to recoup the losses... and sods law determine that there will be a few more goals and i blew my whole bank. I never develop any strategy involving backing unders anymore. All my current strategies are betting for goals and i never blew my bank up again since you only lose when the game ends and when the game ends I cannot double down anymore. I do feel bored when there are no goals but better bored than nervous/angry.

5) Trading is 80% crunching data, 20% actually trading.
Trading is actually for the most part collecting, cleaning and crunching data. You goal should always always always be looking for mispriced market. Your edge should be the willingness to look deeper into the numbers. Say for example, just because one striker scores more goals than the other for the same game time doesnt mean he is a better goal scorer. He might just have more chances than the other. You need to be willing to dig deeper than other market participants, create your own rating system and then find if there are any mismatch in prices. The football market is fairly efficient, but its not impossible to find value. If you manage to find value, a straight bet is actually pretty sufficient.
Learning a programming language would help you greatly automate some of the tedious process. Python and SQL would be a good fit, and Excel too, tho not a programming language.

6) Trading should be for capital appreciation, not for income.
I never understood how people can trade for income. If you trade for income, you will have to take out money from your bank for food and bills and stuff every month. Then you will never be able to compound your winnings and grow your bank. Not to mention if you feel the need to make a profit because your livelihood depends on it, you might "force a trade" even when the circumstances does not provide one.

That's all. Thanks for reading

I largely agree with the first three points. For number 4, if you have a good strategy, rather than deciding that it doesn't match your personality, change your trading personality to match your strategies. It's quite possible to be risk-averse when crossing roads but be different and professional when trading. A trader's personality could be what makes him overstake or let trades go in-play, so he has to adopt a different trading personality.

No. 5 depends largely on your setup and how you go about trading. A botter who relies on stats and past results to design his systems will spend far more time on non-trading activities than the manual boot up and start clicking trader, which I used to be but I'm now spending a lot more time coding and testing.

For No. 6, traders have wide-ranging bankrolls and profit margins. For some traders it's easy to make enough to live on and increase your capital. For the bigger traders, many will be putting as much money through the markets as they will take, have surplus funds and don't need to increase capital. Take megarain for example. He's got so much money he doesn't know what to do with it, so he hides in a market and it still gets bigger!

No well-disciplined trader or punter will ever trade/bet simply because he needs the money. It's far better to have a day off than lose. There is pressure to make money, but there's also pressure on taxi-drivers, pub landlords, restaurants, etc. We're really the lucky ones, unaffected by covid, no income tax, staff to pay, fuel bills that you wouldn't pay anyway, etc.

[gazuty]

That's all. Thanks for reading

Good work, nicely written and great insights.

(Oh and a real distinction from other current threads).

[goat68]

I traded for a few years and then i gave it a break, and i am starting to trade again now, restarted around 8 months ago. I am by no means an expert nor as successful as many of you here but i feel I can share some of my experience.

1) If you invest the same time/effort you spend learning trading into developing a skill or starting a business, you'd probably make more money.
I know some of you may not agree, but this is true for me especially. I actually make more money from my day job than trading.

2) The way you set your life up has a lot of impact on your trading
It is true that psychology matters a lot in trading, but i always realise that the way you set your life up impacts your psychology while trading the most. If your life is chaotic, unordered, those emotions will come back and hurt you when you are trading. You will simply not be in the right state of mind to make decisions regarding your money. If you have psychopathic girlfriend or unstable/abusive relationships, you need choose in between that or your trading career, but not both.

3) The market is ruthless.
Trading is a zero sum game, actually, its a negative sum game, since the house gets their commission. In order to become successful, you have to be cold and calculative. You have to assume that the world is out there to get you. The market is ruthless, its filled with people who wants to take your money . Whoever is on the other side of the trade, he wants to take your money , so dont feel bad when you take his.

4) Your strategy has to match your personality.
Many years ago i used to have this football strategy that involves backing unders if their league average goals , pre match stats and in play odds meet a certain threshold. The strategy works fine but it always blow up in the end. The reason is because i become anxious whenever i back unders. I would watch the game and shit myself everytime there is a shot. My heart ends up in my mouth when the teams attack. In the end it ruined my mental state and when the inevitable goal goes in i would become angry and double down to recoup the losses... and sods law determine that there will be a few more goals and i blew my whole bank. I never develop any strategy involving backing unders anymore. All my current strategies are betting for goals and i never blew my bank up again since you only lose when the game ends and when the game ends I cannot double down anymore. I do feel bored when there are no goals but better bored than nervous/angry.

5) Trading is 80% crunching data, 20% actually trading.
Trading is actually for the most part collecting, cleaning and crunching data. You goal should always always always be looking for mispriced market. Your edge should be the willingness to look deeper into the numbers. Say for example, just because one striker scores more goals than the other for the same game time doesnt mean he is a better goal scorer. He might just have more chances than the other. You need to be willing to dig deeper than other market participants, create your own rating system and then find if there are any mismatch in prices. The football market is fairly efficient, but its not impossible to find value. If you manage to find value, a straight bet is actually pretty sufficient.
Learning a programming language would help you greatly automate some of the tedious process. Python and SQL would be a good fit, and Excel too, tho not a programming language.

6) Trading should be for capital appreciation, not for income.
I never understood how people can trade for income. If you trade for income, you will have to take out money from your bank for food and bills and stuff every month. Then you will never be able to compound your winnings and grow your bank. Not to mention if you feel the need to make a profit because your livelihood depends on it, you might "force a trade" even when the circumstances does not provide one.

That's all. Thanks for reading

nice, agree with all those

[alexmr2]

Agree with most of these and my perspective has certainly changed since I started, so I would say to myself when I was just starting:

1. It takes longer than you think

2. It's not the easiest, quickest and least stressful way to make money and with the cheapest financial investment.
I often wish I had put the time into something else like affiliate marketing or a Youtube venture

3. It's unlikely you will go from starting from scratch to making a living from it in the first few years.
If this isn't your only income you will struggle to put the time in, if it is your only income you will struggle to deal with the pressure

4. It won't make you as rich as you think.
Don't fall for the social media/Youtuber/course salesmen hype of 0-£100k a year within the first couple of years

5. It's not as exciting as you think.
It's more like following a slow repetitive process than playing a fast-moving video game where you pull £100 out of the market every few minutes

6. It's still easy to mess up.
You don't automatically become a money printing machine one day without going back to losing if you don't maintain the effort

7. It takes longer than you think

Whilst these are all negative there are still a lot of advantages to trading which make it worthwhile

[TeresaHoff]

The first golden rule of trading is "there is no shortcut to quick earning". Investors should follow a process to reach their financial goals. Some of these purposes have been gathered for hundreds of years. Many of them are given to us by our parents, like in the masterpiece https://freebooksummary.com/category/on ... ude-quotes. They include financial constraints and a strategy that helps match your goals with those constraints. In addition to these, I have found many others on that free book summary.

[marcusessmith84]

Honestly admit that I am focused not only on capital gains, but also spend part of the money I earn on my own needs. Of course, it all depends on the economic condition of each person. For example, all winnings from https://oddsdigger.com/at/motorsports I spend on charity.

[napshnap]

I agree with most of these , part 5 is critical if you consider this business serious.