Market moves - right or wrong?

[Tonto]

Better to be specialist than a jack of all trades and master of none IMHO. Getting profitable at one thing will take long enough, and I'd make that my initial aim if I were you. Otherwise, you risk being all over the place and getting nowhere.

Good luck on your journey to profitability though. Don't expect it to be quick or easy, but hopefully you'll enjoy it and get there.

Jeff

My feeling is that having a grasp of backing, laying and trading would maximise my available options and, hopefully, my profit.

I don't see backing, laying and trading as 'all trades'. I see them as different facets of the same entity - betting.

I've seen people 'try' backing - and fail. They then 'try' laying because they somehow think that it's easier. They fail at that too. Finally, they give trading 'a go' because they think that it's easy. Of course, they fail as traders too.

I'm not one of those people. I look for races where the odds of a horse are obviously wrong and either back or lay, as appropriate. Unfortunately, such races are few and far between. My plan is to do my homework and develop my trading skills. That way, if a race doesn't contain a decent back or lay, I may be able to trade it.

[Wyndon]

I've got some great audio somewhere of me teaching somebody. I'll see if I can dig it out but you there is another problem as well and that's the ability of people to act on information. You often tell people exactly what to do, but curiously they just don't do it. That's how I've become fascinated by the psychological aspects of things.

Just watched the Storeyville documentary on BBC 4 (available on iplayer) featuring James Randhi a retired magician and escapologist who has devoted a good portion of his life to exposing faith healers, fortune tellers and psychics, who seek to profit from the gullible. The amazing thing is that, even though he has clearly demonstrated the fraudulent activities of some of these practitioners, people still wanted to believe. This even included eminent academics who performed so-called "controlled" experiments. Randhi actually suffered abuse from an audience who clearly didn't like what he was doing. At no time did he suggest these things were NOT possible - just that every case he'd examined had had a rational explanation. Interestingly one of his team put it like this - "People believe what they NEED to believe".

[Tonto]

I've got some great audio somewhere of me teaching somebody. I'll see if I can dig it out but you there is another problem as well and that's the ability of people to act on information. You often tell people exactly what to do, but curiously they just don't do it. That's how I've become fascinated by the psychological aspects of things.

I have a good friend but, love him as I do, he sometimes drives me up the freekin' wall. He's not much good with Excel and occasionally asks me to put together a spreadsheet for him. I'm a bit of a perfectionist and I test the spreadsheet to destruction before passing it to him.

A couple of weeks later, I'll contact him and ask how the spreadsheet is performing. Invariably, he'll tell me that he's ditched it. When I ask why, he'll tell me that it didn't work - even though I went to great lengths to find out precisely what he required it to do and tested it extensively to ensure that it did. I'll ask him to send me a copy of the spread sheet containing his data. When I receive it, I find that he's changed the spreadsheet and tried to get Excel to do things that it was never designed to do in ways that it was never designed to do them. In fact, very often, I struggle to determine what he was trying to do.

Why does he do this?

My feeling is that it's the Not Invented Here Syndrome (NIHS) in action. He didn't invent the spreadsheet and so he amends it so that he can claim that he did and, because of his lack of Excel knowledge, he screws it up.

What also happens is that, occasionally, I have an idea for a new system. I'll do some testing and, if it looks promising, I'll pass it to him for additional testing and verification. A double check of the system if you will.

A week or so later, I'll contact him to see how things are progressing. Invariably, I'll find that not only has he amended the system, he's also gone live without testing it, oh, and lost a shed load.

My theory is that he amends the system because of the NIHS and doesn't test the system because he believes that everything that he creates will work and therefore doesn't need testing, even though he has ample past evidence that this isn't the case.

I'm sure that things aren't this simple and I'm sure that there's other reasons.