Somehow I happened to be on the website of a journalist, with whom I did not have a relationship, and found him interviewing a person with excellent content regarding discretionary trading. The interview spells out almost everything, what i was going to write about discretionary trading, when did the survey.
Posted by Joe Schenk , president First New York Securities( group 3 the most famous Trading companies) And, where i started my career as a prop trader. Thought runs like a red thread, that trading is an art, and not science, which he memorized and went to thresh in the market.
Because of, written in the first sentence, I do not give a link, but I will copy, what does he have. Think, that he will forgive me. He doesn't read me anyway :)
From my experience, this is absolutely true. The best traders have an unexplainable gut feel that they are in tune with and trust in their decision-making process. Any technical or fundamental analysis does not represent hard and fast rules. The rules only work within the context of the overall direction and movement of the tape. Fundamental guys buying financials in 2008 without respect for the downward momentum would have seen painful losses. Likewise technicians highlighting a head and shoulders pattern in June 2009 failed to respect the incredibly strong bid that had entered the market. Intuition can certainly trump strictly quantitative strategies.
Simply put you will not win in the quantitative space; your approach must be different. In order for traders to succeed in a highly quant-driven tape they must develop a feel for the overall market and understand the ebb and flow of particular stocks and markets. Feel is very abstract, nearly impossible to teach and for the most part will only come through years of experience.
But there are two particular daily activities I believe traders can do to help significantly shorten the learning curve. First, follow prices. Making a purposeful effort to memorize prices will allow you to contextualize any movement over time. This includes internalizing charts in order to know the history of prices. Second, read read read. The only way to understand the prevailing psychology is to gauge price reactions against headlines. There are many great financial blogs out there that help in determining broad sentiment.
<…> Beyond developing feel, I believe traders are well-served by studying fundamentals. Trading plans must be arranged well before the stock hits the buy or sell points. Most important for me is background research on the underlying companies. My best trades have always occurred when I have the greatest amount of conviction in the idea. This conviction is only gained by putting in-depth research on the idea.
Holding stocks for longer periods of times will only be consistently profitable if you are correct on the motivating factors behind the buying or selling. While it is probably not necessary to know the long-term debt to capitalization ratio of a given firm for example, it is important to recognize catalysts and know their impact in order to swing trade effectively. With technical levels becoming more fluid than ever before, the ability to hold through tumultuous volatility is only possible by intertwining fundamentals into the equation in order to maintain confidence in the trade.
At the end of the day, as argued by Muthuswamy, “so went the pit trader for the electronic trader, so will the quant human trader go for the robo trader.” Admitting the inability to compete as a human is the first step, the second is to find a new method. There is huge opportunity in swing trading as volatility remains elevated currently at 27%. High beta names have huge ranges on daily basis. The keys for out-performance over the next few years will be those that are in tune with the tape and those that generate fundamental conviction for their trades.
