I think it seems to escape some people that trading is a competitive rather than co-operative activity. Whether you like it or not everyone here is competing against one another to make money. The stop that cost you another trading loss was probably hit by someone here who you may have given advice to. If a trader has an edge that they have discovered through assiduous study and practice (as opposed to a weekend of curve fitting), an edge that consistently wins money on balance and withstands the test of time, why would they give it away simply because the person asking isn’t making enough money from their own system? It doesn’t make any sense. If you think about it logically you will conclude that there is a very good reason why over 90% of traders eventually fail at this game, even when they think they have mastered it.
I would have thought a more pertinent issue would be “Having the Ability to Create Edges”.
An edge exists at a moment, or collection of moments in Time. It does not live forever. Neither does it mean when it goes it is gone forever either. Even those who stand solidly by such long supported and apparently solid edifices such as Elliot, Gann and Fibs can find times and instruments where their relative charms and potions ‘work’ better than others and where their knowledge of how to implement the minutiae of their results of their research into their chosen discipline to more effective outcomes over time yields better results than simply sticking to what they were doing with it perhaps even just a few months earlier. Edges are born, develop and grow from study, research, experience, immersion and usage in the markets. If any one edge existed long enough for it to be recognised generally as such, it would be gradually traded out and would therefore never have been recognised as such in the first pace – and they aren’t – ever.
The ability to keep discovering new edges is key, not the miserly hoarding of ones you might currently have.
To assume any one of us negatively impacts our trading profit potential by interacting with others on these boards is naivety at its Zenith. The markets work on aggregate and to personalise your losses in this way does you genuine harm and takes your focus off where it should be centred. It’s just you – and the market – not other individuals here or anywhere else.
You could, if you had one, share your ‘edge’ with the bods on this and every other board and all your friends and family and you know, or you should know, full well, the vast majority would not trade it the way you trade it and would suffer greater to lesser results than do you. Those that did trade it exactly as you do would soon tire of it, or modify it or in some way diminish its efficacy. See my point below regarding lack of focus and change.
As for the ‘90% fail’ stat (to be proven), that is unlikely to do with not having an edge, but more to do with not managing risk or managing money or calculating position size, or getting the direction or momentum wrong, or getting it right, but at the wrong time or selecting the wrong instruments in the wrong phase of the cycle or looking at too detailed a level for the selected trading timeframe or not keeping the big picture in mind and any combination of this and many other factors.
An edge need be nothing more glamorous than the trading of an established trend or a breakout or Support & Resistance confirmations. Not much of an edge, but with all those other bits & bobs mentioned above in hand, it’ll provide you with an income. So yes, some ‘edges’ do ‘withstand the test of time’. But more of an issue is the trader themselves – even with basic and winning setups like those above, is the real issue them standing stand the test of time or is it the failure of the trader themselves to do so – do they tend to change themselves over time and therefore induce change in their methods and systems and often negatively impact their edge themselves? I tend to feel this happens far more frequently than any market induced changes to edges.
In my view, it does make sense to share your information with others to the extent that their operation upon your research can lead to useful feedback into other areas which you might not have originally considered. There are many traders on here that appear to specialise in going off at tangents to the main topic and it’s often a delight to me to find I often end up in totally disparate areas to that initially discussed and which have yielded immense benefit on many occasions – and not necessarily in trading.
Basically, you get back big time what you put out – can’t be any other way - and that works for both good and bad. It’s been said elsewhere that the market mirrors ‘you’. The fact is, and far more importantly, you mirror ‘you’…
To take your advice to its logical conclusion, this site should not exist as its prime objective is the sharing of information and exchange of ideas. Given the current and general mode of operation though, you are safe. No one will ask you to yield your weighty secrets on the inner workings of the market, nor force you to yield your special edges that you appear to want to guard so closely. But they will continue to be quite happy to share with you the fruits of their thinking and research so that you may perhaps find that edge for yourself. Which is why I presume you are still here?
