Any of you believe in the luck aspect of trading

If you trade a system its much better if the first few years are better than average rather than below average. You get to grow your equity alot faster in the beggining when you most need it. In the long it averages out but its much better to get lucky in the first few years as this is when your fixed overheads are highest relative to your account size.
 
Surprised no-one's replied yet with the well-known Gary Player quote:

"The harder I practice, the luckier I get".

I've noticed that too...
 
donaldduke said:
If you trade a system its much better if the first few years are better than average rather than below average. You get to grow your equity alot faster in the beggining when you most need it. In the long it averages out but its much better to get lucky in the first few years as this is when your fixed overheads are highest relative to your account size.
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I had quite a good debate by PM with one of the "all is known in advance" crowd on exactly this point. To use a simplified argument 7 winning trades followed by 3 losing trades, isn't the same as 3 losing trades followed by 7 winners when you look at the effect it has on your account balance, and therefore luck does have a part to play.

I think the majority are affected by random chance far more than they'd like to acknowledge.
 
zupcon said:
I had quite a good debate by PM with one of the "all is known in advance" crowd on exactly this point. To use a simplified argument 7 winning trades followed by 3 losing trades, isn't the same as 3 losing trades followed by 7 winners when you look at the effect it has on your account balance, and therefore luck does have a part to play.

I think the majority are affected by random chance far more than they'd like to acknowledge.
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True. And depending upon when one starts to trade a set rules will influence the (initial) success of the results.
The outcome of this type of luck (be it good or bad), may manifest itself in whether it affects the traders decision to trade them rules.
EG. After a series of 7 losses, does the trader pull the plug on their rules, or keep faith with them. If they abandon the rules, sods law says that they are likely to miss the biggest winner of the day/week/month/year.
 
From Trading in the Zone (Mark Douglas):
You don't need to know what is going to happen next in order to make money. Why? Because there is a random distribution between wins and losses for any given set of variables that define an edge. In other words, based on the past performance of your edge, you may know that out of the next 20 trades, 12 will be winners and 8 will be losers. What you don't know is the sequence of wins and losses or how much money the market is going to make available on the winning trades. This truth makes trading a probability or numbers game. When you really believe that trading is simply a probability game, concepts like right and wrong or win and lose no longer have the same significance. As a result, your expectations will be in harmony with the possibilities.
 
i suppose it depends. if your the type that approaches the markets as if they were a casino and takes big gambles (bets)..then yes..luck may be important to you.
if you look at the market in terms of risk control and probabilites...then not so much.

just my perspective.
 
Luck research

Some serious work has been done BBC NEWS | Magazine | The loser's guide to getting lucky

Lucky people:
They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

Here are Professor Wiseman's four top tips for becoming lucky:

* Listen to your gut instincts - they are normally right

* Be open to new experiences and breaking your normal routine

* Spend a few moments each day remembering things that went well

* Visualise yourself being lucky before an important meeting or telephone call. Luck is very often a self-fulfilling prophecy

This all seems to reinforce the psychological aspect of trading which so many experts deem to be the most important success factor in trading.
 
This is a great thread. "Luck" is alot of fun to have, even more fun when you know when luck has presented itself to you and you just take the lucky opportunity and run with it.

Great example: Most people would say that its difficult to find a job in todays market. Everytime someone says this to me, I politely counter their perspective and say " it is only has hard as you want it to be :)". They look at me like i'm crazy and get a little defensive. It's to be expected, and often I just walk away with a smile hopefully leaving them with something to think about.

I say this with confidence for a bit while I'm looking for a higher paying job to help fund my account much faster then my current one.

Suddenly, out of the blue, I see an ad for a great paying job that doesn't require a college degree, no expereince, and no special licenses...I applied for it. Took an entry test - prior to I imagined myself passing this in spades - and apparently by the looks of the hiring manager, I was a freakin genius. Got the position and am enjoying always consistent hours and great pay at my local bank.

It helped that I meditated 3 days prior to seeing this opportuinity I hadn't previously ever thought of...I was open to anything that would truly help me raise money the fastest to beef up my trading account, and I got just that...with almost no gas money to get there, its a bargain.

That I suppose is this mysterious thing called "luck".

Listening to music, meditating, and flirting (with chicks) are just a few things that helps raise my vibrations frequently
 
Luck is...

being in the right trade, with stops that are not hit...and you let it run. Profits keep adding up, wow it feels great, refreshing. It just happens, but only with a WELL DEFINED system. Chances of success are greater when you can withstand multuple losses and stay in the game.

I was trading EUR/USD a couple of days ago. I bot in at support and I had thought the range was a bit tight, but stops were not hit. And then wham, up over 20 pips..within seconds. Cool, I didn't expect more than a few pips. Sweet Luck :)

Luck is a nice reward, but don't expect it to come and find you.
 
stockoperatr said:
just curious.
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Interesting question...

Personally, I believe that some traders "seem" to be very lucky all the time only because they consistently are profitable. This is due in large part to their experience.

I'd rather be good than lucky.
 
I always like this - it is not about being lucky, its about not being unlucky. I can sense a tinge of feeling "lucky" on some days!
 
I believe in luck, but only in the sense of random events happening, and some are good, and some are bad. Nicholas Nassim Teleb wrote a book about this sort of thing: "Fooled By Randomness". Some of those "masters of the universe" thought they were geniuses because they got lucky and were in a bull market for a long time. They may know better by now. His other book "The Black Swan" was written before the "credit crunch" and all that followed, but appears to almost predict it. Of course he did not predict it, but what he predicted was that sooner or later, some event like that would come along and take most people by surprise. People are now flocking to his door, I gather.


On another tack I like the idea that some people who appear lucky, "make their own luck" by being ready to seize an opportunity when it comes along, and make the most of it. Many of us, perhaps most of us, don't even see them when they are under our noses.
 
Big believer in "you make your own luck". With what others have said, but also just that people who consider themselves to be "unlucky" are for the most part, just miserable people who don't have much different fortune then people who are happy and consider themselves "lucky", it's just perspective.

In the trading world. I guess I don't. Price is dependent on buying and selling. People buy and sell for a reason, and information is pretty much perfect. Occasionally someone will enter an order by mistake, but it's a drop in the ocean, and probably someone cancelling it out doing the reverse.

I guess the point in the trading world, is that while luck might effect a few things (example: someone hit some oil where they didn't there would be any?), the markets are so immense and depend on so many factors (there's a lot of oil out there), that it doesn't matter any significant amount.
 
The interesting thing is when traders lose they sometimes feel unlucky, however when they win they feel it isn't lucky. good point by the bramble.
 
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