10 ways to speed up the process & improve our bottom line1- Get good: make sure you spot patterns and avoid mistakes by practicing
First of all obviously, and I did not find this in the "how to improve performance lists" I looked at on the internet, obviously you want to avoid mistakes as much as possible and also we want to make sure we never miss out.
So every single day checking the news and/or charts and any other source we may find helpful.
And then also regularly going through past trades, taken or backtested, going through the whole process, and even using tradingview replay button on past price action to train our recognition skills, learn to not fomo in, and more.
The first 5 years are the hardest they say, and then the price action pops out more easily.
2- Get good: keep reading and learning
I'm sure many if not most ideas & strategies see their first spark when we just spend time reading about markets and looking at charts without specifically looking for a strategy, it just comes naturally we spot patterns with time.
So keep spending time taking an interest in everything, when you get a little light appear over your head go check if it has any value if a strat can be derived out of it, and this all should just happen by itself over time.
3- Trade lower timeframes, higher timeframes
You could get into statistical arbitrage, crypto arbitrage and market making, or any other short term activity.
The barrier to entry is here, the skill floor is not down to zero, so there is a large investment to make just to get started.
If you are currently hardstuck, it might be interesting, probably not very, from what I have seen most of the money is made using expensive technology and day trader data to take money from the usual retail victims (100% of day traders are "retail" traders).
But if there is a bone with a bit of meat left and it's not too much effort for the reward, even getting an extra 2-3% a year might be worth it.
Another solution, more intelligent but less attractive to the average "retail" beginner is to look at higher timeframes.
One could have no short term activity on a currency that is very choppy and very slow but take a long term position and get a little bit of extra profit. Also with aiming for long term when possible we can get more out of the market, bigger winners (more "pips") = more profit, and spreads become insignificant.
4- Build another business
It can take the focus away, the smart entrepreneur will avoid getting too ambitious and beign a jack of all trades master of none, if one is hopelessly stuck at a ceiling they can't breakout of it could be a good idea to stop forcing and look somewhere else, the ceiling might be easier to break later on.
A business can add more stable cash inflow, reduce risk and net worth or income volatility, and keep us from tearing our hair out when we aren't getting the amount of setups we want in the markets.
5- Increase position size
Go big like Bill Hwang, then blow up like Bill Hwang. This guy over the years (15 years I think) made more than 60% a year return without much people knowing about it as he was running a family office, he grew in 8 years if my source is correct 200 million into 10 billions. At first he tried to speed up the process by cheating, he got caught up in several insider trading scandals so then he tried something else which was leverage. And blew up.
His positions being so big makes it even worse, and being concentrated, such a whale exiting crashes these stocks completely.
Even the big company Baidu lost 50% of its market cap.
Us plebes don't even come close. Even a "large" 1 million dollar account is 1/10,000 th of his 10 billion.
I am not encouraging anyone to be a degen gambler I'm saying someone that lives in the west and has been profitable might think "I am willing to risk these 5000 euros", such an account can be built back even by simply working at mcdonalds for a while.
The gambling type that risks everything is not the type that ever manages to be profitable.
Still, while small we might want to take on a bit more risk, a reasonable amount, to hopefully speed up the process a bit.
But this is not the only tool and used after all the other stuff improving etc.
So here's perhaps an idea to be looked at. Several companies share prices dropped massively, that's not some legit regular price discovery, the price was destroyed because of a whale causing a fire sale. The term "oversold" could maybe be applied here.
Where are all the retail gamblers? Aren't they buying this time? They always chase crashes. Scared? Or maybe too small, or maybe they sold already when the price slightly bounced and they were up 1% LOL!
6- Improve a strategy RR & WR OR allow for a lower PF but get more signals
Once you have a working strategy you still improve as an investor but the strategy itself should not be getting optimised all the time or something is wrong.
Until we get it right we keep backtesting and working out the contours and details of our strategy, we insist on it to trade it correctly like improving a skill, then once this is done we look for something else and just run it making sure to still give it some time.
7- Add another strategy
An obvious way to get more setups hence more profits is to get a new strategy, but this is done only when the previous one(s) is mastered.
You can expect this to take 3 months to a couple of years. And it can interfere with your focus of the other one, it can also be somewhat correlated so have to watch out for that. It is a big project.
Does not mean we can't always be on the lookout for new strategies and new knowledge, just don't always try trading new strategies, just put the "potential" ones in a corner of your head (and excel DB) and progressively come back to it until at some point after months or years you gathered enough info and really get into it all in. There are several strategies, for stocks in particular I have been looking at, for example I have been posting here and there on this site about the "dead stock bounce" thing but I never traded it, maybe one day I'll start doing so. For now I still have a whole lot to learn about Forex plus a couple of commodities.
The easier way to avoid correlations and other troubles is to have a strong trend following strategy, and then another one for other scenarios. And of course when you end up taking a trend following buy on a currency make sure your other strategy buy is not on a correlated one...
8- Trade more assets
More uncorrelated assets, if they do not hurt performance = more cashing 🤑🤑🤑!
Especially when not much is moving with Forex, just going back and forth, and here you have the S&P 5000 that broke 4000 without hesitation after whales got liquidated and banks had to take the hit, it even gapped up, a bit early to cry victory and stonks time horizons are not the same as Forex ones, but for now it is STRONG and it sure got my attention. Been buying since September/October but been more eager recently.
Not a simple snap of fingers and here we go, adding instruments to our activity is a big project, just like a business that sells printers to China starting to produce protection for cellphones for Taïwan or whatever. People think abstract = easy. I'm laughing since it is the opposite. The more intellectual something is, the more difficulty gets ignored, "let's just use a magic wand to make covid disappear" ye good luck with that, what a mentality. Next let's ask devs to code 10 thousand lines a day like it's physical labor and let's ask a scientist picked at random to find the cure for cancer it's easy very little manual labor.
There is such a lack of respect for mental activities, it's beyond.
9- Push these winners to the limit
S&P again. I've said a while ago I wanted to get really aggressive with the S&P 500 and Bitcoin, I just contained myself 1-2 hours ago to not buy more S&P because I am already ***** deep at that point.
This is not the same as being the typical dumb money and greedy pigs that gamble and get wiped out and never are heard form again.
If you have this urge to go on the offensive real hard, but within reason as a skilled trader, you can improve your performance.
Just don't go all Bill Hwang. Ah if he went aggressive but was 40/40/20 in stocks/forex & cme futures/safe holdings and a bit less concentrated (or in larger cap stuff) he'd be alive now.
Humans evolved to "survive against all odds", agility intelligence and social structures helped.
"Never give up and survive against all odds" this is not what the markets reward. Markets rewards ambush predators.
Get your example from the cheetah, these superfast cats are like bullets. They patiently watch their preys, as we should.
Then they run. And 90% or more of the time the prey gets away. The cheetah could easily catch it but is it worth it? NO.
A cheetah will not take a diminished risk reward, it will "give up" all the time, "oh noes" says the slow human meatbag, "never give up".
Well the cats that survive, that's who. Capitalism 101. The longer they chase, the more calories they spend. Costs go up.
Risk also goes up, as they get tired they become more vulnerable AND these seconds they spend chasing they are not paying attention to anything else.
So they become less likely to escape or fight off danger, while being much less alert of danger for a long while.
The risks are not worth it, and the costs either.
Even while being patient and carefully choosing their prey and the moment they go in, 9 out of 10 get away.
So they might lose let's say 200 kcalories each time. But now is the good part, once they get one secured, they don't just take a quick bite and run away like all these bagholding profit snatching retail traders. They are destroying that prey. 30,000 calories at once. One big meal. They eat everything. Winrate 5-10% reward/risk 150. Now that's a good trader that extracts all he can from his winners.
10- You can't so learn to be patient
RIP. We can always keep improving and doing more and the sky is the limit, but no matter what we do we have to accept that we are going to have to be patient and no one just goes from poor to super rich overnight. It's so hard, but there is no choice. Got to be patient. We are not the FED or the ECB we do not own a money printer.
