I will be recording a Q&A about anything market related with @RichardMoglen tomorrow for their annual @Traderlion conference.
Do you have any questions you want answered? Submit below
Trading cannot just be a hobby, this is a lifestyle.
It will change the time you spend with others, your habits, your diet, your mindset, your entire FUCKING life.
Do NOT think that when starting out you will be able to sit on the beach or at your house for 1-2 hours a day learning how to make money and do it full time for a living, that is DELUSIONAL.
Anybody luring you in that direction is leading you to a path of failure.
This should and will consume your entire life, especially in the earlier stages, if you are not going to bed and waking up thinking about ways to improve consistently you will NOT make it.
Its a job, a job that takes up all your time and is dictated by the market. Be prepared for more work than any regular job requires, if you are not prepared for that now, I'm giving you an early notice that you should stop from now.
Tape is important in #trading, but...it comes behind so many much more important other factors.
There is no way i would recommend beginner trader to focus majority of focus or study time on tape (l2 orderflow) itself over other stuff out there. Watching tape as newbie trader without having any context on tickers expectations is nearly useless. Prioritize. For example:
Statistical research 2 hours per day on how many tickers per month squeeze 100, 300, 1000% and sorting database will be far more useful and applicable than spending same time on order flow l2 observations.
Segragating tickers performances in % moves and multi-day runners chances IF there is hot sector presence vs not so, for one two or more years historically will be far more more useful research than spending those hours on watching level 2 action.
Observing how tickers behave when testing prior obvious high time frame levels (fake breakouts or clean rejects) and tracking this live or spending an hour daily to do it for 100s or 1000s of historical tickers will be more useful spent time than spending that same time on level2 observations.
Doing simple binary historical test on 1000s of breakout setups and checking how many fail or succeed and what is average delivery move might take a lot of hours to gather such data. Yet that time will be better spent for beginner bull trader than spending same hours on observing level 2.
Researching unique catalysts that every once a while have significantly bigger capital influxes, private placements, or have heavy hot sector exposure and spending an hour daily on that research for as many samples historically will be better spent time than spending that hour on watching live level 2 action on your ticker of choice.
By level 2 I mean regardless of tool used, whether its default tape window, Bookmap, footprint chart, doesn't matter. All same category.
Is level2 useful and something that trader needs to learn and get better at? Of course. But for beginner with 1 to 2 years of trading roll it is by no means priority. Addictive nature of traders make so many traders believe that staring at the chart of some ticker moving is better than doing research which is just not the case.
I have done thousands of hours on each side and know how to value one vs the other.
#smallcaps