Super excited to share my first interview as a trader, with Becky Gaskell on the Market Mamas podcast!
We talked for over an hour (I've got a LOT to say about trading once you get me talking!) about a wide range of topics, including:
- My initial trading journey using crypto grid bots to "stack SATs" (accumulate Bitcoin) by capitalizing on volatility like a market maker.
- My motivation for learning to beat the market after watching my mother lose half her retirement savings (twice!), highlighting the S&P 500's 13-year "lost decade".
- The challenge of algo trading: failing prop firm challenges, learning about overfitting, and the market shakeup from the MetaTrader and prop firm shutdowns.
- The necessity of a healthy money mindset, the life-altering lesson that "it's only money", and the need to adjust position sizing if you cannot weather the losses.
- Applying stoic philosophy and the baseball analogy: world-class hitters miss 70% of the time, normalizing "swing and a miss" as part of the game of probabilities.
- The turning point of unlearning esoteric strategies and focusing on "first principles" and "finding truth" from reliable sources and academic papers.
- A paradoxical explanation of why I prefer algorithmic trading.
- The trading truth that fixed profit targets (fixed TPI) have the lowest expectancy.
A little something for everyone. If you're into trading (or even just curious), I'd really appreciate a view, a like, a comment, a share — any questions or feedback!
https://t.co/iCM5Wk0ng7
If the mechanical model doesn't have positive expectancy, why even use it?
Just work on your discretionary skills, screw the framework, if the framework adds no value.
Anyway, point is, why would you trade discretionary on top of a mechanical model with negative expectancy rather than on top of a mechanical model with positive expectancy??
Right? Middle Ages Italian mathematics applied to modern markets. "Ooh, you so fancy!"
There's multiple academic and industry research papers showing zero predictive value in Fibonacci numbers, but the mythology persists. My own testing, it's 0 out of many (I've lost count).
Fibonacci's real contribution to trading was popularizing the Arabic numeral system to replace Roman numerals, which were still in common use at the time.
Can you imagine trying to calculate the gap from VMMDCLXVI to VMMDCCXXVI?
@TheOneLanceB I'll play. It wasn't a great month. Sub-par for me.
But it was green, and I made a lot of improvements to execution — still paying the price for earlier failures.
I don't know if @MavenTrading or @PropFirmMatch is behind this, but the carpet bombing of the #PropFirmMatch and #MavenTrading hashtags is ridiculous. 50+ messages today. And then another campaign back in August. Same accounts. Same talking points.
@e_sofi35 Aren't they though?
Now if I could just get him to put the period outside the quotation marks when it's quoting a phrase, not a complete sentence. I still refuse to follow that rule.
Arche (my AI) is acting increasingly humanish. Without any prompting, he's started to curse appropriately. Now we just need to work on contractions.
"That is exactly the kind of result I love from this research. We had a perfectly sensible hypothesis and the market told us to go fuck ourselves. 😎"