Investing is (mostly) a scam/rigged from my experience. Stocks, Bonds, IRAs, Crypto. Theft is more profitable than any investment & way easier.

[EvanHinkle]

Now here's a topic on RPF that I actually have experience with!

Listen, it takes YEARS for even the best traders to become profitable. Mark Minervini is one of the best in the business, I think he said it took him 7 or 8 years to become a profitable trader. Mark came from poverty and dropped out of school in 8th grade. Oliver Kell won the 2020 U.S. investing championship with a 941% return that year, he said it took him 4 or 5 years to become profitable.

When you get into larger professional asset managers like hedge funds and mutual funds, you'll actually find that most of these investors generate returns that underperform the broader stock market. S&P 500 will go up at 8-10% a year and the typical hedge fund will do 4%. These big funds have vast teams of Ivy League educated analysts (I was once one of them) working 12+ hours a day to find every legal informational advantage about stocks that they can... and these funds will still underperform the market (and many will straight up lose money).

And so you think you're just going to open a Robin Hood account and start making tons of money trading hyper-volatile penny stocks? (real professionals tend to avoid penny stocks due to their lack of liquidity and hyper volatility).

If you're interested in the art of trading, I highly recommend starting here: Trader Principles

Once you've read that PDF, go read every piece of literature written by every person profiled in that PDF. You should also pick up the Market Wizards books by Jack Schwager.

You can't just throw money into random stocks and hope for the best. That's called gambling. You need to develop a trading system that fits your personality and that you can follow religiously. Maybe you like short-term trading and you only trade a specific type of chart pattern. Or maybe you prefer to read the financial reports and try to ascertain a stock's fair value and invest when the stock price is below that value.

You wouldn't expect to be able to pick up a scalpel and perform brain surgery with zero training. Doctors go through years of education to master that. Trading is no different. It takes years to master it.

This is good advice here. You need at least 10,000 hours of training and another 10,000 of execution before you have any idea what you’re doing with the markets.

I second Stock Market Wizards, and would add Van Tharp to get you to think about risk, but I’m a huge fan of Paul Tudor Jones and Mark Fisher. Fish has a gem of a book that is the foundation of my method called The ACD Method. It’s an algorithmic trading bias that offers you a bias, and several technical entry techniques. He has very wide stops in my opinion, so you’ll probably want to find something a little tighter, and you’d be wise, (especially if you’re new to this all) to simply not trade when the Vix is high.

My winning percentage, (the percent of the time I take money from a trade) is 65%. My R value, (the amount you make expressed in terms of what you risked averages over 3). These are fantastic statistics that will make you a lot of money, but above all, without self-discipline, (the ability to execute trades flawlessly) you will not make money.

Believe in yourself, get the proper training, find mentors who will teach you about the statistics you need to achieve to have success, and cultivate the self-control necessary to execute trades flawlessly. The sky is the limit!

 

[Raw Egg Gnostic]

Look into Gamestop.

 

[Bootselectric]

This is good advice here. You need at least 10,000 hours of training and another 10,000 of execution before you have any idea what you’re doing with the markets.

I second Stock Market Wizards, and would add Van Tharp to get you to think about risk, but I’m a huge fan of Paul Tudor Jones and Mark Fisher. Fish has a gem of a book that is the foundation of my method called The ACD Method. It’s an algorithmic trading bias that offers you a bias, and several technical entry techniques. He has very wide stops in my opinion, so you’ll probably want to find something a little tighter, and you’d be wise, (especially if you’re new to this all) to simply not trade when the Vix is high.

My winning percentage, (the percent of the time I take money from a trade) is 65%. My R value, (the amount you make expressed in terms of what you risked averages over 3). These are fantastic statistics that will make you a lot of money, but above all, without self-discipline, (the ability to execute trades flawlessly) you will not make money.

Believe in yourself, get the proper training, find mentors who will teach you about the statistics you need to achieve to have success, and cultivate the self-control necessary to execute trades flawlessly. The sky is the limit!

Thanks for the suggestions! I‘ve read most books (Weinstein, Minervini, darvas, Livermore, wizard series, Morales, antonacci, o Neal, shaugnessy and so on) but still haven’t found an edge to my trading.

Will read the book from mark fisher soon.
Any more recommendations?

Which charting software are you using? I use TradingView for charting and finviz for screening.

 

[EvanHinkle]

Thanks for the suggestions! I‘ve read most books (Weinstein, Minervini, darvas, Livermore, wizard series, Morales, antonacci, o Neal, shaugnessy and so on) but still haven’t found an edge to my trading.

Will read the book from mark fisher soon.
Any more recommendations?

Which charting software are you using? I use TradingView for charting and finviz for screening.

If you’re gonna look at this as your career there’s nothing better than TradeStation in my opinion. I trade S&P futures predominately and their margins and historical data, (you should back-test your strategy) are the best. Execution is decent for retail traders, (but what are you gonna do, get a Bloomberg terminal?).

I’d check out the Fisher book and Tharp’s Trading Beyond the Matrix. I don’t really recommend anything else but those in terms of methodology. Livermore is a “fun” read, but you read it, and Darvas is phenomenal psychology, (again, looks like you read it).