Does anyone have any suggestions for getting some training on day trading. I have spent some time looking but its difficult to know which is best.
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If you do find what you’re looking for, I don’t think Freetrade would be the right platform to do it on, until we get live prices or a price commitment, it will all end in tears.
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Yes, very possibly. Just something I am considering at the moment.
Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets: A Comprehensive Guide to Trading Methods and Applications (New York Institute of Finance)]
Murphy, John J.
Great book focussing on technical analysis which I highly recommend if that is of interest to you - however as highlighted above I feel FreeTrade is probably not the optimal platform for that type of speculating.
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Ignore anyone selling courses on how to do it. If they were good they’d be on an island somewhere…not sat telling you how to supposedly make money.
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And there lies the problem. How to differentiate between the guys making money out of training and the guys making money from trading.
Googling „efficient market hypothesis“ and „semi-strong market hypothesis“ might change your opinion on this. Even if you‘re a pro machine learning engineer you won‘t consistently make profits with technical analysis unless you have access to high-frequency data, massive compute resources, and work for Renaissance Technologies, 2 Sigma, or Citadel. There is simply no way to outperform the market using technical analysis.
Invest for the long-term!
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Not sure if I agree with this but thanks for your view.
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Disagree with that, You don’t need machine learning and you don’t need high frequency trading. You can’t beat high frequency trading bots over ultra short time periods, but you don’t need to and shouldn’t try. Technical analysis works on all time frames
Charts have information about how market participants reacted to a situation. They are a map of human behaviour in the past. Humans tend to react in similar ways to similar situations. You don’t use technical analysis to predict the future, you use it to analyse the past, and how market participants behave in similar situations in the past.
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I can’t help thinking that if technical analysis indicators worked particularly well then machine learning algorithms would have cleaned up years ago. The fact they haven’t suggests it only works until it doesn’t. However I would think the more supporting information you can feed in the more likely it is to work eg scraping the news for sentiment, announcements, sector trends, etc, but that’s where large scale compute resources would be needed. Well, that’s my novice experience when playing around with it where something that worked on training/test datasets never panned out in application. So I tend to skip all that now and just invest for the long term… seems a lot less effort and, with the aid of some very good forum posts here and a bit of research, more lucrative.
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The thing people don’t understand is technical analysis isn’t predicting the future, It’s analysing the past. It will never tell you exactly what the market is going to do next. But it can give you an idea about probabilities. The other things you need for trading is good money management and control of your emotions.
It’s not easy but people do make money with it, so it’s not impossible
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Correct me if I‘m wrong; with technical analysis you‘re analyzing the past to recognize patterns and learn about market behavior. I think I understand what you mean saying one is not directly predicting the future. Instead, one is trying to apply learnings from the past to similar situations in the future.
But this is exactly what many ML algorithms do (e.g. recurrent neural networks and some reinforcement learning algorithms) which evaluate such probabilities. The fact that these models aren‘t profitable in the long-term (at least without insane data and compute requirements) means that technical analysis performed by humans also is not profitable in the long-term. Even for sentiment analysis to work one must have an extremely fast ML model and connection to electronic markets which only professional firms might have - a winner takes all endeavor as Renaissance Technologies has demonstrated.
There is some sound reasoning to be made around the effectiveness of fundamental analysis in the long run, however, its superior returns have also been decreasing since the early 2000s.
The most reasonable risk-adjusted stock investment strategy is arguable to hold strongly diversified assets (which reduces unsystematic risk) and invest in some large-scale trends one believes in. Technical analysis will always have negative expected returns (due to transaction costs) similar to gambling.
I really appreciate Freetrade‘s mission to get everyone investing for the long-term although more educational resources could be made available to discourage day trading and technical analysis. Happy to discuss more, as this is an interesting topics and surely debatable.
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I don’t know why you think it needs super fast machine learning algorithms. You only need that if you are doing automated high frequency trading, That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about looking at similar situations in the past and trying to ascertain probabilities. You can’t predict the future with it, but you seem to think it’s completely worthless.
I’m not a day trader, but I made the decision to start buying stocks again in late march after the covid crash based on technical analysis (not done by me) that suggested we may have already seen the bottom. Turned out it was correct while many were still on the sidelines predicting further falls
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Search for SMB Capital or SevenPointsCap. Both have blogs and YouTube channels. You can read their materials before joining.
Two words: Mark Minervini. He isn’t a day trader and I wouldn’t use FT for day trading, but across a longer time frame and using other tools that provide volumes data (eg Koyfin, which is free) Mark’s book provides some really useful ideas on trading within a short-medium time frame.
I found his book after one of the FT board recommended the book 100 Baggers on an AMA in the summer (also an interesting read!).
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Thanks. I will take a look at this.
Thanks for this. I will look at them today.
Hi @Cotswool2, check out P8fx.com and thank me later. I’ve personally done the course and can vouch for them. They focus on forex trading but also touch on other markets - equities, crypto and even investing. Course isn’t too expensive and is totally worth it. Tell them you got the details from Ola. Good luck
Hi Ola. Thanks for this but can I just check that name/website?
Just to let you know I looked at these yesterday. They are both based in the States (I am in the UK) but I found the SMB site quite interesting and am set up for one of their webinars later.
Thanks again,