Comment by bongodongobob

Extremely solid advice. As someone who has worked at a trading company that makes the big bucks, I can say you (as a single investor) will never consistently beat the market on any remotely interesting instrument. The sheer resources the institutional traders put in is mind boggling. You must understand that you truly are gambling in the face of such a sophisticated opponent. The quicker you understand, the better (hopefully without losing your life savings first). And don't even think about derivatives, you will get eaten up and spat out like you can't imagine.

Isn't that how RenTech got started?

From what I understand, that fund still does huge gains, and can't get too big.

I tried for a long time with stocks, then I tried stock options. I eventually moved off to index and treasury futures. No money to be made in stocks, shitty leverage, high fees, LOUSY TAX TREATMENT and to complicate matters further shorting can be problematic. Also no "real" market is open 24h so you really just get to trade open-to-close standard hours. Stocks just have too many things going against you to make any money and thats before you figure your broker is front running you in the first place.

My basic strategy is that the signal/news/data contains no real information beyond whether or not people are buying or selling. When they stop selling I start buying and vice versa. Use your data skills to identify "things that work with regularity" and "things that rarely ever work" while at the same time understanding "literally any strategy works SOMETIMES".

Develop a roughly asymmetric strategy where your average gain is greater than your average loss per trade. The biggest thing you need is to pick some BIG WIN trades and ride them for a large profit. A small percentage of big wins pay for the losers and make the whole thing profitable. Remember that you "Make more money" by trading larger quantities, not by seeking larger moves. You don't "make money" so much as you harvest what the market gives you and if its not giving you close the trade. Your chosen trading system should reflect this.

Size your trades such that if you're betting N shares with $Y dollars now and you take a loss, you're coming back to the table with at least N shares and $Y dollars. Never loose $100 and find yourself in the position of recovering that loss with only $50 to play with. Read about "money management" in gambling for some ideas heres.

Don't be afraid of the short side either as you will make about half your money there. Don't be afraid to bet agains the trend and "call bullshit" on a move - your system should be designed to detect the success rates of these calls and should be looking for those situations.

For me its about using data to make bets where, in the event I win, I win pretty big and in the event I lose, I lose minimally.

USE BRACKET ORDERS FOR ALL POSITIONS OR PERISH. AUTOMATE YOUR STRATEGY OR PERISH. ALWAYS TAKE YOUR TRADES OR PERISH.

Making profitable trades here and there is EASY - keeping the money you made on those is the hard part.

EDIT: If you're concerned about "slippage" you have a bad strategy. If the strategy can be undone by a .75pt slip then you need to consider something else.

EDIT: Don't be seduced by the High Frequency Trading bullshit. You don't have the infrastructure for this and the fastest safest Rust code you can write is still connected to some slow retail trading infra here. Plenty of money to be made in Low Freq mode. 20 trades a month per instrument is a lot of trades a month!