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How have you performed against the market the last year? Let's just say a well-balanced portfolio, maybe a little risky, returned ~11% last year. A portfolio w

How have you performed against the market the last year? Let's just say a well-balanced portfolio, maybe a little risky, returned ~11% last year. A portfolio with just equities in varying sectors, I think a good number is probably around 20% return for 2017. Not extremely high-risk assets, but a reasonable amount in small cap, em, and international equities. Did you return greater than 20% last year? If so, that is quite remarkable in my opinion!

SirLJ 9y ago
On average my returns have been in the double digits and much better than the market 20%, even with back to back losing years - for some reason I am losing money at the bottom of the market cycles, when the market starts to rebound... I find it easier to have those kind of returns with small account (less than 5M/10M lets say), more than this and you are starting to move the market when placing trades, so it is much harder and cannot be back tested properly...
- odonnellryan 9y ago
  I'll be honest and say I don't believe you, because there's only three likely scenarios in my mind if you're telling the truth: 1) You are extremely smart, much more brilliant than people working at larger funds 2) You got extremely lucky with your strategy 3) Neither of these, it's actually "just that easy" to make money with these trading strategies None of these even approach the likelihood of it not being true... sorry. I don't mean to be negative, it's just, to me seems very dangerous to preach "you can make money in the market, too!" and anyone, in my experience, who says that has something to sell :)
  - SirLJ 9y ago
    Frankly I don't care, because I am not looking for customers, investors or employees :-) And I truly believe everyone can be a doctor, professional athlete, successful entrepreneur or stock market speculator, you just have to put the work required... Don't remember saying it was "easy", but for sure it is one hell of rewarding hobby and not hard to start, get some data, small linux system and start testing...
    - odonnellryan 9y ago
      I've built a few algo trading bots. There are a lot of challenging problems and it's very rewarding, just no direct financial reward. I was focusing on pure technical analysis, so maybe I was doing something wrong, but there weren't any strategies that I saw would work. No statistical analysis that I could do of the data could give me any insight. Testing out theories did not work, either! I didn't use ML or anything, research I did there didn't seem like it made sense to look into.
      - SirLJ 9y ago
        Welcome to my world :-) I was like you and took me few years to realize the technical analysis and candle shticks simply do not work... All those books, online trading courses and coaches are simply charlatans making money from teaching and not from trading... Maybe it did work in ancient Japan, but today even if you find someone crazy enough to sell you a working trading strategy, it will be quickly arbitraged by all the people using it... One advice: first focus on risk management; even with marginal trading strategy, with good risk management, you can still make constantly money in the stock market...
        justaguyhere 9y ago
        Here is my problem with these so called courses - if someone has figured out to time the market, why would they sell it for $47 (or whatever the amount)? It doesn't make any sense, unless that person is a college kid with no money of his own to invest (in which case, he wouldn't have the know how or be in a position to teach). Do you do day trading?
        SirLJ 9y ago
        No, I do not believe in day trading, I don't think I can compete with my few VPS servers against millions of dollars of HFT infrastructure, co-located servers in the exchange data centers, etc... The problem with all educators/gurus/coaches is not much the fact that you'll lose few thousand dollars to useless training, but when you start real trading you'll end up losing much more hard earned money using their strategies... Not to mention some of them will front run their students, buying low float and often penny stocks and alerting to the followers and selling into the spike and then will use the winnings as advertisement to lure the next batch of sheep to fleece... Don't forget: "There's a sucker born every minute" as my high school friend P.T. Barnum used to say ;-)

SirLJ 9y ago

On average my returns have been in the double digits and much better than the market 20%, even with back to back losing years - for some reason I am losing money at the bottom of the market cycles, when the market starts to rebound... I find it easier to have those kind of returns with small account (less than 5M/10M lets say), more than this and you are starting to move the market when placing trades, so it is much harder and cannot be back tested properly...

odonnellryan 9y ago
I'll be honest and say I don't believe you, because there's only three likely scenarios in my mind if you're telling the truth: 1) You are extremely smart, much more brilliant than people working at larger funds 2) You got extremely lucky with your strategy 3) Neither of these, it's actually "just that easy" to make money with these trading strategies None of these even approach the likelihood of it not being true... sorry. I don't mean to be negative, it's just, to me seems very dangerous to preach "you can make money in the market, too!" and anyone, in my experience, who says that has something to sell :)
- SirLJ 9y ago
  Frankly I don't care, because I am not looking for customers, investors or employees :-) And I truly believe everyone can be a doctor, professional athlete, successful entrepreneur or stock market speculator, you just have to put the work required... Don't remember saying it was "easy", but for sure it is one hell of rewarding hobby and not hard to start, get some data, small linux system and start testing...
  - odonnellryan 9y ago
    I've built a few algo trading bots. There are a lot of challenging problems and it's very rewarding, just no direct financial reward. I was focusing on pure technical analysis, so maybe I was doing something wrong, but there weren't any strategies that I saw would work. No statistical analysis that I could do of the data could give me any insight. Testing out theories did not work, either! I didn't use ML or anything, research I did there didn't seem like it made sense to look into.
    - SirLJ 9y ago
      Welcome to my world :-) I was like you and took me few years to realize the technical analysis and candle shticks simply do not work... All those books, online trading courses and coaches are simply charlatans making money from teaching and not from trading... Maybe it did work in ancient Japan, but today even if you find someone crazy enough to sell you a working trading strategy, it will be quickly arbitraged by all the people using it... One advice: first focus on risk management; even with marginal trading strategy, with good risk management, you can still make constantly money in the stock market...
      - justaguyhere 9y ago
        Here is my problem with these so called courses - if someone has figured out to time the market, why would they sell it for $47 (or whatever the amount)? It doesn't make any sense, unless that person is a college kid with no money of his own to invest (in which case, he wouldn't have the know how or be in a position to teach). Do you do day trading?
        SirLJ 9y ago
        No, I do not believe in day trading, I don't think I can compete with my few VPS servers against millions of dollars of HFT infrastructure, co-located servers in the exchange data centers, etc... The problem with all educators/gurus/coaches is not much the fact that you'll lose few thousand dollars to useless training, but when you start real trading you'll end up losing much more hard earned money using their strategies... Not to mention some of them will front run their students, buying low float and often penny stocks and alerting to the followers and selling into the spike and then will use the winnings as advertisement to lure the next batch of sheep to fleece... Don't forget: "There's a sucker born every minute" as my high school friend P.T. Barnum used to say ;-)