Are there any city traders on here?
Discussion
coyft said:
Andrew[MG] said:
Mystic said:
.... from my earlier posts in this thread, a "rough and ready" summary:
Dow low in March 2009 + 22 months (approx) = Dow top in May 2011
Dow top in May 2011 + 22 months (approx) = Dow low in 2013? (strong risk of being under low of 2009? - you betcha!!)
NB: the bear moves may be shorter in time length than the bull moves
Dow low in 2013? https://www.google.co.uk/finance?cid=983582 Coming soon?Dow low in March 2009 + 22 months (approx) = Dow top in May 2011
Dow top in May 2011 + 22 months (approx) = Dow low in 2013? (strong risk of being under low of 2009? - you betcha!!)
NB: the bear moves may be shorter in time length than the bull moves
Apologies for necroing an old thread but I felt compelled to point out that from 2009 to 2018 the DIJA has experienced one of the best bull runs on record circa 400% in 10 years from the low.
The DIJA 10 Year Chart looks anything but sideways.
I cannot believe that I stuck it out for 60 pages of this thread ...
The DIJA 10 Year Chart looks anything but sideways.
I cannot believe that I stuck it out for 60 pages of this thread ...
Edited by putonghua73 on Friday 12th April 13:19
number2 said:
It's always interesting seeing old threads like this pop back up - reading the sentiment and knowing how it all played out.
Talk about nostalgia!I was one of the phantom PM'rs in this thread, I thought it was fascinating. Still don't understand most of it but not all.
I notice that Mystic hasn't posted here for a while, reading it back he put a lot of time into this thread and was ridiculed non-stop
If anyone knows him, I hope he's well.
I've spent 20 years working on a trading desk in a bank. 10 years selling structured interest rate derivatives to corporate clients. 10 years doing varying roles involving IT, risk, regulatory change. when i started out the days of the essex barrow-boy were fading. now traders are almost all mathematicians/physicists or some type of boffin. trading floors are waaay smaller than they were (in terms of people) as most trading is now electronic, and banks cant run the risk they once did (for obvious reasons).
a good mate recently decided to pack in his day job and become a trader. he's buying low and selling high. Piece of p1ss, right? wrong. it doesnt matter which way you spin it, he's just punting the market, and without a sixth sense (which, admittedly, some do have) he's going to waste his time, or lose his shirt. he wont tell me how its going, which probably tells you everything you need to know
another mate, with a similar background to me (albeit with a way bigger brain) is making a fortune sports betting. he was a bond trader for a decade, while studying at imperial college he was also competing in european chess tournaments (you get the picture). he realised that football odds dont correctly price in volatility as matches get closer to the final whistle, and he takes advantage of that.
in summary, it doesnt matter what you're trading, but its a lot harder to make money from an efficient market (bonds, swaps, etc) than an inefficient one (sports betting, apples & oranges, etc)
a good mate recently decided to pack in his day job and become a trader. he's buying low and selling high. Piece of p1ss, right? wrong. it doesnt matter which way you spin it, he's just punting the market, and without a sixth sense (which, admittedly, some do have) he's going to waste his time, or lose his shirt. he wont tell me how its going, which probably tells you everything you need to know
another mate, with a similar background to me (albeit with a way bigger brain) is making a fortune sports betting. he was a bond trader for a decade, while studying at imperial college he was also competing in european chess tournaments (you get the picture). he realised that football odds dont correctly price in volatility as matches get closer to the final whistle, and he takes advantage of that.
in summary, it doesnt matter what you're trading, but its a lot harder to make money from an efficient market (bonds, swaps, etc) than an inefficient one (sports betting, apples & oranges, etc)
Lord Flasheart said:
in summary, it doesnt matter what you're trading, but its a lot harder to make money from an efficient market (bonds, swaps, etc) than an inefficient one (sports betting, apples & oranges, etc)
Very good point and one that's becoming more common in many other sectors outside of trading. The other issue is that at this level most ‘inefficiencies’ are as much a function of low liquidity as anything, which means that even if you find such a market it doesn’t tolerate any form of scaling.
A good examples being smaller investment trusts. You know what their constituents are so you can build fair value pricing models for them and you can track their discounts. At the same time you also know their daily average volumes which you can reweight against overall daily market volumes. That means that you can build a system that subject to constant fundamentals will highlight abnormal selling volumes that widen their current market discount away from their norm. The assumption made at that point is that a pension fund is selling out of a large position, working orders in the market, at which point you sit on the other side, soaking up some of that temporary excess supply at a discount with a view to selling once the fund has stopped selling and the price moves back up to the average discount it trades at. You can even lock in that value at the initial point of trade using a comparable product.
All the information is available to a retail investor and so is cheap execution and a basic home PC has the processing power. And the real benefit is that the amounts involved are too small for a trading desk to ever be bothered with.
But it is just much easier to become a millionaire overnight without doing any work by buying a trading system that studies skid marks or by taking on a bookie that prices efficiently.
A good examples being smaller investment trusts. You know what their constituents are so you can build fair value pricing models for them and you can track their discounts. At the same time you also know their daily average volumes which you can reweight against overall daily market volumes. That means that you can build a system that subject to constant fundamentals will highlight abnormal selling volumes that widen their current market discount away from their norm. The assumption made at that point is that a pension fund is selling out of a large position, working orders in the market, at which point you sit on the other side, soaking up some of that temporary excess supply at a discount with a view to selling once the fund has stopped selling and the price moves back up to the average discount it trades at. You can even lock in that value at the initial point of trade using a comparable product.
All the information is available to a retail investor and so is cheap execution and a basic home PC has the processing power. And the real benefit is that the amounts involved are too small for a trading desk to ever be bothered with.
But it is just much easier to become a millionaire overnight without doing any work by buying a trading system that studies skid marks or by taking on a bookie that prices efficiently.
thats a good point ...though low liquidity usually correspondingly means imperfect market.
i put a load of money on dan ricciardo to win monaco (at something like 10:1) and also on vettel to win the WDC 2 years back just after winter testing (at similar odds). to anyone that follows F1 closely it was clear that RBR were favourites, and that Ferrari had shown epic pace in testing. so why were they so far off? cause none of the bookies give a sh*t about a sport that only has 20 events a year, so they're lazy and give it no attention. So why cant guys like me make a fortune out of beating the bookies? cause there arent enough races to average-out our losses when we're wrong.
Football, on the other hand is different. include africa and south/central america, and there are dozens of games a day you can bet on daily, with loads of bookies making prices. so if you find a mispricing (as my friend is doing) then it doesnt matter if you get a few wrong, because you'll have more that you get right. try to do that in F1 and it could take you a year to recover your losses....which makes for a painfully boring trading strategy
i put a load of money on dan ricciardo to win monaco (at something like 10:1) and also on vettel to win the WDC 2 years back just after winter testing (at similar odds). to anyone that follows F1 closely it was clear that RBR were favourites, and that Ferrari had shown epic pace in testing. so why were they so far off? cause none of the bookies give a sh*t about a sport that only has 20 events a year, so they're lazy and give it no attention. So why cant guys like me make a fortune out of beating the bookies? cause there arent enough races to average-out our losses when we're wrong.
Football, on the other hand is different. include africa and south/central america, and there are dozens of games a day you can bet on daily, with loads of bookies making prices. so if you find a mispricing (as my friend is doing) then it doesnt matter if you get a few wrong, because you'll have more that you get right. try to do that in F1 and it could take you a year to recover your losses....which makes for a painfully boring trading strategy
And even with those sports scenarios a winning account pops up on the quoting desk pretty quickly and gets nicked about with with the ultimate sanction being their name going onto the black list meaning they have to keep using new accounts under other names which aren’t permitted the same initial firepower.
Hence why smart punters do better by taking the other side of losing punters where the bookie acts as broker and doesn’t run B book exposure to someone more efficient in a particular market than they can be.
Hence why smart punters do better by taking the other side of losing punters where the bookie acts as broker and doesn’t run B book exposure to someone more efficient in a particular market than they can be.
Lord Flasheart said:
which, coincidentally, was started by an ex city trader (or at least i think it was)
There were three of them. I remember sitting in a meeting with them many years ago as a junior when our firm had a sports betting arm and our owners thought they were jokers. Within a few years they were bigger than our entire business and we were looking tonoffload the sports book. Laying on Betfair was, I think, how Jasper White made his money but even then the issue with the smaller markets is that you can only write as much as the punters are willing to buy and the nature of the inefficient markets is that there aren’t many punters operating in them.
As you say, trading for a consistent profit is hard and personally Indont think retail traders can. Their pots are too small to deliver a revenue that can be lived off for the type of trading that is profitable but even more importantly is the problem that retail traders have erroneous expectations of returns that always steers themninto taking risks that guarantee a pot decimating draw-down event within 24 months, usually within 3 months on average.
Slightly O/T but one of my BIL's is a footie fanatic and has taken up betting over the last few years. He says he does not lose much (never coughs to having won much either, the tight-fisted git) but the hospitality he's had from the platforms he trades on is worrying. He has a very ordinary job, and a wife and a mortgage etc. etc. so can't have too much disposable income, but he's been invited to corporate boxes at major games and the like.
Digga said:
Slightly O/T but one of my BIL's is a footie fanatic and has taken up betting over the last few years. He says he does not lose much (never coughs to having won much either, the tight-fisted git) but the hospitality he's had from the platforms he trades on is worrying. He has a very ordinary job, and a wife and a mortgage etc. etc. so can't have too much disposable income, but he's been invited to corporate boxes at major games and the like.
I'd say he's losing a fair bit.....Someone’s getting paid enough to warrant throwing a few free sandwiches about to keep that money flowing in etc.
There can be many reasons but by far the most common one is that the person eating the free sandwiches has paid a couple of grand for the sandwich already and looks really good for buying the next free sandwich at an even higher price.
There can be many reasons but by far the most common one is that the person eating the free sandwiches has paid a couple of grand for the sandwich already and looks really good for buying the next free sandwich at an even higher price.
would agree that it seems very unusual to be getting freebies of that kind whilst betting small (less than £100 amounts) regularly. I’d have thought to even be in their radar for freebies you’d be into the thousands regularly to even be noticed on the system.
I also love to call BS on people who say they regularly win big amounts, because it wouldn’t take long for the major chains to limit your account and the value of the bets.
I also love to call BS on people who say they regularly win big amounts, because it wouldn’t take long for the major chains to limit your account and the value of the bets.
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