JP Grunin: From $10,000 to $100,000 in 6 months.

OP-

A couple points from a fellow trader (just equities, and longer term than what you do...).

both points are related to your 'Day 1' youtube video.

Point 1: I just trade equities, but I learned VERY EARLY never to add it losing positions. I don't average down. I don't guess bottoms. I find good entries and then add to my winners. And it works.

Why are you adding to losing positions? I never would add until I see a trade is going my way and moving favorably.

point 2: You mentioned in the vid that you should have gotten out of the trade but were under a lot of pressure to have a big day to start the challenge, so you ended up abandoning your usual practices, staying in, and losing a lot.

I'm all for pushing the envelope, but if you've used certain methods to become a good trader over the past 2 years, I don't see the purpose of this challenge if you start yourself off with so little capital, and require yourself to double up so many times, that you abandon all successful trading practices and just 'wing it' and become reckless.

Why not just take your 10k to the casino and put it on 'black' in roulette?

I don't doubt that you're a good trader, but I don't see the benefit of the challenge if it requires you to basically gamble on the first few trades hoping to hit a home run so THEN you'll have enough capital to make an honest run at the 100k goal.

I would have loved to see the goal be 40k. Or to see you start with around 30K and see you then try to grow it to 100K.
 


drave said:
i think he means everything outside "your hand" and "other players". in poker, that's it insofar as variables, and that scenario doesn't change between overt participant actions. in market speculation, there is weather, political risk, social media, broad market movement (and other inputs that are outside the local environment) that don't sit still until the end of the hand.

stock prices move alot faster now and are influenced by alot more outside influences than they used to be in buffett's heyday.
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Again, I was not making the statement that trading and poker were interchangeable, identical activities. If I say a Mustang is a pony car just like a Camaro, I don't mean they literally have the same engines, body panels, and are both built by the same company.

As far as comparing trading to gambling goes, poker is much closer than a purely random game with statistical constraints because the outcome is more sensitive to the actions of participants than the random falling of cards. In 3-5 deck blackjack if you play by a certain set of rules you can win more often than not, but it is purely based on playing the random variables as the actions of the dealer are mandated and unchanging. You are purely playing the odds, not the other people involved. In poker one can win by learning how other players react to certain conditions then adapting and hedging accordingly. In the context of gambling, poker is closer to trading than a random game, that was my point.

You guys are looking waaayyyy too deeply into a post with 15 words in it.
 
cassius said:
You guys are looking waaayyyy too deeply into a post with 15 words in it.
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Are we? Because you said simply 'trading = poker'. I'd say you weren't looking deeply enough.

A day trader can set up an account, say $10k, and have his strategy, his entry points, his discipline, alerts, maybe some paid research. Okay. Great. Plenty of us have been there - we steel ourselves up like we're bulletproof.

Typically, what that trader has also done is create his own world where his $10,000 matter more than any $10,000 on earth. He tells himself he's being careful, and to the casual observer he appears to be, but what he's really doing is setting the table for a feast in honor of his psychological weakness, whatever it is, to be gobbled up by a market that has no feelings whatsoever. No one is bigger than the market - smartest guy in the world can't tell you if the Dow is going up or down tomorrow.

So whatever the weakness of this trader is be it impatience, propensity to overanalyze, superstition, recklessness, gullibility, skittishness ... the buying and selling of securities will eventually coax it out of the trader and use it like a wooden mallet to hammer his balls.

Reminisces of a Stock Operator should be mandatory reading for this thread, such an enjoyable book - and it takes you through the psychological wringer of trading.
 
Thanks to following Mcgrunin's trades I have to eat instant noodles for the next year. #stock #trading #guru

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there's been a couple times today where he could have closed out the QQQ position for a +$1,200 gain , but I don't think he did that or we would have seen an update.
 
mGrunin said:
When I have stated such lofty goals, I have already confronted the fact that I would be taking risk that is out of my normal trading habits. I won't be able to hit the 900% return without going balls in, in several different stances and come out ahead.
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Actually you don't need to take huge risks. Six months is actually quite a long time - 183 days. And there is the power of compounding. You only need to make about 2% a day after trading costs, and then plunge the profits back in, to get there.

Step away from thinking you have to make large trades or do anything risky. Ideally you should only risk 2% - 5% of your available capital each trade, so that it doesn't matter if one or two go wrong, you won't get wiped out. There are always going to be mistakes, the key to success is making sure they don't wipe you out.

There are a series of books on trading psychology by Mark Douglas - from memory, one was called "The Disciplined Trader". Head over to Amazon, buy them and read them this weekend. Success and failure in this stuff is really down to the game in your head, not reading signals on a chart (if it was just about reading signals on a chart, someone would have programmed a bot to do it automatically to present you with the $100k at the end of the six months while you spent time on the beach).

Good luck!
 
tmoney said:
there's been a couple times today where he could have closed out the QQQ position for a +$1,200 gain , but I don't think he did that or we would have seen an update.
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Well at least it's not a loss...hopefully starts this thing going in the right direction.

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davidne said:
Well at least it's not a loss...hopefully starts this thing going in the right direction.
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If he sold them then it wouldn't be a loss, but right now the calls that he bought for $39 are trading around $13-$15. I haven't seen any update yet, so this very well could be game over. 3 trades, 3 days, -$10K.
 
tmoney said:
If he sold them then it wouldn't be a loss, but right now the calls that he bought for $39 are trading around $13-$15. I haven't seen any update yet, so this very well could be game over. 3 trades, 3 days, -$10K.
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Two words...

DEBACLE!

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0ttEbPycDs]Michigan State Students Daniel Bryan YES! Chant - YouTube[/ame]
 
tmoney said:
If he sold them then it wouldn't be a loss, but right now the calls that he bought for $39 are trading around $13-$15. I haven't seen any update yet, so this very well could be game over. 3 trades, 3 days, -$10K.
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I seriously doubt he's gonna let a $1200 gain turn into a loss...at the very least you set your stop to breakeven once you start turning a profit, especially with less than a day of trading left

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mikeshinobi said:
This is bad right? I tried to read Wikipedia and make my tiny brain understand how put options work, and if I'm understanding correctly, since he was the put option buyer, he wants the price to go down.
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I think his payoff profile looks about like this:
9DO7OPw.jpg


There's two spots there where he could have made about $1,200, but they were really abrupt, and would have been super hard to time using technical indicators because it would have looked like they had the momentum to break a support level of some sort.
 
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