Thursday, September 20, 2007

Trading > Poker? We'll see

Been a couple weeks since I updated cause I've been crazy busy. Been playing a lot of poker. Also been looking at ways to make more money. I've been doing a bunch of research into trading. I've talked to a lot of different people in the last couple weeks about it. A few weeks ago I was a total newb at trading, I literally knew almost nothing. Now, I still know pretty much nothing, but I know which area I'm going to focus on learning. I basically spent a couple weeks reading things in my spare time and talking to people who traded to find out what I should look into trading if I was going to try and learn it.

A lot of people when they hear "trading", they assume throwing money in the stock market and trying to make 10% or whatever. That's definitely not what I'm doing. I'm trying to make MONEY. What I'll be doing is daytrading, where the profits can be pretty insane. Probably the first thing that comes to people's minds is that I'm going to go broke, because most people do who attempt to daytrade. That's because they don't learn how to play the game. It has a lot of similarities to poker, in that only about 5% win, and a lot of people lose their shirts. The big difference in trading, in comparison to poker is that in poker your earning potential is essentially capped out at some point. I mean, you can always make a bit more in poker with a little more work, but very few people are making 7 figures/year at poker, where a lot of good traders are making that type of money. In poker, as you move up in stakes, you play against tougher competition, so although you are wagering more money, your EV(expected value) per buy in is lower since the game is harder. In trading, your competition doesn't change. The game doesn't get harder, so your EV stays the same, you just wager more money and return more profits at the same rate you were when wagering less.

Many people also think poker players make good traders, because psychologically they aren't effected by the money on the line, and they are used to making split second decisions under pressure. To us I think it would just be a game we're trying to win, and we wouldn't sweat the money involved, because we also have bankroll management skills from poker.

I'm not even going to actually trade for money for at least a few months. I plan on studying for at least a month or so, and then simtrading for another month or so to see how I'm doing, and evaluate what I'm doing right and wrong. Then when I feel I have a definite edge I'll throw some money in an account and start trading.

Money wise I think it'd be great if I ended up doing well trading. It'll take a lot of work to get there, but if I do get there, it will have been well worth it. There's obviously a lot more money in trading than poker. Don't get me wrong, the money is great in poker, and I love to play, but I also like a challenge and I like $5 better than $1, so I'm going to give it a try.

I'm currently studying the trading method I'll be using with someone here in Arizona who is seriously a genius with this stuff. He's the one who introduced me to this method and thinks it's the most similar trading type to poker. He even put me in touch with a guy who is pretty well known using this method and making ridiculous amounts of money doing it, so I gave him a call last week and got a chance to pick his brain a bit. Let's just say there is MONEY to be made. I'll talk more about it when I learn more, and get some practice.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have been into the same thaought, but ive talked to many people and they say trading is not the way to go since the marked is so unpredicteble, but if you have a friend who makes a lot of money doing this maybe i would do the same. But you gonna trade stocks? or options?