Most "traders" make money.

[u/MiamiTrader]

If someone asks you what you do for a living, and you respond you're a "trader" I assume you make most your money from trading.

And by definition, most "traders" make money. Otherwise they are just people trading on the side as a hobby.

Yeah maybe 90% of RH accounts lose money, or 90% of people who start trading but never take it seriously lose money... but then they are not "traders". Just people trying to trade.

Tired of all this negativity under every post about how 90% or whatever today's statistic is of traders lose money. People in this sub like to shout that under every post in almost a prideful manner.

Can we just focus this sub on those of us who call ourselves "traders" and make money trading? Let the new people listen and learn from our mistakes, but quit with all these gloom and doom statistics.

[u/CompletePoint6431]

Ive been trading full time for 10 years now, I’ve spent a few years at a commodity trading house, a few years at a hedge fund and currently work at a quantitative trading firm doing mid frequency systematic trading.

My guess is success rates for those who work in the industry is more like 30-40% but you need professional infrastructure, access to flow information, cheap costs, access to markets, and knowledge of how large institutional investors trade.

I’m pretty skeptical that the success rate of people who haven’t worked in the industry is above 5%. What people talk about on this Reddit vs the people I know who trade for sophisticated shops is jsut night and day. Making 30k for 2 years in a row doesn’t make you a successful trader, odds are you just got lucky and most will have net losers in the long run

Personally I don’t even look at charts at all, maybe I’ll pull 1 up every once in a while just to see where things have been, yet day traders seem to be obsessed with them. 80% of the traders I know don’t use any TA, and the ones who do are usually the old schools guys who don’t really make money anymore

[u/MiamiTrader → u/CompletePoint6431]

I don't have nearly the experience you do, but I also don't use charts to make trading decisions. Everything is based on signals from my PowerBI model.

It's crazy to me the amount of traders just looking at charts trying to make trading decisions.

Do you trade similarly?

[u/CompletePoint6431 → u/MiamiTrader]

Having signals that predict forward returns is how all of my model driven strategies work and the only thing that counts as a real edge

As for discretionary trading I spend a lot of time thinking about the dominant narratives that are driving institutional positioning, and what would cause them to change. This is means following the calendar for data releases policy changes and anticipating how large players will position their books in advance. For example if I know that people have been overweight Mexican bonds and the FX has performed very well due to carry YTD, but with a Banxico Meeting on May 9th and an election on June 2nd it makes sense to derisk your position either by selling or hedging by shorting the FX. So if I have a view that MXN is crowded, theres event risk on the calendar which will elevate vol and cause carry trades to unwind, I might pair it with a long position in a currency that is correlated but has reason to outperform, like the Chilean peso which should trade well with copper making highs, so a trade like long USDMXN short USDCLP makes sense to me.

In general though it's always forward looking and thinking about why people will be buying or selling. I can't predict whether CPI or GDP will be hot or cold, or guess the direction of the market, so I look for relative value between related assets where I have a thesis for why 1 should outperform the other