We believe that becoming a profitable trader has been overcomplicated.
Welcome to the Trading Floor
All you need to be successful is better information communicated effectively
You can learn to trade profitably
This site exists to help you get there.
That might sound inviting, but trust me, trading profitably requires an enormous amount of work and effort. Mastering anything of value always does. But, you can do it. We believe that, generally, one of the key missing ingredients in a traders success is the right information. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you for anything. There’s no signup page, no special, one-day-only Bar Mitzvah sales, no secret handshakes. I’ll settle for you having an enjoyable read.
Best selling author and speaker Chris Brady does this incredible bit when he speaks on stage. I can’t duplicate it here, but the general gist of it is “You don’t know what you don’t know” [1]. Inherently, we all understand that we don’t know what we don’t know. However, we also know that we all have to know something. But, how can we tell the difference between what we know, what we don’t know, and what we think we know that just isn’t so?
When trading financial markets, certainty is a valuable commodity in rare supply. According to veteran day trader Al Brooks (2009), “Directional Probability” is defined as “The probability that the market will move either up or down any number of ticks before it reaches a certain number of ticks in the opposite direction If you are looking at an equidistant move up and down, it hovers around 50% most of the time.” [2] So whether you choose to buy or sell, you generally have a 50/50 shot of being right. Not a lot of certainty there. However, in this negative-sum game with basic coin flip odds, there are some things we do know with certainty:
- We know someone is making money in the markets and it’s not us.
- We know for sure that we have no idea what we are doing wrong.
- We know that we’ve tried many things and are still not consistently profitable.
- We also know just how many other people also don’t know. We’ve been in all the chat rooms, we’ve watched all the YouTube videos just like everyone else and we’re still not consistently gaining.
As frustrating as knowing those things is, we also know the market is the purest form of truth that exists. That’s what I love about financial markets more than any other attribute. You can think you know the future direction of price, I can think I know the future direction of price, and we can argue back and forth about it. But, the market will tell us the truth! And it will tell us at the exact date and time to which our prediction applied. Lesson #1 is: The market is truth! (With the preservation of capital being a close second).
Another painful truth is this: some of us are a really just looking for the perfect oracle. Those folks want to find the genius mind that can see the future clearly in some crystal ball of a method and tell us what’s next. For you, we have nothing to offer. However, many of you found your way to this site believing you are on a quest to become a profitable trader. You want to learn what you need to know, take what you know, and extract value from the market to make profits. This makes sense, but this is not how you become consistently profitable. We cannot simply learn some things, take what we think we know, apply it to financial markets, and win. When we do this, we are effectively imposing our truth on the market. This is a method of failure. By now, we all understand that we cannot rely on another trader’s truth to become profitable. But, honestly, you can’t even rely on your truth! I would assert that the quest you are actually on as a trader is to learn the market’s truth. That is is the path to becoming consistently profitable.
Now, I want to thank you for being here. Thanks for reading this. But, I’m a realist. There is an infinite number of books, articles, websites, YouTube videos and paid courses that you could otherwise choose to spend your time on to learn to trade so why would you invest your time here? Your other problem is choosing if you should trust this information or not. You, as a new trader, are seeing all kinds of ads from people who want to sell you a course, a book, a strategy, an indicator, a signals group, mentorship, coaching, something, anything that they can talk you into that will allow them extract dollars from you and take advantage of your lack of knowledge in this field. Often they’re selling you information for $1,000 that you can learn in a $20 book that was written 100 years ago.
Well, I can tell you, I’ll do all I can to make it worth your time. This site is a free, online trading education platform produced by me, Kurt Smock. I been through everything you’re going through. Now, since I’m just like you, we’re not going to be learning from me! We are going to tap into the minds of the greatest market minds who ever lived. We’re going to distill the thousands upon thousands of collective pages compiled over the century to find the market’s truth. I’ve done the research. I’m going to try and give you the bottom line. Save you the reading. Ideally, this site is going to be a repository of market truths that can exist here on the internet for all to see free of charge. It’s 2019 after all. Who pays for information anymore?! Honestly, I don’t want your money. I don’t need it. All I want is for you to achieve your goals. To whatever extent I can help you accomplish that purpose, I are forever grateful to have contributed. There are lots of links at the top of the page (or if there’s not yet there will be one day). Here is how the site is laid out. The concept of the site being “Under Development” is the under-statement of the century. But nonetheless, here’s the idea:
- Start Here
- The Premise
- The Problem
- The Soultion
- About Me
- Education
- Risk Management
- Market Structure
- Support and Resistance
- Price Action
- Chart Reading
- Depth of Market
- Indicators
- Trading Styles
- Trading Strategy
- Other
- Market Philosophy
- Cryptocurrency Economics
- Game Theory
Here’s a fundamental insight that can kick us off. In any given market, there’s only one thing happening now and there is only going to be one thing that that happens next. Every mechanism ever devised by man to read markets has the capability, to some extent, to accurately describe what is happening and gives us some form of clue about what is going to happen next. However, all of these mechanism are trying to tell the same story. What we want to do is learn the foundational principles of them all. By doing so we will reveal the underlying nature of the markets and the truth that lies within.
Now, I primarily trade cryptocurrencies and equities. But, a chart is a chart is a chart. Everything you learn here will apply to any market you want to trade. So, hopefully being crypto-centric in the charts is not going to be a point of contention. Welcome to the show!
I leave you with this because it’s hilarious. We’ll see you around.
(Disclaimer: We have no affiliation to that guy, but that was a great rant!)
References:
[1] Brady, C. (2007, November 20). You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know. Retrieved from https://chrisbrady.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/11/you-dont-know-w.html
[2} Brooks, A. (2012). Trading price action trends: Technical analysis of price charts bar by bar for the serious trader. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Recent Posts:
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Bitcoin – The Challenge of Valuation
Kurt Smock 11/25/2019 Abstract This is a working paper compiled to discuss the strengths, weaknesses, and risks associated with various proposed valuation models of Bitcoin and to present opportunities for future research and modeling. Bitcoin is said to be an unprecedented technological advancement. However, upon inspection, it provides no actual innovation except to the extent… Read more
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Every Chart is Telling You A Story. It is the story of price.
Be unpredictable, be real, be interesting. Tell a good story. James Dashner This is the fundamental premise that underlies every chart. Everything that happens on a price chart is a result of the actors in the story playing their part. Like in any story, there is the protagonists and the antagonists. In financial markets, these… Read more
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