Patterns/Math

it's not a "wormhole" it's the bare minimum to be a trader

the guy who calls spreadsheets and backtesting "the bare minimum" is always the one with 3 monitors and a negative pnl at the end of the month some people just want the title without the work, and it shows. i've built a few custom indicators myself and the real value isn't the patterns you find, it's learning which ones are just noise. my spice rack sees more genuine reorganization than half these traders see actual analysis

what is this even saying? it's only my 4th year living fully off trading income so I guess I have a lot to learn

So you’ve built some of your own indicators. That’s cool. Were they preexisting ones you altered or complete new idea you crafted together? Why did you make them, like did you do some calculations form some data and find something worth putting into something or find/see something else without going into statistics or something? I’ve built around 50ish myself, many alterations on existing indicators, but some that are completely new creations. There are many that didn’t come out as well as I’d like and were abandoned but there’s around 15 I kept even though I only use a couple. Either way this is some of the interesting ideas I’m getting at wanting to hear about

Of course you have to track and do things with some data, but I’m talking beyond the norm. I talking like thousands of hours dredging up all the data and doing statistics, calculus, and more trying to dredge out hidden patterns and information. I’m talking about going down the wormhole not just your typical traders tracking and info.

i guess depends on the results you're currently seeing. if you break it down to the basics, trading in a nutshell is to look at data/info till you find something worth actioning. and once it stops working you repeat the process. on an on.

Op, Wormhole is an understatement All research is a tease to continue further research and it is in that further research that we are teased to research further. It is a never ending spiral and ultimately we do learn from all of it because we learn to understand market history and our specific niche.

I love it

That is one rabbit hole of many https://preview.redd.it/xfcoua59cyuh1.png…

Yeah, I’ve gone pretty far down that rabbit hole. The useful stuff usually wasn’t some magic indicator though, it was finding where performance clustered. Time of day, trend vs range, opening range width, distance from VWAP, volatility, prior day/overnight levels, weekday, stuff like that. Once you tag enough trades, you start seeing that the same setup can have very different expectancy depending on the environment. The biggest benefit for me was actually finding what *not* to trade. Removing the bad conditions improved things more than adding another confirmation. Only warning is it’s very easy to data-mine yourself into a beautiful backtest. I try to keep the filters simple, make sure there’s a logical reason they might matter, then validate them on data I didn’t use to discover them.

Good luck. The big algo traders are so far ahead of you that you will never catch up. They are bigger, faster and stronger. they have more data, faster computers and PhD.s that are smarter. Any profits that home daytraders make are the crumbs they leave behind.