Teacher and consultant to the futures industry since 1983
Teacher and consultant to the
futures industry since 1983
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Items you need to improve and protect your FCM or IB... 1. Very important and useful forms and letters for different applications for the FCM and the Introducing Broker. Visit our "forms" page. |
SUFFERING FROM INFORMATION OVERLOAD?With all the futures, options and trading information and data on the Internet, even just the free stuff, it is easy to suffer information overload. It would be, in fact, easy to suffer a nervous breakdown if you were to try to digest all that information. What can you do to organize and use only the information you need for trading? I have said before that to be a competent fundamental trader you must be prepared to get on all the mailing lists available for the commodities and futures you intend to trade. You should also be ready to read at least four hours a day in an attempt to assimilate and digest the information before placing any trades. Well, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that you can now get most, if not all, of the fundamental information you need for trading right off the Internet. The bad news is that you would have to spend at least eight hours a day trying to read it all. The same could be said for the technical trader. The Internet offers many free technical analysis tools, and some even offer free back data. So what should you do to expedite your trading decisions? As with any information, each item will be useful to one person or another, but different items will be nothing but "noise" to the same people. You should not over-analyze. At first you will have to research all of the information to see if, and how it will assist you with your particular trading methodology, but then you must begin to filter out the information that is "noise" to your system. Always retain the source of the noise information since some day you may design a different system or method that could require you consider the information source that is currently useless to you. The are two pertinent sayings here: "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread", and, "The more I learn about trading futures, the more I lose". It is your job to find the middle road here. If you don't learn, you will generally lose your trading capital very fast. On the other hand, if you overload your method with information that has never proven its relevance, you will also begin to make more losing trades. Remember that not every indicator means something. I have a friend who makes his living betting sports, and is in the sports handicapping business. He tried including the statistic about the amount of times a football team fumbles. He found that it actually hurt his handicapping instead of helping it. You must work hard to discover which "fumble statistic" you are including in your current trading methodology, and eliminate it. To be successful in futures trading takes work and commitment. It is actually more than a full-time job if it is done correctly. You can choose to "roll the dice" for fun as long as you know that you will probably lose, or you can choose to work to become a successful trader. I personally believe that with the available free data on the Internet, the opportunity to become a winning trader is now greater than it's ever been. So if you are a trader, commit to excellence and take pride in victory with winning research and planning. Get in touch with us by
email.
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