Becoming better at X

Trembling Hand said:

You cannot be serious?

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TH said:

For more than twenty years, Simons' Renaissance Technologies hedge fund, which trades in markets around the world, has employed complex mathematical models to analyze and execute trades, many of them automated. Renaissance uses computer-based models to predict price changes in easily-traded financial instruments. These models are based on analyzing as much data as can be gathered, then looking for non-random movements to make predictions.[7] Some also attribute Renaissance performance to employing Financial signal processing techniques such as pattern recognition.

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Found a WSJ piece from last year on them.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324474004578444933337979710 said:

Updated April 25, 2013 6:16 p.m. ET
Renaissance Technologies LLC, a hedge-fund heavyweight, has been bruised in the market's recent turbulence.

Two of the three hedge funds that the company makes available to outside investors have suffered sizable losses this month, largely due to the big drop in the Japanese yen, investors say.

At the same time, Renaissance continues to raise cash at a slower pace than some had expected. The firm manages about $6 billion of cash for outside investors—down from about $25 billion in 2007.

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According to the above article, if Renaissance have an algorithm or 3 they clearly need some tweeking.

As i said, the fact that no infallible or even consistently profitable algorithm exists means that the data is useless for predicting price movement = patterns are useless.

Weatsop said:

Do you like trading? If no, stop trading. You're done.

If yes, then it's no big ask to practice stuff. Stopped out for today? Or the market is bad for how you trade? Hopped on early? JUST STARTING? Then hurray, fire up the paper account and practice something, or pop open historical data and go candle-by-candle.

Practice one thing. For the love of god, practice one thing and ONLY one thing, and know what that one thing is. (Seriously - what's the thing? Write it down!) Maybe one kind of entry, with one kind of exit. Sure, when you trade live you've got a bunch of tools and tricks, and use them all. But when you intentionally practice, have ONE thing to focus on. Otherwise, how can you clearly see whether it was working, or whether you're getting better, or if you are PROFITABLE, when it's all mixed up in a bunch of maybes?

Be honest with yourself. Don't cheat. Log the trades, the losses and wins and the commissions and slip. Don't just eyeball old data and tell yourself you'd have made a motza. That's not practice. That might be ok to get some basic ideas, but reality doesn't work like that.

Note when it's going good. Print the charts. Stick 'em on your wall, mark the trades. DO THE SAME WHEN IT'S BAD. Notice anything different? Is the price action looking different? Is there some way to avoid those bad trades, but keep the good ones? Can you see the jaggy stupid wandering crud that tells you to stay the hell out of the market? Can you recognise that? Practice NOT trading that stuff, because seriously, staying out of bad conditions is something you need to do.

And that noting what's good and bad? Do it with the real trades! Real trades are the best practice, but it's messy. It's not just one thing you're practicing, so especially at the time you made the trades, you'll miss some of the details - you'll miss the forest for the trees. So on the next day, get on your computer a couple of hours early. Look over yesterday's trades. What was good? What was bad? Mark all the trades, and what you were thinking when you did them. Does REASON X keep failing? Does EXIT Y keep missing something obvious?

Don't - this is important - don't try to get all the pips. If you could, you'd be the richest person on the earth. You won't get them all. Don't kick yourself for "mistakes" that are only clear in hindsight. Practice, instead, being PROFITABLE, not being RIGHT. Can you introduce a new "rule", under some conditions, that would have made your old trades better? Fine, try that rule - and practice ONLY that rule for a while. See if it works when the bars are moving.

If all of that isn't fun, then quit. There are plenty of jobs on earth. Go do one you like.

There's no perfect trade. Ever. That's what makes this fun. Because there is ALWAYS something to do.

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Seriously good post "Weat" ... where have you been for the last couple of years .... are you and TH mates?:

So_Cynical said:

Found a WSJ piece from last year on them.



According to the above article, if Renaissance have an algorithm or 3 they clearly need some tweeking.

As i said, the fact that no infallible or even consistently profitable algorithm exists means that the data is useless for predicting price movement = patterns are useless.

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You have an interesting take on this stuff SC, how do you trade if not some form of a pattern?

So_Cynical said:

Found a WSJ piece from last year on them.



According to the above article, if Renaissance have an algorithm or 3 they clearly need some tweeking.

As i said, the fact that no infallible or even consistently profitable algorithm exists means that the data is useless for predicting price movement = patterns are useless.

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As at 28 Sept 2007, the total AUM for RET was $35.4bn. This largely consisted of a long biased equity fund managed against the S&P 500 called the RET Institutional Equity Fund consisting of $25.6bn. Further, their headline fund, Medallion, had about $6bn on 1 July 2007.

Although the firm manages $6bn for outsiders as at 25 April 2013 vs $25bn in 2007, this occurred largely because holders of RET IEF sold as the market deteriorated in 2008 and 2009. Unlike the name of the fund, the holders were largely private wealth and intermediated platforms. Hot money. The RET IEF managed $7.3bn at 2013. The difference accounts for virtually all of the external client exposure movement. RET managed a total of $23bn.

Thus, about $18bn of AUM loss was due to hot money movement at the bottom of the equity market. This implies growth occurred to partly offset this. In 2012, RET launched the Institutional Diversified Alpha strategy. It held $5.5bn as at 2013. It is a cut down version of Medallion. Hence, investors showed confidence in the firm's strategies and abilities as a pure alpha generator in diversified stock selection (in largely US stocks, the same universe as per RET IEF) when broad market movements were taken out of the equation. Fees for this would make up for a substantial part of the loss from RET IEF given it is non-directional.

Medallion, which is only open to employees now holds $10bn. Before this fund closed, demand for it was so high that fees of 5% base and 44% of performance were levied. That is an incredible load relative to the industry standard of 2% and 20%. Again, demonstrating the confidence in RET and desire to hold assets along side their staff even if basically half of the profits generated would revert to the staff despite bearing no downside risk.

Were the algorithms so useless? The article supplied says as follows:

"Medallion has scored average annual returns of about 35%, after fees, since its inception in 1988, with only one money-losing quarter since 1995, a slight 0.5% drop in the first quarter of 1999, the firm has told investors"

Furthermore:

"Renaissance's best-known fund, the $10 billion Medallion fund, is up around 10% so far this year"

"Medallion, which rose more than 20% last year, is only open to Renaissance employees"

If the requirement is infallibility, I guess this record is junk. A more rational examination would suggest that RET has some predictive ability in the application of their technologies. If algo is to be judged on robustness though hundreds of iterations of market evolution and, if failure to remain consistently profitable or infallible for a period of 26 years somehow implies the data is useless, there might be a lack of understanding here about how algo is actually developed and used. Sure works for some. If something is useless, it certainly isn't the data.

DeepState said:

if failure to remain consistently profitable or infallible for a period of 26 years somehow implies the data is useless, there might be a lack of understanding here about how algo is actually developed and used. Sure works for some. If something is useless, it certainly isn't the data.

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Put simply, if Renaissance or any one else has an algo that worked consistently, they would use it and be profitable every year...Renaissance according to the first thing that popped up in a google search, operates some funds that are NOT consistently profitable.

Therefore i conclude (and struggle to see it any other way) that Renaissance does NOT have a consistently profitable algo.

http://www.institutionalinvestorsal...ssance-Technologies-Falling-off-the-Mark.html
~

So_Cynical said:

Put simply, if Renaissance or any one else has an algo that worked consistently, they would use it and be profitable every year...Renaissance according to the first thing that popped up in a google search, operates some funds that are NOT consistently profitable.

Therefore i conclude (and struggle to see it any other way) that Renaissance does NOT have a consistently profitable algo.

http://www.institutionalinvestorsal...ssance-Technologies-Falling-off-the-Mark.html
~

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perfect strawman argument?

I'm sure the medallion fund's algos are still humming along nicely

So_Cynical said:

Put simply, if Renaissance or any one else has an algo that worked consistently, they would use it and be profitable every year...Renaissance according to the first thing that popped up in a google search, operates some funds that are NOT consistently profitable.

Therefore i conclude (and struggle to see it any other way) that Renaissance does NOT have a consistently profitable algo.

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Interesting conclusion.

You have clearly not checked the data on how Renaissance runs its funds. Had you done so you would not conclude that any fund is representative of any other.

You previously supplied a newspiece from WSJ which reported that the main fund, Medallion, has had a stellar run. This fund uses the full suite of abilities to maximum advantage. Only in one quarter since 1995 did it record a negative quarter. This was a minor underperformance at that.

If you then conclude that, because of a single quarter of underperformance, despite an incredible set of performance from that date and also since inception, that this result is inconsistent...struggle away.

To explore this further, what is the measure of consistency?

If a strategy does not produce good returns every minute of every day or 26 years, it is not consistently profitable?

Perhaps we should relax this notion. How about not consistent for every hour of every day for 26 years. Not consistent? Data is useless?

RET Medallion serves to represent quarterly measurement. You have chosen to overlook that in your response , or otherwise regard that as inconsistent with useless data.

How about an annual basis? I know this extends beyond any indicated window of consistency that you have expressed. But let's explore anyway.

What if a portfolio consisting primarily of US equities lost value (over an annual period) in absolute terms twice and nine times vs the S&P last 49 years? Not consistent? I guess Warren Buffett doesn't have a good algo either and his data is useless.

Happy struggling....

Further to TM, why do you post T/A and bother to average down, yet alone participate in a market if all data is useless? It is entirely inconsistent with this perspective without the involvement of investment alchemy. Alternatively you are just doing it for entertainment. Perhaps this whole position is just a form of entertainment?

Investing in the market is actually an algo whichever way you (well, you might not) look at it. It is a decision. A decision is a process, even if random. It is an algo. Its results are clearly inconsistent. Thus investing in equities is a bad algo and the data is useless. It is ridiculous to use it. The rational thing is not to touch something where you have no knowledge of anything and data relating to it is useless. Unless you are doing so for entertainment or hard wired for excessive risk taking.

If you can't invest in equities because all data is useless and you cannot make any sense of it or generate any expectations...Then what? Cash? Except the purchasing value of cash sometimes loses real value! Inconsistent. Chuck that out too. Bad algo. Gold? Same deal? Dirt? Salt? Same deal. ...all data is useless. Without useful data, all decisions are entirely uninformed and essentially random.

Given the market is really people when it is truly considered (where would the market be without people? Even algo is programmed by - well - people) we must check to see if data in relation to people is useless. This is the natural extension. If people use data to make decisions, even that knowledge is useful. However, if all data is useless, we are just random people doing random things. When I meet someone in the street, I might say "lovely grass ice-cream to your purple catfish umbrella" - burp - and place my left shoe down their shirt. The data I had for sentence formation and social interaction is useless. And thus this entire text is the result of a bunch of monkeys typing, after they finished a Shakespearian novel.

Could be. I don't have any useful data to know anything about the veracity of this. If all data is useless, I don't even know what the concept of veracity actually is. Maybe you are an algo housed within a cosmos which itself is entirely random. We don't actually exist.

...and now we are into the realm of reality and philosophy where it just might be that data is useless. Interesting perspective.

....Struggle away.

So_Cynical said:

Put simply, if Renaissance or any one else has an algo that worked consistently, they would use it and be profitable every year...

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I can't think of ANY business situation where every single transaction makes a profit. Not one.

But if the sum total of your profits exceeds your losses, and your maximum drawdown is within an acceptable limit, well then you have a profitable business as such.

Having 100 years of rainfall data doesn't tell you that there will be a flood next March. But it certainly does tell you how likely any particular amount of rain is over any given period. With the benefit of such information, you can then manage your farm, hydro scheme, outdoor festival or planned 10 day bushwalk in a manner that has a very good probability of being satisfactory. Sometimes it will go wrong of course, but looking at past data which shows a definite pattern is a way to tilt the odds in your favour.

barney said:

Seriously good post "Weat" ... where have you been for the last couple of years .... are you and TH mates?:

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Don't want to interrupt the big wang-off...

...but I'm going to go and talk about my brain a while, and completely destroy my credibility.

Some years ago I lurked these here forums, and I remember TH. That's unusual, because I have a pretty weird mental condition that means I can forget almost anything that I don't think about pretty often. I often find out I have forgotten years, jobs, and even relatives - I once forgot a cousin who had lived with me for 6 months, about 2 years earlier (and now I can't remember which relative! I can only remember not-remembering, and getting **** for it).

The last time I moved I found textbooks for the same subject, each 6 years apart. Had no idea I'd done the same course 3 times. In my last job it got so I was starting the same document 5 times (that is, I found 5 copies of the first draft in different places and with slightly different name conventions), and even, sometimes, having the same dot-point twice in the same list.

Though now I'm on better meds...

Still though, the fact that I remember TH (even if not exactly why) suggests I went back and read his stuff every now and then, and I'd guess that means I hold him in some respect.

Probably.

(*him, because female traders are bizarrely rare - some learned facts never fade, usually because they confuse, interest, and/or anger me. And also because females tend to mask their contempt, and he doesn't).

Hah! I've got a blog of his in favourites! Hmmm, and old blog, 2010. Oh! He's the bloke who wrote the first two parts of a three part series on how to trade, and never did the third part! I remember that because I use it as an anecdote sometimes. Hahaha. I had totally forgotten who it had been, and honestly didn't expect ever to find out again.

Man, this whole conversation has made my day! Hahaha!

ANYWAY, if I'm parroting TH, it'll probably be because I'm quoting him word for word, but only remembered the substance, and not the source.

I don't respect sources, I respect what they say. And because I'm always forgetting, I'm always learning. Often stuff I already learned once already, I need to learn again. I'm good at learning, and at being wrong. That's why I reckon I'll be a good trader (again). Being wrong doesn't matter. You need to know you'll be wrong (and why, and roughly how often). You need to CONTROL being wrong. Own it. Don't curse a trade that lost money. You're SUPPOSED to get those. Look at it as another confirmation of your trades doing what you planned.

You might not hope for a trade to go to a loss, but the universe doesn't give the slightest crap for what you hope. What matters is what you expect, plan for, and most of all, what actually happens.

To go back to the subject, that's my advice: look on a stop hit as a marker, that you worked out in advance, that conditions are bad, or the setup is bad, or that your chances of profiting are now less than you losing. Hitting a stop isn't a failure - it's a sign your setup and planning and preparation and experience was right. Enter HERE, but if it goes THERE, get out.

"Here be dragons."

"Below here, I don't know anything. Get out."


...and yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about trading. It's fun!

Yeah, no, that's just too wishy washy.

Here's what I mean:

Imagine you just missed your bread-and-butter entry. And the price blasts onwards, on one of those once-a-week winners that make half your profit.

And you freak out.

You forget where your stops would be, you forget everything, and you just buy and try to ride it.

What's the worst that happens?

If you said "it reverses and spanks you like the red-headed stepchild of a rented mule"...


...you are wrong.


The WORST thing that happens is the price goes bounding a mile into profit, and you trigger the exit with a grin on your face, and you stand up and go WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Why is that the worst thing?

Because you just taught yourself to trade like a moron.

Any dropkick can enter at random, get lucky, and leave with money. That same dropkick is going to burn his account looking for that same run of luck. That dropkick has all his mental rewards based around "ballsy" big-wins based on nothing but gut instinct. And he will get flogged. Maybe not today, but tomorrow. Soon. Inevitably.

You are not a dropkick. You are a trader. You'll be trading day in, and day out, for years. You will profit, over time, inevitably.

Anything you can't do every time for the rest of your career, is a crap trade.

And, the converse, is that everything you CAN do every day (and profit from in the long run), is a GOOD trade.

So. When "this" happens, I trade like "that". THAT, is how I trade every single time THIS happens. And I profit. I *win*. Even when I lose individual trades, I WIN, because this method nets me money.

---
I logged onto the MT4 site today and saw that people can put up black-box systems, that trade for you - they give you buy and sell instructions - and you pay the developer some money. The ones at the top of the list for the EUR/USD all had massive results, and a 100% win rate.

They are not lying. That's what they get. And yet, every account attached to that system is doomed. They're dead, and they don't even know it. They are zombie accounts.

I know that because I knew what the systems were before I even looked at the comments.

The EUR/USD has been on a long downtrend. So to get 100% wins, all you needed to do was go short, at random, and wait. WITH NO STOPS. If they'd had stops, a retrace might exit the trade, and they'd mess up their nice 100% record. But it kept going down, so all they needed to do was keep going short.

I stress, needed to go short. Knowing the past, I know that a short play would win. Christ, knowing the past I could make an essentially infinite amount of money. Easy to do. Even if it takes some anxious moments - I saw people saying their account was 40% down, and others would say, it's ok, it's always right in the end...

The day the EUR/USD turns, all these people will be wiped out. They have no stops. They've trained themselves to ignore setbacks and keep going. It doesn't matter how big their accounts have grown, 100% of "a lot" is still all of it.

Sure, some will be lucky and pull their money out early, great. It's like a pyramid, or a Ponzi scheme. It's doomed, but if you get out early then you win. Now what? Where do you put your money now? Another Ponzi scheme? And then...? Another one? You can't keep being lucky. Eventually you will lose 100%. Putting money in a dip**** Ponzi scheme is a losing plan. Maybe not today, but eventually, it'll lose you everything.

Being RIGHT, is worthless. Count all your days, and see where you are.

...

Another example: the EUR/USD fundamentals. The US banks are holding (not a secret, but not often discussed) a ridiculous number of repossessed homes on their books, from 2008-ish. They have not (seriously, look at the books) been maintaining those properties. What do you think is left? Feel free to hire a photographer where your US bank is based, send them to repossessed properties, and get them to send you the results.

The paper value isn't even close to the actual.

Europe, with all its problems, is at least dealing with reality. It is competing against the USD which is, essentially, a phantasy. The USD isn't in a free market - nothing like it. There are too many big players with entire bloody economies at their fingertips who have a massive vested interest in keeping its value high. It is the world currency, and what happens in the US economy doesn't count for much anymore.

No matter how certain an eventual US crash becomes, the dollar rolls on.

If all of that is right (I don't know - and don't care. I'm a scalper. I'm proud to have no idea where the currency is going) - but if that's right, and YOU were right, and you went through the books and found the USD is "really" worth 70% of what it's valued at, and you traded that knowledge...


...well, look at the past year. If you'd gone long, you would have been crushed. You could have lost a thousand fortunes.

BEING RIGHT IS WORTHLESS.

If you're right, and the market is wrong, you will be murdered.

It's different if you're investing. An undervalued company will return to something like the true price eventually - the market can't argue with earnings and dividends forever. If you have deep enough pockets you can ride out the chop and come out happy.

But I am (we are?) traders. Not investors. And fundamentals don't matter so much to us. We don't have the time or the account size to wait for everyone else to agree with our genius. We do not care what the market "should" have done. Take "should" right out of your vocabulary.

What matters to us is the price. You don't get to argue with the price. If the price goes down, no fiery sermon you give to your own waving fist will ever make the slightest god-damned difference. If the price goes down, you have two ways to profit: be short, or get out.

That's all there is.

You do like to write eh Weat! ..... Fortunately lots of us like to read ..... good stuff.

barney said:

You do like to write eh Weat! ..... Fortunately lots of us like to read ..... good stuff.

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Hey, it's a complex issue, trading. If people want to stick to reading three-line posts, they'll never learn much of anything.

Also, I had a damn nice bottle of red after I finished last night, and that makes me talkative.


Though, yeah, I'll shoosh now. Gimme a few weeks to get properly settled, and I'll start a separate thread for the people who want to read slabs of text, rather than invade threads like a fungus, hahaha.

So_Cynical said:

(and struggle to see it any other way)

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DeepState said:

Given the market is really people when it is truly considered (where would the market be without people? Even algo is programmed by - well - people) we must check to see if data in relation to people is useless. This is the natural extension. If people use data to make decisions, even that knowledge is useful. However, if all data is useless, we are just random people doing random things. When I meet someone in the street, I might say "lovely grass ice-cream to your purple catfish umbrella" - burp - and place my left shoe down their shirt. The data I had for sentence formation and social interaction is useless. And thus this entire text is the result of a bunch of monkeys typing, after they finished a Shakespearian novel.

Could be. I don't have any useful data to know anything about the veracity of this. If all data is useless, I don't even know what the concept of veracity actually is. Maybe you are an algo housed within a cosmos which itself is entirely random. We don't actually exist.

...and now we are into the realm of reality and philosophy where it just might be that data is useless. Interesting perspective.

....Struggle away.

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LOL and I was thinking you didn't have a sense of humour.

Weatsop said:

Hey, it's a complex issue, trading. If people want to stick to reading three-line posts, they'll never learn much of anything.

Also, I had a damn nice bottle of red after I finished last night, and that makes me talkative.


Though, yeah, I'll shoosh now. Gimme a few weeks to get properly settled, and I'll start a separate thread for the people who want to read slabs of text, rather than invade threads like a fungus, hahaha.

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If there is one thing I've learnt in 20 yrs. of posting 14000 posts.
People retain very little.
They read even less.
You'll waste a lifetime of productive valuable time posting up
quality info to faceless people who couldn't care less.
Then there is another batch who see anything that remotely looks like
practical application as nothing more than ego stroking.

Hence my brevity to the odd one it benefits.

Hahaha, fair enough sir!

But here's my secret: I learn by teaching.

I catch myself holding vague, unformed ideas, unless I am forced to enunciate those ideas. I'll kid myself if I can get away with it.

Try to teach, and you have to get right at the bones of what you believe. You have to squeeze that fog down into a drop of actual water, and see if it's clean or mud.

Usually I teach an imaginary student in my head.

Now I'm back into it again (and loving it, despite raging about brokers), I'm chattering constantly to myself (mouth closed). I'm teaching my imaginary student all my plays while I'm driving, while I'm on the bog, while I'm waiting in line. While I'm sitting in my kids' room to protect them from monsters until they go to sleep, because their mum is too damn soft on them.

The posts I wrote above were just some of the foundational stuff I've been teaching my imaginary student. I just wrote the sort of thing I was thinking anyway.

Lately, my internal dialogue has been in the form of an epic post I haven't made, "How to scalp like me". I make and edit posts in my head.

And I think of what a student might ask. And two of the questions have been bloody excellent, because my first answers sucked, and the more I thought about them, the more I realised I needed to change the answers.

The first was: why don't you enter long right THERE, instead of where you always do? Why wait for the second confirmation when the risk is so low?

And you know what? My student was spot on. I've gone over all the old entries and been trying it live, and it's a winner. I seem to scrape an extra 3 pips out of about 60% of that style of trade, for a 2 pip (counting comission) risk. That's money.

The second was: if Forex is so dumb (part of my introductory course is a section titled "Forex is DUMB"), why don't you switch to Futs or something? Couldn't you take your dumb trading skills, and then get to know something with real fundamentals and more intelligible tape, and do that well enough to have an extra edge?

...and the answer was basically - I think Forex is better for newbies... and because I'm a chicken.

So now I'm on a few hours early, I'm cracking my knuckles, and I'm starting to learn more about trading something different. I've still got lots of work to do on Forex, for sure (infinite amounts of work! That's why trading is so cool!), but I don't trade 'till 6, and don't really need to start dicking around with brokers until 3. Why not develop something during the day?

Christ, I talk a lot.

----
*Edit: but hey! At least it's on topic! How to get better, tip #328: talk to yourself.

So nyah.

Weatsop said:

Hahaha, fair enough sir!

But here's my secret: I learn by teaching.

I catch myself holding vague, unformed ideas, unless I am forced to enunciate those ideas. I'll kid myself if I can get away with it.

Try to teach, and you have to get right at the bones of what you believe. You have to squeeze that fog down into a drop of actual water, and see if it's clean or mud.

Usually I teach an imaginary student in my head.

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Actually its a good idea. And one that many trades/professions follow.

Dr Brett a long time ago pointed out a well worn and proven path to competence (you know the step before mastery). It was the way medical students learnt from start to specialisation. Started with fundamentals of the body, moved on to different medical branches, then giving each student exposure to actually doing rotations through each dicapline. Then picking a specialisation towards the end of their studies. But it didn't stop there.

They also do the

"Each one teach one" is a motto of medical education. The experienced physicians mentor; the advanced trainees coach--everyone is both teacher and learner.

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Steenbarger, eh? A Google search finds a LOT of love.

My Kindle app thanks you, TH. Daily Trading Coach, sold, downloaded, in my pocket, ready to roll.

Technology rules.

Weatsop said:

I'm chattering constantly to myself (mouth closed).

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Lol ..... I'm feeling pretty chuffed with myself right now ...... I admit I am still the worlds worst trader (well sometimes) .... but ...... over the past few months, I have been talking to myself while trading, only out loud

My wife who is usually in bed when I'm trying to sort out why I am the worlds worst trader often comments "who are you talking to"

So bearing that in mind, I feel I may be heading in the right direction! ..... now if only I could learn to talk and trade simultaneously

I might pin this to the wall .....

Weatsop said:

Though, yeah, I'll shoosh now. Gimme a few weeks to get properly settled, and I'll start a separate thread for the people who want to read slabs of text, rather than invade threads like a fungus, hahaha.

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Hope you don't forget this idea!!!

barney said:

My wife who is usually in bed when I'm trying to sort out why I am the worlds worst trader often comments "who are you talking to"

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Personally I find that explaining something (whatever) to someone else is a good way to find out how much you don't know about it. Explain it, they'll ask questions, and you'll soon realise whether or not you can confidently answer them.