Trading -- Mentally Exhausting for the Pros Too?
Just trading from home, during WFH for personal account, it's just exhausting. The ups and downs, having to be attentive every minute, knowing when to sell so you don't give up your morning gains, knowing when to hold so you don't lock in your morning losses -- it's just freaking exhausting.
To the guys who did it for a living for the banks... you just get used to it, or is it exhausting to you guys too?
I don't rly watch it every minute or try and predict when to buy or sell within a trading day and don't know any real trader who does. Sounds like your doing some fake YouTube guru technical analysis.
Traders are glued to their desks to attend to clients or take advantage of opportunities when markets pricing clearly goes wrong because of short term demand, not because they know which way a stock will go. Many of their prop positions are longer term in nature.
An example of the mispricing is a bunch of retail buy calls and make implied vol a shit ton above historical vol so the desk will go short vol. Or when a whale sells out of an ETF, causing it's NAV to be underpriced and the desk arbitrages it.
The longer term prop positions may be buying LEAP puts because the market is not pricing in a regulatory crackdown that the desk thinks will happen based on the current political party's behavior this year. Prob won't be naked but rather will be a position on one of the Greeks.
What type of strategy are you doing where you need to know which hour or minute to buy and sell something??
But to answer your question, yes. Many traders I know have grey hair and are still in their mid 20's. They say it's one of the most stressful jobs but I'm a pretty lax guy so we'll see 🤷♂️
Thanks for the great insight.
And you're dead on about my "method" -- based on articles and (yes, Youtube) videos trying to identify trends and momentum based on exponential moving averages and spikes on volume. Will have one good day, two bad days, no consistency. Basically just trying it out to see if I can pinpoint some "method" that works 55% of the time. But it's maddening as, like I said above, the thing that worked the last two times then fails the next three. Realize it's most likely a fool's game, but still trying to "observe" and nail down the method that will work more times than not.
Yes it absolutely is. Go do consulting/banking. Wrote about this before…you lose sleep most on the trades that “could your career…”, then the trades “could have retired you…finally if you are flat and miss a move.
This is why banks have rules you have to mandatory walk away for 2 weeks can do nothing. Sit on a beach and let your brain relax.
My impression was that these rules don’t exist for you to relax, but primarily to see what happens when you’re gone in an attempt to sniff out wrongdoing (i.e., you’re rigging books or manipulating systems).
Was joking around. You are correct they are to make sure the book is “behaving appropriately”. That said most traders know when they plan to take it and why not just relax when you have no control over the situation. Most I know totally unplug during that break.
Buyside is different…but really the same thing should be encouraged.
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