I’m a bit unclear how to map your generate versus detect distinction onto my thoughts. Very little of what I do seems like generating ideas. I’d describe my process more as noticing possibilities / finding ideas, then evaluating them.
My experience says it’s harder to evaluate ideas than to find them. I doubt that I’m unusually good at finding ideas, so there’s something strange about our disagreement. I’ll guess it’s due to some combination of you being unusually good at evaluating ideas, and being overconfident about those evaluations.
I find new ideas mostly by looking at more companies than most other investors. That’s likely more time consuming than your approach, and sometimes feels like a mind-numbing search for a needle in a haystack. But I never exhaust the supply of new companies to look at (e.g. there are many non-US stock exchanges that I haven’t found time to look at).
My concerns with commentator opinions:
Neglected topics / ideas tend to be more profitable than ones that get adequate attention, because getting attention tends to cause stocks to be efficiently priced.
Framing effects: if I frame issues the same way as others, I’ll have some of the same biases they do.
Social pressures: commentators have more goals than just making money for their followers. It’s hard for me to avoid being influenced by that.
Here are some more specific guesses as to why you might value commentators opinions more than I do:
Your approach works a couple of years per decade, maybe when there’s a large influx of inexperienced investors, and underperforms the rest of the time. You might still be right in this case if the outperformance is high enough in the best years—I might have overweighted median years in evaluating my experience.
Something has changed to make your approach usually work better (e.g. Seeking Alpha might have made it easier to distinguish good commentators). I haven’t thought much about these issues for over a decade.
You’re unusually good at distinguishing good commentators.
I’ve been trading for a bit under 15 years now. Really great article and ideas, but I actually disagree with both of you that analysts are a good source of ideas/inspiration (Seeking Alpha/Twitter/Stocktwits). They normally have an angle based around whoever they work for and are trying to position a certain stock based on those factors.
If you look at most analysts’ performance, they almost always underperform standard market indexes over a long timeframe.
These days, I’m looking at specific technical patterns within hot areas (e.g. AI/semiconductor ETFs are outperforming standard indexes by +2.5% per month).
Some quick tips I thought I would share with others looking to trade full time:
Start small (5% of funds) until you have at least 3 months of profitable trades.
Scale up when your trades start becoming profitable; scale down when trades are unprofitable.
Study, study, study. Study the best trades rather than relying on opinions. You can then reverse engineer what happened to see why that stock was one of the best trades. A company called Finsuba used to have a free daily email with the best trades (entry time, gain, and exit time). I think it is a paid report now, but it used to help me commit to studying each day.
Start with stocks. 99% of traders are unprofitable with options. Only when you have a really high conviction trade with multiple data points would I consider options. I still tend to avoid them.
Use stops with every trade; they are like insurance when you are getting started.
Avoid low volume, low market-cap stocks, large bid and ask spreads and Chinese ADRs. These are normally traps and manipulated.
Watch market segments closely. Premarket can give a lot of detail about how a stock will trade that day.
And lastly, good luck out there. Trading is tough. Your mindset and convictions will need to be strong.
I’m a bit unclear how to map your generate versus detect distinction onto my thoughts. Very little of what I do seems like generating ideas. I’d describe my process more as noticing possibilities / finding ideas, then evaluating them.
My experience says it’s harder to evaluate ideas than to find them. I doubt that I’m unusually good at finding ideas, so there’s something strange about our disagreement. I’ll guess it’s due to some combination of you being unusually good at evaluating ideas, and being overconfident about those evaluations.
I find new ideas mostly by looking at more companies than most other investors. That’s likely more time consuming than your approach, and sometimes feels like a mind-numbing search for a needle in a haystack. But I never exhaust the supply of new companies to look at (e.g. there are many non-US stock exchanges that I haven’t found time to look at).
My concerns with commentator opinions:
Neglected topics / ideas tend to be more profitable than ones that get adequate attention, because getting attention tends to cause stocks to be efficiently priced.
Framing effects: if I frame issues the same way as others, I’ll have some of the same biases they do.
Social pressures: commentators have more goals than just making money for their followers. It’s hard for me to avoid being influenced by that.
Here are some more specific guesses as to why you might value commentators opinions more than I do:
Your approach works a couple of years per decade, maybe when there’s a large influx of inexperienced investors, and underperforms the rest of the time. You might still be right in this case if the outperformance is high enough in the best years—I might have overweighted median years in evaluating my experience.
Something has changed to make your approach usually work better (e.g. Seeking Alpha might have made it easier to distinguish good commentators). I haven’t thought much about these issues for over a decade.
You’re unusually good at distinguishing good commentators.
You’re unusually objective at evaluating ideas.
I’ve been trading for a bit under 15 years now. Really great article and ideas, but I actually disagree with both of you that analysts are a good source of ideas/inspiration (Seeking Alpha/Twitter/Stocktwits). They normally have an angle based around whoever they work for and are trying to position a certain stock based on those factors.
If you look at most analysts’ performance, they almost always underperform standard market indexes over a long timeframe.
These days, I’m looking at specific technical patterns within hot areas (e.g. AI/semiconductor ETFs are outperforming standard indexes by +2.5% per month).
Some quick tips I thought I would share with others looking to trade full time:
Start small (5% of funds) until you have at least 3 months of profitable trades.
Scale up when your trades start becoming profitable; scale down when trades are unprofitable.
Study, study, study. Study the best trades rather than relying on opinions. You can then reverse engineer what happened to see why that stock was one of the best trades. A company called Finsuba used to have a free daily email with the best trades (entry time, gain, and exit time). I think it is a paid report now, but it used to help me commit to studying each day.
Start with stocks. 99% of traders are unprofitable with options. Only when you have a really high conviction trade with multiple data points would I consider options. I still tend to avoid them.
Use stops with every trade; they are like insurance when you are getting started.
Avoid low volume, low market-cap stocks, large bid and ask spreads and Chinese ADRs. These are normally traps and manipulated.
Watch market segments closely. Premarket can give a lot of detail about how a stock will trade that day.
And lastly, good luck out there. Trading is tough. Your mindset and convictions will need to be strong.