Long & Wrong

My poker equity curve continues to look like a sine wave but has shown some improvement by targeting the weaker players. The following chart demonstrates just how unsuccesful one of those targets is (more an equity slope than a curve).

This kind of data, easily accessible in poker but not in trading, raises all kinds of questions that do though have relevance to trading.  Is this person happy to lose money? Is this the price of the enjoyment(?) derived from playing the game?  Do they have some kind of subtle psychological blind-spot that prevents them from seeing the obvious? At what point does the slope end (they call it a day) or alter its course (they recognise the need for a new strategy)?

Those kind of questions kept me awake at 3AM, but I was still awake at 3:30AM with a whole new train of thought.

What if that data was available in trading? It would make  sense to take the opposite side of the traders who consistently lose or to piggy-back the trades of the winners (the best strategy would depend on whether there are bigger losers or bigger winners).  If there were a large number of trader’s data available then it might be possible to synthesise high-probability winning trades based on their collective actions.

So far this is only a theoretical discussion. Then I realised that brokers have access to exactly this kind of data.  Why work hard to be a really profitable trader when there is data describing exactly what really profitable traders do? I am in the wrong job, I’m also not getting enough sleep.