Do retail traders get any advantage from learning methods of mathematical of finance?
"If it could, it seems yet to be proven.  Long Term Capital Management was founded by a bunch of math whizzes and they seem to have missed something.  I'd never suggest that something has no value, but similar to the concept that ""if time travel were possible, why hasn't anyone come back from the future to tell us"" I'd suggest that if there were a real advantage to what you suggest, someone would be making money from it already.  In my opinion, the math is simple, little more than a four function calculator is needed."
If anyone is interested in looking into it, the company Pinnacle has actually been using theory from quantitative finance for a long time. I went to one of their talks during useR!2017 in Brussels, really interesting betting company. thanks for the advice, I still have few weeks before my master course starts and would like to do more reading regarding trading, any books that you would recommend ?   Also I always assume that modelling skill is not that important in sales and trading, is my assumption correct ? Modelling is probably one of my weak skills but if it is needed I would like to work further on it   thank you Making a profit in trading is not a function of time, it's a function of information, speed, and consistency. Regardless of how much time you spend learning about trading, there is no guarantee that you will ever become profitable because you will always be competing against a counter-party who is either better- or more poorly-informed than you are.  Since trading is a zero-sum game, someone is always a winner and someone else is always a loser. So you need to be either better informed than your counter-party, or you need to be as well informed as them but beat them to the punch. You also need to be able to be consistent, or else eventually you will get wiped out when the unexpected happens or you make a mistake. This is why resources such as full-time professional analysts, high-speed trading terminals/platforms, and sophisticated algorithms can provide significant advantages. Personally, I think that people with talent and those kinds of resources would take all my lunch money, so I don't trade and stick to passive investing. One funny story, I once knew a trader who was in the money on a particular trade and went out to have a drink to celebrate. The next day, she remembered that she had forgotten to exercise the options. Luckily, they had expired while in the money, and by rule had been exercised automatically as a result. "While I've never used Wall Street Survivor, I took a look over the marketing materials and I've seen multiple similar contests run among investment interns also just out of college.  I see some good here and some bad. First off, I love interactive web-based tutorials.  I've used one to learn the syntax of a new programming language and I find the instant feedback and the ability to work at your own pace very useful.  The reviews seem to say that Wall Street Survivor is a good way to learn the basics of how trading stocks works and the lingo.  Also, it seems pretty fun which I've found helps a lot. Wall Street Survivor will hopefully teach you that there are many real stock markets and that they may have somewhat different prices and they likely take the real and timely data from a single market. Wall Street Survivor also frightens me.  The big problem that I see with interns running similar contests is that the market is extremely random over short to medium periods of time.  An intern can make an awful portfolio or even pick stocks at random and still win the contest.  These interns know a lot about the randomness in markets already so they don't believe they are trading geniuses because they won a contest, I'm not sure there is much to temper this view on this web-site. Also, while Wall Street Survivor teaches you about trading it doesn't appear to teach you about investing.  The website appears to encourage short term views and changing positions a lot and doesn't seem to simulate the full trading costs (including fees) that would eat away at the gains of a individual investor that trades that much.  It gives some help with longer term thinking like diversification, but also seems to encourage trading that makes Wall Street Survivor more money, but are likely detrimental to the user. I would say have fun with Wall Street Survivor. Let it teach you some things about trading, but don't give the site much if any money.  At the same time, pick up a copy of short book called ""A Random Walk Down Wall Street"" and start learning about investing at the same time.  Feel free to come back to Stack Exchange with questions along the way." "A lot of investors prefer to start jumping into tools and figuring out from there, but I've always said that you should learn the theory before you go around applying it, so you can understand its shortcomings.  A great starting point is Investopedia's Introduction to Technical Analysis. There you can read about the ""idea"" of technical analysis, how it compares to other strategies, what some of the big ideas are, and quite a bit about various chart patterns (cup and handle, flags, pennants, triangles, head & shoulders, etc). You'll also cover ideas like moving averages and trendlines. After that, Charting and Technical Analysis by Fred McAllen should be your next stop. The material in the book overlaps with what you've read on Investopedia, but McAllen's book is great for learning from examples and seeing the concepts applied in action. The book is for new comers and does a good job explaining how to utilize all these charts and patterns, and after finishing it, you should be ready to invest on your own.  If you make it this far, feel free to jump into Fidelity's tools now and start applying what you've learned. You always want to make the connection between theory and practice, so start  figuring out how you can use your new knowledge to generate good returns.  Eventually, you should read the excellent reference text Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets by John Murphy. This book is like a toolbox - Murphy covers almost all the major techniques of technical analysts and helps you intuitively understand the reasoning behind them. I'd like to quote a part of a review here to show my point:  What I   like about Mr. Murphy is his way of showing and proving a point. Let   me digress here to show you what I mean: Say you had a daughter and   wanted to show her how to figure out the area of an Isosceles   triangle. Well, you could tell her to memorize that it is   base*height/2. Or if you really wanted her to learn it thoroughly you   can show her how to draw a parallel line to the height, then join the   ends to make a nice rectangle. Then to compute the area of a rectangle   just multiply the two sides, one being the height, the other being   half the base. She will then ""derive"" this and   ""understand"" how they got the formula. You see, then she can   compute the area under a hexagon or a tetrahedron or any complex   object. Well, Mr. Murphy will show us the same way and   ""derive"" for us concepts such as how a resistance line later   becomes a support line! The reson for this is so amusing that after   one reads about it we just go ""wow..."""" Now I understand why   this occurs"". Murphy's book is not about strategy or which tools to use. He takes an objective approach to describing the basics about various tools and techniques, and leaves it up to the reader to decide which tools to apply and when. That's why it's 576 pages and a great reference whenever you're working.  If you make it through and understand Murphy, then you'll be golden. Again, understand the theory first, but make sure to see how it's applied as well - otherwise you're just reading without any practical knowledge. To quote Richard Feynman: It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.  Personally, I think technical analysis is all BS and a waste of time, and most of the top investors would agree, but at the end of the day, ignore everyone and stick to what works for you. Best of luck!" You can't tell for sure.  If there was such a technique then everyone would use it and the price would instantly change to reflect the future price value. However, trade volume does say something.  If you have a lemonade stand and offer a large glass of ice cold lemonade for 1c on a hot summer day I'm pretty sure you'll have high trading volume.  If you offer it for $5000 the trading volume is going to be around zero. Since the supply of lemonade is presumably limited at some point dropping the price further isn't going to increase the number of transactions.   Trade volumes reflect to some degree the difference of valuations between buyers and sellers and the supply and demand.  It's another piece of information that you can try looking at and interpreting.  If you can be more successful at this than the majority of others on the market (not very likely) you may get a small edge.  I'm willing to bet that high frequency trading algorithms factor volume into their trading decisions among multiple other factors. From my 15 years of experience, no technical indicator actually ever works. Those teaching technical indicators are either mostly brokers or broker promoted so called technical analysts. And what you really lose in disciplined trading over longer period is the taxes and brokerages. That is why you will see that teachers involved in this field are mostly technical analysts because they can never make money in real markets and believe that they did not adhere to rules or it was an exception case and they are not ready to accept facts. The graph given above for coin flip is really very interesting and proves that every trade you enter has 50% probability of win and lose. Now when you remove the brokerage and taxes from win side of your game, you will always lose. That is why the Warren Buffets of the world are never technical analysts. In fact, they buy when all technical analysts fails. Holding a stock may give pain over longer period but still that is only way to really earn. Diversification is a good friend of all bulls. Another friend of bull is the fact that you can lose 100% but gain any much as 1000%. So if one can work in his limits and keep investing, he can surely make money. So, if you have to invest 100 grand in 10 stocks, but 10 grand in each and then one of the stocks will multiply 10 times in long term to take out cost and others will give profit too... 1-2 stocks will fail totally, 2-3 will remain there where they were, 2-3 will double and 2-3 will multiply 3-4 times. Investor can get approx 15% CAGR earning from stock markets... Cheers !!! Frankly, I think all the higher maths in finance is mental masturbation.  EDIT: wht all the down votes?  I've made my money by trading against the PhDs in European investment banks who actually and innocently believe their models represent the real world. Their models work when they work.  I love trading against the combination of arrogance and faux intellectualism.   Folks, read Fooled by Randomness or Black Swan. https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/most-important-finance-books-2017-1  Bloomberg, finacial times, chat with traders, calculated risk, reuters, wsj, cnbc(sucks), bnn (if canadian)  Audio books on youtube helped me read a lot of finance books in a short amount of time, listen while working out.  One thing that helped me stand out at my student terms (4th year here) was learning outside of the classroom and joining an investment club. Learning programming can help if thats a strength, but its really not needed and  it can waste time if yoi wont reach a point to build tools.  Other than that at 18 you have more direction than i did, good luck! No one at my firm uses python, but we have both long-term algo-managed portfolios as well as very successful day trading strategies. I've worked a bit with both, so if you have any questions I'd be happy to try and answer them and if I can't I'll ask at work next week. As JoeTaxpayer has commented, the markets are littered with the carcasses of those who buy into the idea that markets submit readily to formal analysis.   Financial markets are amongst the most complex systems we know of.  To borrow a concept from mathematics - that of a chaotic system - one might say that financial markets are a chaotic system comprised of a nested structure of chaotic subsystems. For example, the unpredictable behaviour of a single (big) market participant can have dramatic effects on overall market behaviour. In my experience, becoming a successful investor requires a considerable amount of time and commitment and has a steep learning curve.  Your actions in abandoning your graduate studies hint that you are perhaps lacking in commitment. Most people believe that they are special and that investing will be easy money.  If you are currently entertaining such thoughts, then you would be well advised to forget them immediately and prepare to show some humility. TL/DR; It is currently considered that behavioural psychology is a valuable tool in understanding investors behaviour as well as overall market trends.  Also in the area of psychology, confirmation bias is another aspect of trading that it is important to keep in mind.  Quantitative analysis is a mathematical tool that is currently used by hedge funds and the big investment banks, however these methods require considerable resources and given the  performance of hedge funds in the last few years, it does not appear to be worth the investment. If you are serious in wanting to make the necessary commitments, then here are a few ideas on where to start : There are certain technical details that you will need to understand in order to quantify the risks you are taking beyond simple buying and holding financial instruments.  For example, how option strategies can be used limit your risk; how margin requirements may force your hand in volatile markets; how different markets impact on one another - e.g., the relationship between bond markets and equity markets; and a host of other issues.  Also, to repeat, it is important to understand how your own psychology can impact on your investment decisions. No, at least not noticeably so. The majority of what HFT does is to take advantage of the fact that there is a spread between buy and sell orders on the exchange, and to instantly fill both orders, gaining relatively risk-free profit from some inherent inefficiencies in how the market prices stocks. The end result is that intraday trading of the non-HFT nature, as well as speculative short-term trading will be less profitable, since HFT will cause the buy/sell spread to be closer than it would otherwise be. Buying and holding will be (largely) unaffected since the spread that HFT takes advantage of is miniscule compared to the gains a stock will experience over time.  For example, when you go to buy shares intending to hold them for a long time, the HFT might cost you say, 1 to 2 cents per share. When you go to sell the share, HFT might cost you the same again. But, if you held it for a long time, the share might have doubled or tripled in value over the time you held it, so the overall effect of that 2-4 cents per share lost from HFT is negligible. However, since the HFT is doing this millions of times per day, that 1 cent (or more commonly a fraction of a cent) adds up to HFTs making millions. Individually it doesn't affect anyone that much, but collectively it represents a huge loss of value, and whether this is acceptable or not is still a subject of much debate! "Yes, of course there have been studies on this.  This is no more than a question about whether the options are properly priced. (If properly priced, then your strategy will not make money on average before transaction costs and will lose once transaction costs are included.  If you could make money using your strategy, on average, then the market should - and generally will - make an adjustment in the option price to compensate.) The most famous studies on this were conducted by Black and Scholes and then by Merton. This work won the Nobel Prize in 1995. Although the Black-Scholes (or Black-Scholes-Merton) equation is so well known now that people may forget it, they didn't just sit down one day and write and equation that they thought was cool. They actually derived the equation based on market factors. Beyond this ""pioneering"" work, you've got at least two branches of study.  Academics have continued to study option pricing, including but not limited to revisions to the original Black-Scholes model, and hedge funds / large trading house have ""quants"" looking at this stuff all of the time.  The former, you could look up if you want. The latter will never see the light of day because it's proprietary. If you want specific references, I think that any textbook for a quantitative finance class would be a fine place to start.  I wouldn't be surprised if you actually find your strategy as part of a homework problem. This is not to say, by the way, that I don't think you can make money with this type of trade, but your strategy will need to include more information than you've outlined here.  Choosing which information and getting your hands on it in a timely manner will be the key." Got a degree in finance and I'll talk about simple ways to really improve your learning experience:  excel will be your best friend. Get comfortable with it. Learn; pivot tables, formulas, formatting, and macros.  Learn to type at a decent speed. Many students still type slow. It will hinder you  Current events is the best way to stay informed. Always be reading up on business information. Pretty much twice a day.   Join a free stock market game and track how you do. Get on it twice a week and make trades frequent based on what you think.   I can elaborate more if you have any more questions ! "Thinkorswim's ThinkDesktop platform allows you to replay a previous market day if you wish. You can also use paper money in stocks, options, futures, futures options, forex, etc there. I really can't think of any other platform that allows you to dabble around in so many products fictionally. And honestly, if all that ""make[s] the learning experience a bit more complicated"" and demotivates you, well thats probably a good thing for your sake."