finding an edge

[ShaunWhite]

I think we're all basically agreeing but might differ on how relevant things are, or the dictionary definition of 'edge'.

I'm not accusing you of being stats mad sb but it's clearly something that plays to your strengths, and that's great. Some people might be innummerate but are incredible at judging a horse just by looking at it, and that might be their edge. Others might just develop an 'intuition' learned by repetition and not quite know how to quantify it. Some might have the patience of a saint and wait all week for one trade or be happy to work 80hrs a week.

The ultimate trading machine would be great at them all and a dozen other things but, as someone who doesn't especially want to earn 100s/day I don't feel the need to beat myself up for not fully understanding and refining my 'edge', so I can squeeze every pip out of it. I'm happy enough to perm 8 from 10 of all the possible types of edge.

I'm not sure you can call any particiular aptitude irrelevant though.

It's not some kind of intuition that a players temperament ......(sic)

Sure, the effect of temperament is a thing you can know and not hard to teach how to profit from. But you'd be suprised how many people lack the emotional intelligence to read body language in the first place. If you can't read it you can't act on it. It's not intuition as such, but it isn't quantifiable either and almost impossible to teach. When a player's shoulders drop are they resigned to defeat, or relaxing and getting centered? Obvious to you maybe and a huge 'edge' but if it's not intuition, what is it?

[Dave Angel]

There are traders out there who can make sure that 90% of people lose 90% of their trading bank within 90 days!
......Worth the watch me thinks!

[spreadbetting]

I think we'll just end up going round in circles Shaun and believe it or not I don't even use stats for any of my strategies/edges as for beating myself up if I can't squeeze every penny that's not the case either. I do believe most edges are actually very small though so you need to be as efficient as possible if you expect to earn anything from them these days. Prior to the exchanges I ran my own business so still have that "If a job's worth doing it's worth doing well" mentality and try and use any time wisely when betting.

I guess the real fact is whether we agree or not there are 'magic bullet' strategies that can be taught you'd have to be very lucky to stumble across one on an open forum. It's always going to be easier to tell people not to go inplay or read 'trading in the zone' than revealing your hard earned tricks.

As a side note one of the things that I do find annoying at the moment is certain posters implying to newbies they're overlooking the 'missing link' usually by some cryptic post or referring them back to a post with a winky smiley, why they don't just tell them is beyond me

[ShaunWhite]

revealing your hard earned tricks.

We agree more than I initially thought. I didn't intend to disrepect what you were saying.

I do agree with you that there are certain 'magic bullet' strategies, hard edges which can be taught/learnt, but as you say they are often small and in order to make them effective you probably need some of the 'soft' edges I was refering to and a healthy dose of 'mindset'.

I'm really more concerned by the way these magic bullet edges are sometimes made to sound like click and collect formulas, all frightfully clever and only found after years of analysing data, when in fact these edges are often much more open to interpretation, such as 'x often happens in this situation so watch out'', or self evident like the example of temperment or a price not shortening forever (usually) . Importantly, they're not always simply reproducable by anyone who wants to buy the secret, that's why they need to be supplemented by the 'intuition' that's unconsciously learned by watching 1000s of markets.

The reason people need to watch 1000s of markets is surely to build up that unquantifiable unteachable 'intuition'. You won't learn any hard facts from watching that many markets, our mental weakness for recentism puts paid to that idea, but given a large enough sample our brains like to find dominant patterns, the magic bullet edges are a nice shortcut to giving you an idea where to look for them, rather than a hard fact you could program into a bot or profit from tomorrow.

Knowing and doing are very different things (I can testify to that) so the idea that someone can go on a course to be gifted a magic edge, or stare deep into their results and find one is misleading. Not necessarily deliberatly misleading, but unless a newcommer really understands what an edge can actually be, it can come across as being more concrete and life-changing than it actually is. I think that also leads to the frustration you see when people are actually given an edge to look into, and they have a paddy because it either 'doesn't work' or seems vague.

...hope you have a good weekend.

[Bluesky]

The reason people need to watch 1000s of markets is surely to build up that unquantifiable unteachable 'intuition'. You won't learn any hard facts from watching that many markets, our mental weakness for recentism puts paid to that idea, but given a large enough sample our brains like to find dominant patterns, the magic bullet edges are a nice shortcut to giving you an idea where to look for them, rather than a hard fact you could program into a bot or profit from tomorrow.

Absolutely agree with this, would also add though that I think there is a tiny proportion of people (maybe 1 in 10,000) who can pick all this up maybe 5 times quicker than a typical newbie (Adam Heathcote springs to mind) these lucky so and sos probably find it difficult to understand why everyone else finds it so hard to succeed.

Something else I have seen written about edges on sports and financial trading forums, usually by newbies is that they think the following added up is sufficient edge to succeed.

Reading books, going on a course, reading forums, buying trading software, have tv subscriptions to sports channels, being disciplined and not being distracted.

All the above and there are many more I could add if I spent some time thinking about it, but here is the problem. The list above plus some other things is enough to give you an edge over a large percentage of traders on the exchange. BUT its not enough to put you into that long term winning 5%. All those long term winners will have the box ticked for that little list above, but they will also have something more, for example they have spent the hundreds or thousands of hours in front of a trading screen slowly absorbing information.

[Chrisglenn664]

Hi guys,

Awesome reaction to my initial post on edges, never thought I'd get this much feed back so thanks.

Inlight of everything that previously been said on this post I'm still none the wiser on these so called edges!!

I'm going to drop a name in here who perhaps isn't the best person to use on this forum but for the sake of this thread and to find a conclusion on this topic I'll mention him anyways! So caan berry has done a video on edges and he basically says that to take trading full time you need to find an edge or edges. Now some of you guys on here explain an edge as just being able to interpret a market and understand technical data which makes sense and just doing the basic things well can be interpreted as having an edge, and I agree, someone else said that perhaps you have an edge but don't know it and notice all these things sub consciously which also could be very true.

Can uses an example tho "a hint as he explains it" being certain things happen at a certain time in certain markets, and certain things happen depending on the amount of runners in a race. These are the type of edges I'm talking about when a certain set of events happen in any given market allow you to exploit it and print money! No technical data or how you treat and read marked actually solid physical events allowing you to capitalize.

Does any one on here have a so called edge they use that they would be willing to share with the group as an example? Allowing use to understand what to actually look for in order to find an edge. For my self personally I know that if a commentator says a horse us playing up in live TV "BANG" I lay the shit out of it and 9/10 times its the right call, that is the only physical edge I believe I have.

Someone mentioned Adam heathcote and I truly believe for the time he was trading and how well he did he defiantly had several edges over the rest of us! Obviously he was shit hot at reading and understanding markets and desyphing graph dada but surely he didn't earn all that money on that alone he must of had physical edges! Adam is different to Peter w and can berry as Peter and caan have years and years of experience, Adam did not so what was his edge what did he know that the rest of us don't........

[ruthlessimon]

Does any one on here have a so called edge they use that they would be willing to share with the group as an example?

Let's take a real basic one, guess you could call it a "pullback" - OMG SCRETS!!!!!!!! shhhhhh :

Backers aggressively back in a runner, a layer steps in, the backers quickly 'absorbs' the layer, steam continues. Stoploss placed above the layer's entry. We expect the low to be taken out, if this doesn't happen we scratch/maybe exit for a small profit.

Pretty basic order flow pattern - but everyone knows that. Or maybe not many people do, to busy trying to be complicated & give it fancy names (i.e. head & shoulders )..... But to give it some real juice, you need some confluence & that's where the good secrets lie

[oscar123]

If you are making money, you have an edge. If your account is in profit over a decent number of events/time/months/years, you have an edge.

I guess you never truly know until after the event whether you have an edge or not, or if that edge still remains, or if it has been eroded, only time will tell.

As for an example, you gave one. If a horse plays up on the way to start, 9 times out of 10, it will drift ( unsure of exact figures, but let's say that is right). So if the 9 times you lay a horse that is playing up makes more profit than the losses you make on the one time it plays up but the odds go the other way, then that is an edge.

That is a well known 'edge', though it also relies on being fastest finger first. So obviously, the less well known and obscure your 'edge' is, the more chance you have of profiting from it. As if it becomes common knowledge, it just becomes a case of fastest finger first, and may get to the point where despite knowing which way the odds are going to go, you become unable to profit as somebody else will have got there first.

There are probably tens/hundreds of other situations, biases, patterns, trends that happen every day that will do similar. They may come and go as the market adjusts. That is why you have to be constantly monitoring your results, and looking for new edges and new angles in. It is also important that you manage your money and stake correctly in order to take advantage of these edges.

So it figures, that the least amount of people that know about your edge, the more chance you have got from profiting from it, until the market catches up, and the edge is eroded. That is why anybody smart enough to find an edge, is also smart enough to not come and put it in an open forum.

There just isn't the liquidity in the markets to share. We can't all get rich together.

As for gurus talking about edges. I imagine for some of them their biggest edge is the ability to get other traders to hand over what most would consider to be a good day's trading profits in exchange for an ebook/services/course that basically leaves you non the wiser.


So don't push me, cause I'm close to the EDGE, I'm trying not to lose my head. It's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under..

[Bluesky]

As for gurus talking about edges. I imagine for some of them their biggest edge is the ability to get other traders to hand over what most would consider to be a good day's trading profits in exchange for an ebook/services/course that basically leaves you non the wiser.

We know there are people out there that will take your money and leave you none the wiser but I also think there are people who try their best to help you learn to trade. I don't think there can be a course that you can take and next day you start raking in the money.

I do though think there are courses out there that can give you a structure and enable you to not lose much money so that you stay in the market long enough to learn how to trade. Sports trading courses seem to cost in the range of £200 to £400, I think this is not a lot of money if it gives you a chance to survive in the market long enough to learn something.

How many posts are there on this and other forums of people jumping into trading, not bothering to take any training, and then losing a lot more than two to four hundred quid in a few weeks.

[oscar123]

Where is the evidence that spending that £200-£400 on trading educational material does give you the chance to survive longer in the market though?

These courses have been going on for years now, probably thousands of ebooks have been sold, though there seems to be very little evidence of people advancing their trading careers because of them?

£200 to £400 seems a lot of money to me, especially when most seem to be told to go and play about with minimum stakes or worst still practice mode as they are sold the line that 'it takes time' and 'nobody profits immediately'.

I used to buy the line that they are helping to create liquidity for the exchange, though I don't even accept any more. There are more courses and educational material available than ever before, yet the markets seem quieter.

There maybe examples of people jumping in without any training and quickly blowing up, but let's face it, most of those posters didn't have a chance anyway.

Apart from all the obvious sock puppet accounts on Twitter, where are the examples of people who have taken a course or bought an ebook and have gone on to trade successfully?

[deggsy10]

Didn't realise that 20% commission kicks in when you have reached 5k profit. That's poor. Maybe a way round it is to bet the profits out of betfair by backing in betfair and laying in another exchange such as smarkets. Obviously the betfair bets would have to lose but at least this way as some will win and some will lose you are stopping your betfair profits from going up too much as some of the profits will be transferred into the other exchange.