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I met a South Tirole forex trader.

South tirol is in the mountain valleys in the north of a Italy, and they speak a dialect of German.

I struck up a convo because he was staring at currency charts and scribbling in a notebook.

Adjusting his algorithm he explained. He doesn't trade the USD (too many do that already), just other currencies. He makes 12% annually following his algorithm.

I asked if he likes Bitcoin.

No, he isn't interested in stocks or Bitcoin because they react to news, and it's too complicated to trade.

He explained he hadn't done any formal studies and worked as a seasonal farm laborer. The next apple and cherry harvest in Australia was going to put some cash in his pocket.

Farm work grinds down more than strengthens. Carrying 20 pound belts up fruit trees is not easy on shoulders and backs.

He was struggling with the yield question. How to make money from money versus working.

It's ironic that he finds himself far away from the farms of northern Italy in Bitcoin country and dealing with currencies but still not into bitcoin. It will be the perfect fit if he will be able to apply his algorithm ideas to Bitcoin.

I just don't see any trading being useful apart from perhaps selling and buying back covered calls on Micro$trategy. But I haven't figured that one out.

Making 12 percent when the stock market is going down is a very useful skill. Maybe in 2026 I'll be asking him about his algorithm.

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Discussion

mike 11mo ago

The problems I have with trading:

Only 1-3% of traders make money and only 13% of those make consistent profit over 6 months and only 1% are consistently profitable over 5 years, which means that 99% don’t.

The traders that make money, make it from the 99% that loose.

It’s a competition and only the fittest survive, the rest die.

It is similar to sports like football, where the best teams thrive and the worst struggle.

However, sport is just a game and even though professional sport involves money, losers don’t loose money, they just fail to make it.

𝕞ptf 11mo ago

I also can't get into trading. The best is long term trends or swing trades is feasible though. Also, trading means watching the markets all day and that is boring for me too.

mike 11mo ago

Good choice.

gojiberra 11mo ago

I agree about trading. Also all the news is totally random.

The only person i know who invested successfully was holding long term index and optimizing leverage.

He ran a lot of Matlab calcs on the S&p and NASDAQ and found that historically it's worth it to buy and hold indefinitely up to 2X levered Nasdaq and up to 3X levered S&P.

Ive been trying to convince him that Bitcoin is an index with enough historical data to be comfortable with.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 11mo ago

when i was most effective at forex trading i barely spent 10 minutes a day on it

money management is the main thing, and having a reasonable margin versus the risk level of the market

what this means is you only trade a small percentage of your stack, and this is the number one rule, this is the rule that you can't break, other rules are not so rigid

but i personally think that it's better to stack a store of value and invest in real enterprises directly instead of other people's

gojiberra 11mo ago

the 10 minutes a day thing sounds like what he described. He was a super humble dude. Hope he gets rich. The farm products from south Tirol sound amazing.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 11mo ago

yeah, forex is a relatively easy decent income generator once you know the rules of it but finding good brokers is also an issue, and the rare but inevitable rug that all fiats eventulaly have

bitcoin is hard to trade on using the techniques i used on eur/usd because of its wider volatility and this is because of its lower overall volume

at some point, the volume is going to rise and the volatility will fall and money management/trailing stops will become effective at shorting the dollar but you can avoid all the headache by just stacking as hard as you can, because this will still beat the effective volatitility arbitrage technique that i learned back in 2008

it's basically like, you can flip a coin for your trade direction, everything else is based on a system, literally there is nothing you really need to watch the charts for

apart from the average volatility, that's it, that's why it only takes 10 minutes

you only have to win one time out of about 5 if you use trailing stops and have your volatility range correct, because that winner tends to do more than double the gains that your 4 previous losers cost you

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 11mo ago

oh yeah, part of it is that you tend to be trading against a lot of other idiots with their signals and systems

what they gain, you lose, with far less effort... this is where the leveraging plays its role in the picture

i still say better to stack a SoV though, less complicated

scooter 11mo ago

The problem I have with statistics is that 3% of the time I never fini

mike 11mo ago

😂