Thread by @theBuoyantMan

Discretionary traders blow up sooner or later.

For ex: check what happened to Ed Seykota.

This is a sarcastic tweet. Ed Seykota was a systematic trader, whose discretions with his systems eventually led to big drawdowns and eventual bankruptcy. Be careful with discretion though.

Especially when you're trading systematic style, you have to be absolutely thorough and rigorous about whether you want 100% mechanical, or some element of discretion in your system. The discretion parts should be decided before testing stage to stress test the system.

The more moving parts a system has, the more fragile is a system is going to be. The lesser the moving parts, the more robust it will be. It's better to minimize discretion as much as possible when you go the systematic way.

The list of things you can bring discretion into is big. Eventually you must narrow down on things that will bring least emotion alongside discretion and start trading - and you can add more discretion as you gain experience and remove emotion from trading.

At the end of the day, for an inexperienced and immature trader, discretion is going to be the one factor that will largely cause blow ups of accounts. To this day, brokers RELY on you blowing up. A profitable trader isn't good for a broker.

So, trade wisely. If you're a beginner, you have no business starting off with 100% discretionary style of trading. Also, please educate yourself about LEADING and LAGGING indicators and not just use any rubbish strategy you find online without validating.