Trading and poker…….joined at the hip.

I have mentioned before on this blog just how systematic play can be very profitable. Financial day traders for example can and do make an awful lot of money from trading systems. However there is one very important difference between financial trading and playing online poker or poker in general. If we imagine for example that the other traders and institutions are the equivalent of other poker players for a minute. In this instance then they cannot possibly know in advance when a specific trader will trade or for how much. They may know from experience when specific trading firms will enter the market, for what stocks and for how much. They may also know the mass psychology of the market and what individual traders are likely to do and when they are likely to enter and exit.

It is for this reason why they often try to faze other traders out of positions. But if you operate as a lone wolf sort of trader and you try and work in ways that are different to most other traders then you can come in under the radar for sure. However there is one very important difference between poker and trading. In trading then your opponents are not watching you specifically and homing in on you like they are in poker and especially online poker. In online poker then your opponents have numerous tools to help them watch you and this is even if they are not doing so themselves. For example software like PokerTracker and Poker Office will download millions of pieces of information onto your hard drive and give you a breakdown of the game of any poker player who happens to be on it.

So within a very short space of time then you can build up a dossier on these people and really get to know how they tick. In fact the best online players have become so good at this that they have almost turned themselves into what is known in the industry as a “super user”. This is a term for a player who has access to the personal accounts and back office of a poker site in a way that they can see your cards. In fact getting back onto the subject of tracking software then you can even purchase readymade databases of information on your opponents and of course they can do the same to you. When you go and trade for the first time then your opponents simply cannot do this to you and they cannot possibly know how you will trade.

There may be a large institution who may know how large volumes of novice and intermediate traders think but they are generalising. If you can trade in such a way as to step outside of those generalisations then you stand a great chance of success in the field of electronic day trading. You may ask why I am talking so much about this subject when it is supposed to be about poker. Well there is one very important reason for that and it is because the two fields are inexorably linked. During my studies of both fields then I have come to the conclusion that a good trader could become a very good online poker player and vice versa. Another big difference between online poker and trading is in the variance. Many of the really good trading systems have very low variance and this is what attracts me to that form of making money. Poker on the other hand can be brutal when it comes to variance and that has led to the demise of many a player.