Detours can be costly

When researching a method or deciding on profitable strategy, there are many temptations. For beginners it is especially very tempting to get caught in a wrong concept and spend lot of time on it. One of the problems is in most cases immediate reality can influence your decision making.

For example in recent 3-4 months, biotechs have done well. Some of them have gone up several hundred percents and stocks like DNDN has caught investors fancy. For many beginners that looks very tempting and they can spend months figuring out such sector. But such sector specific strategies have high risk, because sectors go out of style for years. China, India, Solar Energy, Ethanol, Energy, were some recent themes, but they will not be around in another year.

Similar things apply to things like NR7 and many volatility based systems. Unless you are going to trade short time frames, it can be huge distraction. Plus many people do not realize that the author of that book trades millions and wants a very low risk steady return strategy. I had a long email back and forth with a new trader, who is besotted with such short duration things while he wants to primarily trade longer term things.

The other trap is trying to trade like macro traders. Unfortunately most of what you hear in mass media and in popular finance blogosphere is macro stuff, which seldom has day to day bearings on stock markets. There are more macro newsletter writers than traders. They earn their money from subscription and not from trading. When you hear things like dollar going down and Dow is actually down in comparison to other currencies, you should quickly check to see what is that guy selling. Trading like that with your small account is recipe for disaster.

The funny thing is , even if you tell beginner trader this, he or she does not have the perspective to understand these things. So many spend several months taking detours.