Over what period is the minimum amount of data to determine if you truly are a profitable/good trader?
I assume somewhere along the line there has been an established amount of time/trades that is the minimum for such assumptions.
When your profits are more than your losses on long terms, then you can consider yourself as a profitable trader.
What will you consider longterm? A year, half a year, two years or?
It’s complicated.
My guess is that there isn’t really an “established” amount of time/trades, and that there’ll be quite a wide spread of views, on this subject.
It’s inherently statistical: what you’re really asking is at what point can you be (say) 90%+ confident that your results are statistically significant rather than being just “a lucky run”?
I think the main thing it depends on is your win-rate, in that statistically, the closer the outcomes are to 50/50, the smaller is the number of specimens needed in the sample-size for it to achieve statistical significance.
If you have a win-rate fairly close to 50/50, even 200 trades is plenty, for that purpose, whereas if your win-rate were 20% or 80% (and there are potentially profitable methods with [I]both[/I] of those win-rates), then you’d need a [I][U]far[/U][/I] greater number of trades to achieve the same degree of confidence in the results.
And then there’s the time factor as well, as you rightly allude to in the wording of your question, because one would want to be sure that one wasn’t just dealing with a market which (for whatever reasons) happened to suit well at the time, but doesn’t always.
My own “guesstimate” is that for most people, for most types of trading, most of the time, 300 (or more) trades spread fairly equally over a 6-month period (or longer) are going to provide a pretty good indication.
[QUOTE=“thejdg;786804”]Over what period is the minimum amount of data to determine if you truly are a profitable/good trader? I assume somewhere along the line there has been an established amount of time/trades that is the minimum for such assumptions.[/QUOTE]
As long as you not over trade and pay commission and spread much
And even you not trading then you investing , so is tricky really