How do we decide what to trade and when? What part of our chimp-like intellect, our primitive capacity to reason compels us to click the button? Do the charts tell us something? Is it our gut or instinct? Reading the proverbial banana leaves? Whatever is it, we're not here to tell you that you're wrong. But what's undeniable is that the advent of fully electronic marketplaces gave rise to a new species of big-lot slinging primates...upright standing and free handed to make use of mathematical tools and computer modeling to help with their decision making. Wall St now has the intellect of every non-smooth brained phd who’s got an aptitude for numbers/programming, and a proclivity towards forcibly extracting every last dollar from your bank account...and what they lack there they make up for in computational power and the sheer force of capital. How’s a lowly knuckle walker supposed to compete???
Information, that’s how...lots of information, organized in a meaningful, mathematically useful way. Your trading system, whatever system that may be, will dictate what information you use and how you need it organized. They can all be valid (perhaps not the banana leaves) and if you make money, who’s anyone to say otherwise? No judgment. We at DimeChimp don't advocate for one trading system or style over any other. What we're saying is that every institutional trading firm has tools at their disposal that most retail traders don’t, and many of those tools are based on pretty intuitive mathematical modeling and statistical analysis. How you use them is up to you. How you trade is personal...it’s based on your risk tolerance, on your balance sheet, even on your emotional tendencies. Some of us are built to stare at screens and grind, others are built to fire and forget. Don’t ever listen to anyone else telling you how you should trade or that you’re doing it wrong. What you SHOULD do is to take all available information and process/interpret it in a way that’s methodical and rational for your own purposes and risk tolerances. Do you day trade? Perhaps fine-tuning your strategy to be directionally biased would help you extract more edge. Maybe you swing trade. Knowing what the probability of a move is, based on its history, and how long it’s historically taken for that move to happen could definitely help...it certainly couldn’t hurt. Trading 0DTE options? Having a metric, not only for whether your underlying is trending, but also how trending it is, could boost those returns. Perhaps you’re a wretched little baby monkey looking for some direction. Don’t worry, we are all. Perhaps having a different perspective on the market can provide that spark of inspiration and creativity.
That’s what we at Dime Chimp are hoping to provide, information sliced up and churned around in ways which may allow you to look at the market through different lenses, making sense from the mess. As individual traders, it’s difficult to view the wider market. Many traders focus on their small world of symbols, industry or sector. While this may work for some, there’s no doubt that combing through a larger universe of assets can provide valuable insights. The trading universe is getting bigger by the day. Exchanges are listing more products and derivatives than ever. We need smarter ways to consolidate this data, filter out the mess and titrate it down to what can be valuable to your decision making process and your trading strategy. We’ll try to do the dirty work so you don’t have to...harvesting data, consolidating it, running it through mathematical modeling, spitting out useful info, and suggesting a multitude of ways to put on your desired position. We hope to grow a community that’s willing to help each other, to throw ideas against the wall, to test one another, and to advance the tools we’re able to provide. Trust me, you’re not big enough nor is your trade juicy enough for someone to poach it and extract all of its edge from you. If anything, you’ll be better off ganging up with the rest of us chimps and pushing a trade in your favor. We welcome feedback and are willing to provide assistance or information in whatever capacity we can, and if there are problems our community wants to solve hopefully we can do it together. We want to promote an active community where everyone is open to ideas and criticisms...and hopefully we can help each other walk a little more upright.