I feel the only two paths to profitable trading is you either put on 1 trade a day or 100+. 1 If you put on 1 trade a day then you very carefully plan out the day and the trade with your stop and profit target and once you enter you let the trade go. Whatever happens reflects how well you planned your trade. However with this approach you have very large fluctuation assuming you are using large targets. 2 If you put on 100+ trades a day then you are basically scalping almost every move as soon as price breaks a certain level you either aggressively trade the break as a momentum trade or your fade it expecting a return to the break. With this approach though you do need a low cost broker with the lowest commissions and even then you may need member rates. I think nearly every pro trading firm trades strategy # as reflected buy the fact that many firms do 1-5% of market volume in many securities. So in ES that is like 10000-50000 contracts a day for example. It is an insane amount of trading. But for the retail guy it seems strategy #2 is out of reach without large capital, tech, risk management, algos, traders, and exchange member rates. Strategy #1 is doable but it's an all or nothing mentality that you need to develop. It is the total opposite of #2. The problem with the 1-100 trades "middle ground" is that basically it eventually all devolves into overtrading, trading too large, too impulsive, too emotional, or eventually you end up giving back all your gains on 10 trades in 1 trades if all in/out or all your profits trading 1 lot on a 10 lot if scale in/out.
Another analogy is the only people that 100% make money in the markets are the buy and hold forever investors (preferably in ROTH IRAs or 401ks) and market makers that hold for like 1 second. Trading any timeframe in the "middle" is just brutal. And you can put brokers/banks in the category of market makers. They just facilitate the trade, collect their piece of the transaction and they are done in 1 second.
It depends on what sort of trader you are. Roughly, swing trader trades a few trades a day or week. light day trader trades tens of trades a day. heavy day trader/scalper/algo trader trades hundreds of trades a day.
Doing 100+ trades a day is a great way to pad your sharpe. But if 1 trade makes your nut why do you even care?
But diversification is money, given you have an edge. 10 positions returning .1% is always better than 1 position returning 1%. Commissions should be largely irrelevant unless you're trading some exotic market.
With my personality, I look to trade once a day if my setup is there. I couldn't handle 10 trades a day, let alone 100.
The issue is your personal "devolving", not the number of trades. Don't underestimate the mental effort trading requires. Artificially filtering the trades your system offers you is going against your system. When you can take all appropriate trades and never tilt, the number of trades is irrelevant.
The biggest gainers always had a few trades. But they also had diamond hands and set on their hands for weeks. It is their BALLSIZE that give them the big profits. (and again, trading infrequently)
%% Good shots sniper [aka the sniper]. Actually, say someone is invested in QQQ long term .... aboVe 200 day moving average; not so hard to trade some of it. ESpecially if you have many charts of qqq, including when QQQ was priced @ $30 area. Ditto for QLD. Some shoot bench rest real accurate @ 1000 yards, i like longs, not that long/LOL.