I've made a nice living averaging less than 10 trades per day. That being said, when I was automated, there were days when over 10 trades would hit my computer in a second. But that stopped working. My programmer lost 35K in about 30 seconds and he quit trading. He makes a nice living programming for a Minneapolis company. I was crazy enough to stick with it, and it's worked out.
Not necessarily, you can also trade 100 different stocks each day, without scalping them. This usually requires an automated trading system, however.
More important than "number of trades" are the market conditions that demand action based on your strat. If three instruments show the market condition you seek, then trade all three. Hundreds of trades per day really demands some kind of api or algorithm, unless you're one-click scalping or something.
1 trade a day, just trade in the direction of VWAP. j/k, I tried for months to make a system like this work. It didn't. And it was more than one trade per day except if the market was trending hard.
Automated mean reversion. Enveloping long and short. It hasn't worked for many years. Literally over 1000 standing orders waiting for volume spikes. I remember being in the office and looking at each other and saying "This is too risky. We can't do this anymore." That was 15 years ago. I can't imagine trading that way with all of the Meme stocks lately. I'm just an old timer momentum trader these days.
My worst days are when I trade too little, 2-3 trades/day, or overtrade, 40+/day. My best days, I'm doing 12-20 roundtrips/day.
I would say none. Trade as per our interest and at the right places so it can be 1 or 2 or even 50. But it should be right and should give you good returns.
If were to hire a trader to trade then I would present two options: 1 One trade a day. All In/Out. Wait for STRONG trends where it doesn't even matter where you enter you make money because the trend is that strong. 2 Put on 100+ trades a day doing mean reversion scalping in/out via scaling. However must avoid the strongest trends. Shut down when account goes up/down a % amount. The reason why TopStep Trader probably has 95%+ failure rate is you have guys with: 1 No patience to wait for that ONE perfect trade. 2 Lack the low commission structure (exchange member rates) + automated risk management required for 100+ trades.
The truth about this industry is that Brokers, Exchanges, and vendors like TopStep Trader are heavily incentivized to MAKE YOU LOSE. Because After you Lose: 1 You trade more (which means more commissions, exchange fees, combines, etc.) in an attempt to get "even". And the more you lose the more you trade and bigger risks you take. You end up churning the entire account. Look at the risk management features that a broker like Tradovate offers where you can set your daily loss limits. Such a simple feature every broker could have offered to prevent blowups but they want you to blow up. Incentives explain almost everything. I think it was Victor Niederhoffer who wrote in his book that the 1000+ Billion $ wall street infrastructure must be paid for with your losses.