As someone who failed to do that, and accepted the fact, may I ask if are you sure it is not possible? Day trading to me was too much like a video game, and I don't play video games, but there are people who do and are bloody good at them.
It's like a video game only that you are facing a computer screen and in the end of the day have nothing tangible to show. The markets are very dynamic on any timeframe you look at. The only way to make money with the regularity of a "salary" is to do something shady (the mutual fund timing stratgegies), inside trading on economic data, or front running block trades. Charts and analysis ( of any kind) will fail in some market conditions and succeed in others. So you can't have a regular payout.
Averaging out over what time frame? A week? Or a month? I doubt you can make 10 pts a week (every week without fail) daytrading the ES, it just isnt possible. Nobody who is taking directional risk can take money from the market with such high consistency in the long run, by long run I mean at least 1-2 years. You will run into bad patches at some point trading direction, its inevitable.
It's good that a number of the "senior members" of ET here keep emphasizing 2 pts/day is not doable. Makes some dreamers here wake up rather than possibly waste time, or waste less time, and money, chasing a basically unachievable dream. Speaking from some painful, multi-year personal experience, I can't find any sustained edge trading the ES.
High freq trading isn't illegal but it generally is a form of front running. No one here has a real edge. A real edge is a tax arbitrage that i ran because I had the balance sheet and the legal structure to do it. A real edge is having access to information that 99percent of the general publica doesn't (legal but obtained through very specific channels) A strategy that makes money isn't a edge and it has some kind of directional risk and volatility of those earnings will be much higher than a salary.