I keep hearing that.....Trading Stradgey, but I've searched it and haven't found much. Need direction there for sure.
Yes. That is what I meant. Every product will have its quantity measure like ticks, pips or cents which we use to count gains and losses. At the end of the day, it translates to a dollar figure in your brokerage statement. Not look at risk? Definitely, NOT. It is the first thing you should look at because your understanding of reward will be incredibly biased.
Your question, or experience, is all over the place. -- You need to have a focus of some sort. Be a Master of one, not a jack of all trades. Reading books, sites, and following advice is all good...but you should also have an open, neutral, objective mind of your own Use both your left brain, and right brain, while staring at those charts. Really study the underlying. Why it moves, or behaves, the way it does. Just observe it for a really long time. and you'll develop almost a sixth sense or pulse for it. you'll pickup subtle signs and things. I personally have great, or better, experience by trading the day. -- if I had to trade a longer time frame into the future...I would just be wishy washy 50/50 gambley. Options/leverage/derivatives are not that bad...alot of people will tell you to shy away from those -- but on the flip side of that coin...if you're good...you can really have explosive returns.
A trading strategy is a set of rules that you (or your automated system) follow to decide when to enter the trade, when to exit the trade, which instrument(s) to trade, and what size to trade. For example, here is a (simplified to the bones) trading strategy: -- Buy 1 ES contract when the 2-hour moving average is above the 4-hour moving average -- Go flat when the 2-hour moving average is below the 4-hour moving average How elaborate (or unconventional) the trading system is up to you. What you want to accomplish is a demonstrable "edge", i.e. the consistent ability of your trading strategy to generate favorable risk-adjusted returns.
I suggest tastytrade.com - 8 hours of free daily content. I have been a student for five years. I developed my own strategy and paper traded it in 2016. Although there was slippage and some unreasonable fills, the experiment was up 49.65%. Now I'm trading the strategy live. I don't use charts or technical analysis. It's just not necessary for my style of trading. Take profits early, don't trade too big, enter high probability trades, set limits for your losses. My strategy is still a work in progress. Best wishes!
For most, the learning curve is not really like a curve at all, more like an invisible brick wall, unless being fooled. So even though you are all over the place, this is only natural, unless you got a mentor that makes some sense to you, which is incredibly rare. Sure some nuggets here and there from random strangers are nice, but this is mostly a lonely path few venture on. So how many light-bulb moments have you had until now? If not too many to count, you're still like the toddler being told to climb the mountain. Just you're not even sure where the mountain is exactly! The best you're able to do at the moment is really crawling around in circles. And this is completely natural. You're still in a very foreign and unknown environment. Sure you could try to spread your arms and fly down that hillside, but would you be able to fly? Probably not for long. We're all really searching and crawling within the confines of our own light-bulb moments. This is what it is, and don't think that it's all about getting The Answer from someone. It's more about the processes of how you generate your own answers. Some day in the future, you'll be able to stand up, and may see much more than you did before, but still just a tiny speck of the entire land. And you'll still need to be able to progress much further than you've done before, and nobody is going to hold your hand. This will sound harsh to the uninitiated, but my bet is you've had some feel for this already. So beware that feeling a breakthrough is just around the corner. That maybe true, you just may be checking the wrong corners! About how to trade directionally. If you cut losses too quickly, it's really hard to make any money at all. If you never cut losses, you might lose whole positions. So obviously there's a middle ground between death by many cuts, and death by the big blowup, where profits are possible at all. There's really no glory in either extreme. Since being stuck at either extreme may be psychologically rooted, it may take time to break free, gaining enough experience to build and trust a trading plan. One of the best advices is to always trade small, and gain confidence and learn the trade that way.
Awesome post! I do feel that way sometimes, a lot actually. Lost, walking around, but I think I've learned something everyday, all be it small, or Ive at least wrote down another question to fix the answer too. So let me ask.....if I may. What is the deal with the stories I hear of people setting a stop loss position and it not being filled. What happens? Does it just drop down past it(if long)? And what can you do to prevent it.