My wife is real nervous with me trading even though I make quite a bit more than I did working on the job. The girlfriend she don't care as long as I take care of her if you know what I mean. Heck I couldn't even afford a girlfriend until I started trading.
until recently, i worked a regular job and did swing trading only. now i am taking a sabbatical and trading fulltime, but still not comfortable with day trading. i do occasionally jump into hot ideas that i get from cnbc (like buying puts on the recent bol scare). but i never risk a lot of capital. a pretty cautious trader overall and my style would probably not suit most who are career traders.
interesting to me that most people on this site are male. none of the males i know are any good at trading. (but then again, neither are the females i know - lol). my significant other thinks i'm a genius, and he's right. he loves it that i trade so well.
Yes, I have a proper day job. That was the reason why I tried to come up with an indicator-less day trading system. Here is what I learned. Day-trading is not easy and if you cannot give all your time to it, don't do it. Now I'm more focused on swing trading ES(which is what I did before trying day-trading). There is less stress and I can work with EOD data and incorporate other technical indicators too.
I think this is a great post/forum......BUT....if we all admit or tell our "on the side trading"....the news the papers etc will be all over it and the companies or government agencies we work for will be investigating and the whole think will be over.....for example as soon as the NJ turpike finds that some of its employess are day trading as they collect tolls what do you think might happen....this maybe a good time to not admit or share our experiences at all with anyone...not even the board....this basically helps no one although I find them to be great stories...as for me...well I have no comment.
>>>interesting to me that most people on this site are male. none of the males i know are any good at trading. <<< Princesa, Actually, you are a rarity. Tell your husband, he is lucky you have an interest in investing. Very few women trade and the ones that do are very impulsive. I had a female friend who I was mentoring on trading but, she was too impulsive. Would suddenly trade huge positions without good reason. She blew out close to $300,000.If she listened to me and put the bulk of her funds in the bank, she would have more money now and be a better trader. On a couple of occasions, I gave her my options picks, she was able to take advantage only 3 times. She missed the last one I gave her on XTO EH (XTO) which I bought at $3.60 and sold for $7.40. In between, she bungled some more trades which lost her money. Have a couple of female friends in the office who are also impulsive----they would hang on to their losing positions (big losers) and would dump the ETFs I gave them when the declined a little bit. Then, the ETFs go up and they regret what they did!!! Go figure. Oh, I am a guy by the way. Not a very good trader yet, but working hard at it!!!
I work as a CNC Programmer/Machinist & it's harder than hell to trade. The pay is surprisingly decent - 70k+ yr. But it sucks working(real work) for a living. Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful to have a "real" skill, but I'd rather trade. Basically, I use a smartphone to track realtime quotes & I have a laptop w/wireless broadband to place the trades. All this extra gear is costing me a pretty penny every month. Right now, I'm concentrating only on trading options - outright calls & puts - short term. So far this month made good coin on JCI May 80 Puts & JCP May 57.5 Calls - Currently in NUE May 115 puts, don't know how that's going to turn out... Eventually, I'd like to trade ES intraday - hopefully within a year.
for those who swing trade afterhours, I am wondering who are you recieving your end of day data from and what software do you use for analysis? i am thinking about placing trades in the AM Eastern time and doing analysis at the end of day, looking for a decent commodities broker to place online trades with....