A bunch of styles, but none of us are flat at the end of the day so clearly we know noting about day trading. [/s]
If you're trading micro contracts with a bucket shop and have to use that to pay bills, you're not approaching this correctly. Withdrawing money to pay bills is fine if you have a massive account. If you have a small account, you're essentially impeding any possible progress. Find some other work that pays the bills and keep the money in your account to grow it. If you have a track record you could show to people that's more interesting than any amount of talk or public journals. At the end of the day, day trading is a marginal business and usually one either makes money or not with the P&L being the ultimate judge. Good luck. PS: I day trade and I dare say I'm quite good at it, too.
Did you get enough sleep last night? That was a very weak deflection. Generally you do better. Of course most of you don't day trade. You didn't even have to respond with anything. It's obvious by the posting.
It doesn't necessarily matter but are you doing it full time? Asking because you say you're quite good. You can still be quite good and and not ready to go full time as you already stated. Just a pretty bold claim.
I don't believe most people that commented on this thread are actual day traders. Like I said maybe an investor approach, hedging, dca or etc I could believe that based on their comments. Maybe you're the exception. Yeah, I am going to start a journal here. May as well.
lol to DCA. Probably half the guys in the room are automated. Six have Director/MD-level or higher ibank-desk experience. One was the global head of eq-derivs for the largest EU bank. Four had trading gigs at funds exceeding a B in AUM. One guy ran a pod at a fund >$30B in AUM. Another swings 500 lots in VX futures/switches. One turned $40K into $5MM in three years just out of uni.
Actually, it doesn't matter for you or anyone else at this point as I'm not trying to sell anything to anyone, nor disclose specifics about what I do. But I do feel I know enough to give some general advice and common sense now and then. I day trade ES 5 days per week and still usually spend a big bulk of my weekends on research and testing. I live in Norway, so I currently hold a day job which pays the bills. I've been full time a few times, but lacked capital and skills/knowledge/experience. I'm now at a point where I think I could do it full time if I had enough capital, but I've decided that if I ever go full time again I want to be much, much better capitalized. Trading for a living is usually a bad idea. I base my claims on my own performance. Also, from what I've seen from other posters most people don't do well with directional day trading of indices. It's a tough gig and probably the hardest way in the world to make money.
Sounds good man. I'll do a journal should be fun. That's my strength is directional day trading, even short term. That makes sense why even more people here than I expected to poopoo'd on my parade. That also aligns with what I was thinking anyways regarding my comment about not many of them being day traders. It really isn't that difficult. Certainly can't say it's easy either though particular if under capitalized. There's just a lot of misinformation about day trading and people way over complicate it. If take someone with average intelligence with a decent executable strategy and they are willing to follow the rules. They will blow someone out of the water who may know 10x them and double the IQ, if no other reason than the person can't effectively execute their trade. They always go off on some complicated wild goose chase, thinking they need some holy grail when the answer is much more simple.
None of that is impressive to me without knowing more, besides the gentleman who turned $40k into 5M in three years. Hats off to him. That's impressive and actual trading skill with an edge, incredibly rare to just be able to do that straight up without all the other advantages afforded that people generally need.