When i first wanted to be a trader i thought i could become a full time trader, just like that. Now i believe i have the skills to swing trade successfully with my methodology. Something i've realised is...trading ...especially swing trading...is incredibly boring. Is there anyone out there who trades well , swing styel, alongside a job? Im starting to think that just trading unagressively into fortunes, withtout the pressure of a single income, would be best. And i could later retire anyway if i felt like it . Any thoughts?
Really depend how active you are. Trading a lot of securities? Do you set limit buy/sell orders & are you day trading? If you're into watching market activity, trying to get the best price on entry/exit, you might consider something part time or outside market hours. I work and set daily limit orders on at most 3 stocks. On my days off, I'll watch the market more closely looking for trends, patterns. This determines what to trade and the limit amounts on those orders. Hope that helps. Good Luck
Position trading stocks is a good way to begin when you become employed of if you are still in high school or college. In the '50's, when information was minimal, it took up to 30 minutes a day in the evening to get prepared. A daily phone call just after the RTH open, sufficed. Making 10% a week was common although the commissions were high then. At about three years into position trading, the salary I got as an engineeer/writer @ IBM was less than commissions. Commissions were always a trivial cost. There may not be much clarity about trading full time. For intraday trading, it does not take much of the RTH's to make a lot of money. A person could trade full time but he would have a lot of leftover capital. The common choice is to not work and not trade full time. Do anything you want and just make money when you need to refill the hopper. If you trade the ES and use 50, 100 or 500 contracts, and take the market's offer on a given day, then you have quite a lot of capital to do anything with. A combo of position trading stocks (2 to 5 day holds) and trading the ES (20 to 40 trades a day) is a convenient approach. Not everyone is cut out to be a trader. You can't cheat or do shortcuts or fool yourself. It is necessary to know how markets work and this is only learnable by using your mind correctly. The simple fact is that using a computer will probably prevent you from learning how the markets work. I thought about it a little. Small personal computers were not around when I began and the mainframes were so simple they couldn't do anything anyway. The only choice was to work manually with a hand made chart and a pencil and eraser. I did double my money faster than once every 8 weeks simply because I added capital to the extent of 50% of my pay check. I did borrow money to buy two things (expensive) but regular things like sports cars, etc I just paid cash for. Bottom line. To be a trader, you have to learn the markets. No one will understand your telling them how taking the market's offer is done. this is simply because you cannot tell them unless they go through learning how markets work themselves thoroughly. Two major things prevent people from becoming skilled and expert: reading books and using a computer to learn.
Yes, I'm sure in your world 20 to 40 trades a day in S&P e-mini futures is very convenient. After all, how else would we make 3x the daily range? Lol.
You bring up some super points. 1 trade has a maximum number of times the daily range. 2 trades has a different maximum of the daily range. 3 trades is not going to make 3 x the daily range for several reasons. what is the maximum 3 trades can make with regar to the daily range. There is no fixed maximum and there is a fixed minimum of the daily range. What happens to the remaining 37 or only 17 trades left to do that day? We found out recently that a person could make every tick of every trend by doing the bookmarking of ftt's on the fastest observable fractal. We saw that a person makes money in terms of margin and under these conditions of measurement, he does double his capital everyday before he runs out of day. All ticks of all observable trends are made during each day. How does the daily range relate to all the ticks of all the observable trends? What's missing here? What is missing is how a person knows that he knows he has an ftt AND WHEN he has an ftt. Lets say he misses every time by 2 ticks. We know that for 20 turns this is 20 times the number of ends of a turn times 2 ticks. A turn has 2 ends if you look closely. We have 80 ticks that have been missed or 20 points per contract per day. For trading 50 contracts the person misses just 100 points or just 5,000 dollars a day in missed bucks. Look at those 20 points in terms of the daily range. It is usually more than the daily range that got missed due to sloppiness. Is there some part or a multiple of the daily range that wasn't missed? Yes, what isn't missed is the price change on all the bars that are NOT ftt's. How many ticks are there on bars that aren't ftt's in one day. Let's look at bars that are going across the daily range. There are as many ticks as the daily range is wide and all the rest are overlapping ticks. So how does a trader not make any money going across the daily range. He has to lose two ticks on each end of each trend that is used to get across the daily range. So now we have an algebraic formula for relating the trends, ticks and daily range. So how do people not make money trading? They do NOT trend trade. On Monday we posted a way to make all the ticks on all observable trends and there was a definite problem for most people: they could not find the ftt's when they occured. Could they come within one tick? Two ticks? Three ticks? Could they just try 20 to 40 times? could they find them on FTP's, FBP's, OB's, Stitches? they are all colored yellow. does that help? What about all bars NOT colored yellow? Do they work as places to find ftt's. Yes, 100 % of the time except for the better bars that go right out on the ltl. They just make more money instead. Where are all ftt's? After point 3 of the parallelograms!!! That eliminates 40 or more bars out of 81 as NOT possible ftt's. guess why I do NOT do more than 40 trades for making money (I do wash occasionally, however). Check this out. I am writing this and you can't write any of this stuff. check out that I know markets down cold and there is NO noise and there are no anomalies in what I know and write. You don't know any of this either. What you know is that I can't make 3 times the daily range. I know you are wrong and I can write all the coding for what I do. You can't write the coding for what I do, either. Coding is a combo of four separate functions. I posted the functions and, of course, a moderator deleted my post. He had too; it was too important to remain on ET. Could you put me on ignore, please. You are too famous and too smart to read my posts.