Plain and simple: Are you a daytrader or a swing trader? I'll start: I'm a daytrader and I'm dipping my toes into the world of swing trading. What about you???
Right now I'm a day trader. There is way too much risk in taking something home overnight. I do understand there is some real money to be made by doing this because I have in the past. In this market the risk is just to great. Another terrorist attack in the states could easily destroy my account.
I thought it was interesting when you started that "swing journal." Several weeks earlier I had decided I was going to use half my trading capital (actually "trading buying power") for longer-term trades. Best trading decision I've ever made. I still daytrade the Qubes -- but instead of trading 10,000 (or more) shares per trade intraday, I scaled that down to 5-7K. Meanwhile the swings are proving to be VERY satisfying -- and profitable! What I do on the "swing side" is to have about 10 trades working at all times. In the past 2 weeks I've been net short on the swings and have cracked'em pretty good. While I do monitor the swings during the trading day -- I make most of my adjustments during the last hour of trading. I use Tradestation as my trading platform and have about 100 stocks in my Workspaces that I shuttle in and out of for the swings. ... For all here who ONLY daytrade -- I highly recommend allotting a portion of the trading acct for longer term trades (I'm not talking years or even months -- 2 to 14 days is what I'm working with now). dog
I'm starting to swing/position trade more. You can catch more of the meat of a trend that way, imo. For example, I picked up some ES longs the day before ES broke above 1000+. The gap and the upward range extension, at one point, had me up over 20pts. And then the damn thing had to reverse and eliminate ALL the gains it had made over those two days, triggering my 20day volatility range stop. CRAP. Anyways, I typically use Market Profile, in addition to pivots & fibs to determine high probability support and resistance lines, to scalp on ranging days when price is rotating between known values. Boring, safe, but mildly profitable.
These days, I do think that there are a lot of "dumb money" to be made. Mastering how to swing and daytrade would increase your profits exponentially.
That is the exact reason why I scale out of my trades. I have always scaled out of my daytrading scalps. Now, I'm attempting to do that with my swingtrades. I find it to be a consistent way to make the cash register ring. You gotta close the positions when you can, not when you have to.