In the futures side, I already went short on all the indexes for a longer term trade and did all using hedges for very short period of time. As far as length of move, I never was able to fortell the future, otherwise I would be knowing the numbers for the lottery each week. In other words, I go to breakeven at certain amount of points, I have one target on half my contracts and unless I have a very good reason, my protective stops stay at breakeven. The only way I can make a few times a year huge profits on a few trades almost each year. When I started, it was $125 bucks to do 100 shares of anything, no way you could day trade and make money. T-bills was the big market that was making the big moves in the futures. I spent like a decade before I went into futures which for me was a huge mistake, took seven years of finding out every single horrible emotion I had within me to overcome. Eventually I overcame, and found long term to be very boring and added short term till I was day trading. I figured one time if I had never went into futures and just stayed totally with long term stocks, I would have seven times what I have accumulated, but...could'a, would'a, should'a. At a certain point, just too hard to double any more, you start thinking of percentage of risk to total portfolio whereas when first starting out, you think less in that. I found day trading stocks to be easier when it traded in 1/16ths, but after it went to pennies and less, just became much tougher, so went to big S&P500 at $25 a nickel(.05 tick size) long ago, that was better than the ES of today, much easier to trade, much less false moves even though you had to call into the floor, retail commissions($12) were cheaper than today, now you have to trade 10 ES to get same point value, but tick size is horrible to retail trader today. I no longer day trade these days, no energy, sick, lack of interest generally. I have employees that grind it out or automated systems. Best way to learn to day trade, don't, biggest moves are longer term trading, less stress, takes way too long to learn how to curb your emotions. Day trading makes you work too hard for the amount of risk to get much less reward, while longer term trading gives greatest return for sensible risk.
:eek: Was it because of the huge leverage or the predators? This has been my experience, too. Day trading is fun, but small change compared to swing moves. I haven't even tried the longer term yet.
Considering I was only looking at stocks once or twice a week, and went to day trading and watching every tick, plus being bipolar with ADHD, my personality was not suited for shorter timeframe. My ordinary day starts with depression and beginning traders has much more losses than wins, my losing made me feel even worse. Add that to inabilities of all the emotions that are emitted from realizing you can't control the markets, and having losses intensifies my depressions to manic, I was feeling pretty lousy in the early years of learning how to day trade. It wasn't the leverage as much as need to not lose. As years have gone by, I designed more methods always leaning on low percentages of losing. If you don't lose often and losses are small, account has to go up. Stocks in my thoughts and trading just have been easy, find something that bases or refuses to go down after so many weeks and buy it, or watching distances between pivot highs and next pivot highs to sell short. But in longer term commodities, when I started to learn to hedge using options after a few years, that became easier. But when it came to day trading the S&P500, early on, I didn't know the game is rigged like 70% of the time. I had to study patterns and times of the day, then backtest it over large amount of years. S&P500/ES IS the hedged product of stocks, at least in my mind. I was doing well enough is stocks, my day trading losses weren't coming out of my pocket per se, I didn't make any money taxable for few years.
If "buy the dip" first post on this thread 10 days ago was the advisory, isn't buying the slide today that much better today ? Just asking. Trying to figure the logic in the quote above. For what its worth.... "For historical purposes" Chart 11 to 15 April http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=3780893#post3780893