Good Morning hilmy83, You already know what time it is my G. Getting rich is all that matters. If you not trying to get rich quick, then you trying get poor quick.
Good Morning .sigma, All the members on ET website including you are trying to get rich, quickly, in the markets in the day trading in 1 to 10 years. To get rich slow invest in sp500 index twice a month. Then you be to old to have fun at 65 years old. Then die at 75 years old. Takes too long. We all trying to get rich before 30, 40 or 50 years old man by day trading everyday to have perfect life. No millions, no perfect life. There is no other way to get rich besides day trading. This is the truth
How many trades are you doing to make your daily goal? What's the standard deviation of each traders return?
It's easy to make the argument that all days are not created equal and that there is more opportunity some days than others. However, depending on how and what you trade, using a daily goal can be a valid workable plan. I only trade stock index futures. I don't care what the market did last year, last month, yesterday nor even the last hour. I don't care if we are in a bear market or a bull market. I only care what the market did the last 15 minutes, the last 2 minutes and the last 1 minute (emphasis on the last 2 minutes). There will be dozens of short term trends up and down on most days.
I have an average daily goal. However, I don't stop because I hit it. I find my attention usually flags after 90 minutes or so, so when I find myself getting distracted or tempted to take a trade because nothing has happened in 20 minutes, that is when I shut down. Over the past few weeks I have had multiple days where I have made three times my daily goal. Those wouldn't happen if I stopped just because I made goal. By "average" I mean simply I would like over 20 trading days to have averaged, using your number as an example, $500/day. That is a minimum for me. The way you are setting up, that would be your maximum. And if you don't hit it on just one day, your 20 day average will be less than what you desire. I think it better to have a set duration of time during which you will take all of your signals. Stop when your last trade either takes profit or stops out.
The whole idea is terrible. If you had a shoe store, you can't close the store if you have customers because you hit your profit goal for the day and then have a shoe sale the next day at noon because business in the morning wasn't good but you have to meet this arbitrary daily goal. Like a shoe store, it will devastate your revenue and you will be out of business soon enough. Even a good shoe business would be devastated by this bad idea. Even worse in the markets because the payouts will be much more asymmetric.
Agreed. Also agree with @comagnum that if one should utilize this approach the daily loss limit is just as important and would probably have to be enforced broker side in order to protect against full tilt. There's no use in making $500 per day 10 days in a row if you lose $3000 two days in a row on day 11 and 12. So, if you can reasonably expect to make $500 per day most of the time you should probably have a daily loss limit at that level as well. But in the end, I agree that the idea isn't very clever and it also gives the impression of: "I got lucky catching $500, so I better quit so I don't lose it." Doesn't sound like someone who's confident in what he's doing. If the goal is steady, daily gains, maybe receiving a paycheck is a better choice. Upside is limited. Just like the downside. Same outcome. Like I suggested on page 2, I think a better option is to make sure a green day doesn't go negative. For example, if one day trades ES and captured say 20 points and the average daily range currently is 20 points, maybe it's wise to call it a day since you in fact captured a great part of the expected move OR reduce size to half your maximum on subsequent trades and call it quits if you take a loss or two on your next trade(s). But if you're up 5 points on the day on 2 contracts ($500) after 10 minutes and daily ranges currently hover around 50 points, you're selling yourself short by settling for 5 points. You should squeeze what you can get out of that day. At the expert level, you would simply keep trading your signals from Open to Close racking up gains while limiting losses.
I do not set a plan for daily earnings. I trade when there are signals from my trading strategy. At the same time, when a trader has received a loss instead of the planned amount of profit, in order to achieve the planned daily result for profit, he will try to quickly cover it by any means, even by increasing risks in order to have time to fulfill the plan, which can only worsen the situation. Therefore, I think that you cannot limit yourself to a certain amount of profit per day: if there are conditions for trades - trade, if there are no conditions for trades - wait and do not rush.