"95%" is such dirty statistic. You have those who guess randomly, those who attended a webinar/seminar and jumped in because trading is "cool", those who see ET and try to do do half-A&$, etc. How many of the 95% truly dedicated themselves to learn, explore and make intelligent mistakes that could be learned from? How many of the 95% can digest that there is no "income" from the markets..."I just want 2 points" still cracks me up...and the ups and downs of equity that paralyze traders. My account: Jan Win Feb Win March Loss LARGE April Loss small May New Equity High...so far...all because of shorting silver..could be dumb luck. When I write this I am a bit mad at myself at how I traded before..pissed tons of cash...but this was not trading. I ask myself if I am a trader and I say...not yet. I am more active but I just went back to making projects with clients because I don't want to be desperate to make money. if I am, the market will eat me alive. A real trader understands it. If you are a beginner and you can trade 2 months being negative or more and still continue..you could be ok...if not, try underwater basket weaving which is a lot more relaxing. RG
Trading is not rocket science, after trading a while we all learn the set-ups, how to read charts, technicals, fundamentals etc.. The difference between a successful trader and a not so successful ( as long as the time has been put in to learn the game ) is the mental approach. So guys/gals stop complaining you are losing because of you, not because trading is impossible. Trading is not for everyone, its esoteric and still there are many out there making plenty of $.
Which is why stops are generally not a good idea and averaging up or down in a losing position is a better way to go.
I tend to agree with the main points of the OP. Most traders do fail. If anyone got a real peek at performance of individual accounts of retail traders, it would probably discourage people from ever trading. Since this is the case, those numbers are closely guarded and never released to the public. I think research that was done in the past indicated 90% losers, 1-2% consistent and substantial winners, 8-9% winners but not substantial and probably just treading water. If I remember correctly, out of the 90% of losers, roughly 10% were catastrophic losers who basically blow out their entire account. These aren't encouraging statistics for aspiring traders. Although I consider myself part of the 1-2% consistent winners, whenever anyone asks me about trading as a profession rather than a hobby, I vehemently discourage it. I suppose out of those 1-2%, everyone has their own "secret" for how they're doing it, but I suspect it is not just a matter of time, effort, and psychology. People on this board seem to think you can read some books, pay for training, spend the necessary time, and you will somehow get good enough to profit from the market. I just don't believe this to be true. The previous poster mentioned something about finding the right arbitrage / market inefficiencies. On the scale of difficulty, I would venture that it's on the order of coming up with a new, undiscovered physics theory. I'd also guess that most people who spend the next 10 years studying the market will still not be profitable daytraders. It might go from 90% failure rate to 70% or so, but I just can't imagine the majority would be profitable. How many people do you personally know are successful daytraders? I don't know any besides myself, and I know plenty that tried to trade actively and lost enough to not attempt it again.
Only two threads on day trading were started by me.The second thread was to learn from a different perspective.The purpose is to learn a bit more and understand .
If you want to learn and understand, why do you start your threads with a statement, rather than question?
At least a few people I know well for several years and talk with them literally every day. One of them is NoD, who's evolution from a newbie to a great trader I witnessed myself and can definitely say her success is result of her deliberate practice and willing to learn. Some of others have experience of a few decades and are not just successful, but are true market masters, making millions from their trading. And what they do is start ALL their trades as day trades, but they have enough skills and experience to see when to hold and when to fold, so some of their day trades turn into huge long-term winners with the risk-reward of like 1:100, because initial risk on every entry was as small as it usually is for a scalper.
Do you find scalping easier than day swing trading?Is it easier to see direction on 1 min time frame than 15 min? Here is some scalping trades for today , 45 pips profit with 8 pip stop ,and target of 8+ . Spreads were 2 pips plus , with cheaper spreads of 1 pip from 66 trades today but lower spreads could bring in 66 more pips.I felt comfortable trading this tight stop scalping. A few poor entries were made , and a few exits were missed.I see this net profitable performance as repeatable every day .I learnt the use of tight stops.What is your criteria for tight stop entry?Is it trading only in a highly trending market?
what most people don't get: it's all about context ... that's the reason they can't read their chart, you should have multiple charts of different tf's up to get some idea of how it works. People simplify this so much a robot could do this ! That won't work of course, this is human interaction with all of its subtleties. Most of these subtleties get lost on beginning traders leading them to say: 'this can't be done' ... the truth is they didn't give it a decent try, they just thought they did ... It's like when I was doing options, I told a few people and said them 'it's money for free' ... but they had to read a few rather thick books with a lot of math equasions in them ... they didn't want to do that cause that would take to much time and effort, meanwhile they kept plodding along and losing money ... Most people just don't get sophisticated enough at this, yes, it's simple, but not that simple ... there are nuances ... if you don't know how to read those, yes then trading is impossible ...