"I think that most daytraders think that every day is a trading day, and that is where they screw themselves over. You need to trade when there is an opportunity, and have the discipline to just scratch yourself or something other then trade when there is not. Sometimes there will be 10 or more trades to take in a day, other days there will be 2 or less..maybe none. " This is my perspective exactly.
no, i'm not. i don't know anything about gold; thus i don't trade it. nor do i make annoying posts nagging traders with my ***KEEN*** hindsight. there are MANY things that any of us could post regarding our amazing hindsight, like-- "how many of you guys shorted qualcomm at 800 and played golf for the next two years??" OR "who shorted ENE at 60 and played golf for the next year?" OR "who bought MSFT at $3 and played golf for the next 5 years??" ------- if these are the things you constantly allow to nag you in the back of your mind, then you should reconsider your strategy..
bunghole, daytrading is a way to make a living. However fortunes are not made from scratch that way. There are no daytraders in the Forbes list of richest people. There are no daytraders that own sports teams. The big money is in the big trends, as has been pointed out by many other posters. If you don't get the point by now, then just move on.
I completely agree. I traded at a prop firm all of last year. While the market was tanking from late August to early October, two of the partners were loading up on stocks such as Oracle and QQQs. They were both out of the money big, but held on for the bounce and made out nicely. In the meantime, the rest of us were struggling daytrading. During the rally, no one made serious cash because the market would gap up substantially and slowly trend up for the rest of the day. My point is this: three times a week, one of the partners would ask me- If you could buy one stock at these levels, what stock would you buy? I would say LLTC (at that time, it was trading between 19-21. From Oct. to mid November, the stock ran to $35. So while we were busy daytrading, making peanuts, nearly every tech stock that we tried to squeeze .25 cents out of each day had nearly doubled in a bit over a month. The big money was clearly in that trend. These experiences have led me to seriously question the daytrading business model.
True, scalping for pennies won't put you in the ranks of Warren Buffet...but for me it boils down to lifestlye, doing what I enjoy, and if I can make a decent living at it, thats even better (its consistenly making a decent living that's the hard part)