almost everyone I know ( myself included) make steady profit swingtrading... ...there are NO.. NONE..NADA... steady daytraders that i am aware of personally... just the facts mam... just the facts... ( live stoen from tv show ...DRAGNET)
Unless the so called gurus consistently post good results on the P/L journal assume crap. That's my filter for ET. Nexen
Your definition of "the very nature of daytrading means..." is ridiculous. A lot of your if/then statements don't establish any cause and effect. A daytrader trades their timeframe. Moves that go on for days, weeks, and months aren't trades that a "daytrader" would be looking for, therefore they ARE NOT moves that would make a daytrader's year! Your thought that "The more frequently you trade the more addicted you become to the action. Also the more frequently you trade the more compulsive your actions become." Are you kidding? Ridiculous. If you trade for the action, then by definition, you trade for the wrong reasons...no matter the timeframe you trade. 6 Great profit potential also means greater loss potential. Sure you can make 2x the daily range daytrading but more often you can lose 2x the daily range. Doesn't this ruin your entire argument to become a swing trader? Weren't you arguing for bigger profits in those bigger multi-day moves you touted at the beginning of your original post? As far as losing the same amount that you "can" make goes, in order for this to happen, you have to have no understanding of risk-to-reward. Judging by your 3 25k losers, this certainly applies to you since you can't get out of your hole. 600/day? Lol! How can you take 25k losers and only average 600/day?!?! You have no idea what you're doing as a trader. If you switch to a longer timeframe, it will probably shorten your career even more than if you remain a daytrader because you'll manage to lose even more when you refuse to take your losers.
.... My plans for swing trading is to "scalp" but on a much longer timeframe and across many different positions so that I'm not impatiently trading noise. [/QUOTE] "impatiently trading noise." Damn. You think that if you change timeframes your inability to patiently wait for the right time to enter a trade will change? Oh I get it. It's the timeframe's fault that you are so implusively impatient that you trade "noise". Seriously -- keep daytrading, you're probably helping me make money.
I haven't read the whole post, but here's my $0.02: Comparing daytrading to longer-term trading is kind of futile. It's like comparing rugby and (american) football - you can see similarities, but the rules and required skills are very different. Sure, you'll get people who are good at both, but more often than not it pays to specialise. As someone who does 300+ RTs a day, I can say that I know a great number of people who profit from daytrading. Basic theory tells us that the more times you exploit an edge, the more chance you have of coming out green in any given period of time; I know of someone who has not had a down day in his last 3 years as a daytrader. It's all about deciding which route you want to take and spending months, if not years, perfecting your craft.
You'll find that most people who lose money daytrading do it through fear or lack of discipline. I scalp my markets but I'll also trade for 50 ticks or more; it all depends on what I see happening in front of me. Most people will probably blow up rather than fade out slowly - you can put together a string of 5 1-tick winners on a 3-lot, but then you get 3 ticks offside in the next trade, decide to throw another 3 lots at it, it moves against you again and within seconds you've lost 3 times what you gained in the last 5 trades. Being a winning daytrader imo is less about being an economic expert and more about being able to eliminate scenarios such as the one above. This is why 90% of people lose; it's not that trading is intellectually difficult, most people just lack the emotional discipline to always act in their best interests.
The above is always touted but is always difficult in practice. I am not talking about stop losses. While I think it is most important to focus first on not losing principal. The biggest challenge is squeezing all the juice you can out of a trade or investment on the upside. The worst thing ironically which many can attest to is taking profits too early and hating yourself for it. Psychologically that can be worse than simply losing on a trade.