look, i am not saying that market makers etc. do not sometimes gun for stops based on their understanding of TA and where people would put their stops. Personally, in regards to intraday trading, i trade the dow, which is much more of a pure supply/demand proxy than any individual stock, and thus this is far less of a concern... however... the fact is that when the market is reassessing value, it HAS to move. there is absolutely no reason why you cannot profit from that any more or less than any other trader, whether big money or your piddly one contract. any participant in the market with a decent datafeed can know how many shares were excahnged at any particular level, but they don't know where YOU bought it (note that this is the case with Stocks, that there can be a change in the # of net longs. whereas with futures,there cannot.). you are an anonymous #. play the market and it certainly SEEMS as if the market is gunning for you, and/or it KNOWS, but that is a classic example of the aforementioned anthropomorphization. you can sit there and yell at your screen, implore your stock to move, etc. but it DOES NOT CARE ABOUT YOU. the vast majority of retail traders lose money (and by traders, i mean daytraders. most investors make money and do just fine, but they aren't gunning for big returns), so clearly it seems like the market is "against" them. clearly, that's a bunch of rubbish. the (imo) easiest way to identify a non-professional/losing trader, is that he refuses to take responsibility for his losing trades, and blames somebody/thing else.
"It's not so friendly, and you can make more money if you are comfortable with that, is all I'm saying." - Now that I agree with. But I never said the market is some big Kumbayah fest. I don't get how you came up with that. Re religion, outside of weddings, I don't think I've been in a church in at least 20 years. The markets and life in general can be complicated, irrational and, yes, unfair. So why make things even harder by focusing on shady conspiracies that, even if true, have no predictability to them? There's a big difference between being unemotional about the markets versus coming up with whining rants about the market being unfair for some bullshit reason and that's why you lost money which, to me, is contemptible.
If we were talking in person perhaps the communication would be better and we wouldn't even be having this debate but when I read your quote above, I think 'Jesus christ, doesn't anybody take responsiblity for anything?' If "you happen to be holding the same position" it's because you made that decision yourself out of your own freewill for chrissakes!!!
Yes, I didn't mean for this to get blown out of proportion, it was my fault for not just starting another thread going the other way. No trader who does not take full responsibility for his own actions can succeed, that is an absolute given. My point with the above example was just that markets sometimes move for completely predatory reasons that have nothing to do with true supply or demand, down to the shortest of time frames, and that even as individual traders we must be wary not to become collateral "prey".