Why? If you had, say, a good-looking setup for what looks like a decent scalp trade, would you forego it if the longer term pointed in the opposite direction? Or would you just size the trade or the protective stop differently?
Well it's hard to average more than 6k a day scalping ticks or a few so when you have serious dosh swing makes more money with less effort, or just stocks. I had a plan to live and breathe it for four years and move on when my 'number' was satisfied. I did five and a half as a live trader. I won't return to it. Cortisol is very corrosive, just tipping away is fine like a guy who goes to the park to play chess a couple of hours a day. Tearing it up 18 hours a day sometimes would have killed me except for my guys, one on the US east coast and one GMT. To be honest I was only good at the scalping, the swing trading was pushed on me by the statistician I employed and I was in the back seat a lot, much over my head and much automated. With scalping I never had a real stop, I think we discussed this. I would just see which of the other indices was farthest away from my conceptual multi-market midpoint and trade in the opposite direction the same value. So knowing they could not get toooo far away exposure was limited. I get that this seems weird as the maths don't favour it but whether or not it was efficient, my psychology benefitted from basically just losing time, not money. I'd have one of them watch the stuck trade until it was resolving my way and of start to scalp again via other accounts. I would only trade a max 20 lot emini contracts in the mornings to avoid the puckering asshole feeling of things not coming right before the stop but even if that did happen, I could carry them through as with the swings. Lots of different accounts of course. My broker was great and would often call for a chat. I was never worried about somebody like a Ray at AMP/Ninja trader brokerage buggering me out of the blue by closing a position that scared them.
I remember something along those lines about not necessarily having a stop, but your rationale, as explained here, gives me better context. So thank you for that. If I understand correctly, you were allowing the trade to potentially go farther against you than the profit you would normally take. Did you ever run into trouble with this approach?
One time lost 80k which was not trouble but it was annoying. It was a problem between chair and keyboard on my end that was not spotted when I was trading solo. One of those mistakes a solo trader makes. But I'm actually struggling to remember the exact details... I'll check messages I sent at the time and update tomorrow.
Ah yes, I entered a position on an expiring contract. A dumb clerical error. The price on old and new contracts was a good bit apart but I was settled automatically on the expiring and didn't realise so the opposite trade was no longer balanced out. I recall thinking I was out and saw the account was dented. My broker had to explain it to me which was embarrassing That's the lone wolf trading, nobody was checking my blonde moment. I guess I did understand the swing trading approach but it was based on analysis numbers I could not understand the statistics behind. I probably should have been able to but like options I could never hold the totality if how they work in my brain. With Options I always felt nervous as there was weird options shit stuff I didn't know lurking. For me Options were a test of having intelligence... to avoid them I'd seen too many way smarter than me get screwed by them.