People have issues "trading straight up" and use account size, contract size, averaging down, time and etc to be profitable. Which is fine all can be very helpful and powerful tools when used properly. Like others said however someone can consistently pull money out of the markets, that is amazing and great. No debates or complaints there. The issue becomes is people get their feelings hurt, that they can't objectively trade as well as they think they can or want others to think they can. There's very few people who can actually sit down, have a repeatable setup where they have entry, target and stop predefined and be consistently profitable like that. Because if you can than your account will be seeing exponential growth in a very short period of time. If your account is not experiencing that, than your edge is not as strong as you think and/or you're needing to pull additional edge from some place else to be profitable(as mentioned above). Again nothing wrong with that, just no need for people to pretend.
I'm really enjoying this discussion. I agree with making 50 points on repeating wins and small size being superior to one win on large size, because the latter is not statistically significant. The real test is how many bear markets you've survived! I am starting to sense some anger out there.
Nowadays I prefer NQ which for whatever reason find "easier" get in and out with what I need to make in a day. I use one minute to set entry/exit but watch a 20 pt,1 tick Kase bar chart setup. I just checked and there were 278 (20) point bars today. 278 friggen bars!!! Plenty of opportunity.
TS user with Kase bar's? Nice. That's mainly what I use to trade NQ with. It's surprising how few people use range bar's, much less know or use Kase bar's. They're very flexible though and work very well with my setups.
Let's settle the argument once for all. I funded $43k and had entered long at 3775 in my larger account. It was a bad timing as it turns out, down over 100 points, 5k drawdown. But this setup is for holiday bounce or relief rally to 3950ish, about 150-200 points. Don't call day trade for nothing, close out all positions daily, win or loss. 11 losing days out of 69 days I traded H2, total 581 points gross pocketed, little bit sky of 3x. If someone suggests that it is easy to repeat and compound the result daily consistently, then he doesn't know what he is talking about, or he is a gambling man. Don't getting feelings hurt by opinions. If you are losing money, that is a real hurt.
In my opinion, it was the higher probability setup. I’ll try to be more forthcoming on my reasons for trades but often trade on instinct. I’ve been doing this for quite a while
I'll stop you right there as the rest of your post is discussing strategy. My point was simply that there's a difference between taking 50 points total on 50 contracts vs 1 contracts. Then @tiddlywinks jumps out of nowhere and says it's no difference. I agree with your comments on strategy, though. Humbly, an EliteTrader takes what's offered and maximizes his take. That means smaller scalps when the market's in a narrow range and larger moves when the market is moving. It takes skill, recognition and a good emotional makeup (no greed or fear) to be able to do that. For example, I can recognize chop, but still have trades go back to B/E chasing "the big one" instead of taking 3-4 unrealized points on offer. That's not EliteTrading, but BS and greed...
Ok fair enough. Yeah, there's no way for either of us to prove what was the higher probability setup, so I certainly don't want to waste your time or mine debating that. Maybe you were more just joking with him more than being serious. Was a poor way for me to make my point, which was just that both setups basically played out. For me I liked the short more given it's more in line with the larger charts. But given the fact that June lows have not been taking out and we see day after day shorts being squeezed off the lows, there's certainly long setups to be had as well obviously. To each his own more than one way to trade.
Scalping vs holding for larger moves is an interesting discussion, though. The inherent problem with scalping is that you might have a hard time to get a positive R/R ratio on your entries in a market such as ES. Meaning you'll often have to risk as much as you stand to gain. Maybe even more. What this means is that unless you have a very high winrate, you can easily give back a lot of gains very quickly if you hit a losing streak. I was scalping 5 ES contracts targeting 1.5 / 3.0 points per trade earlier this year and had a good run, but eventually took a larger loss. Maybe a hybrid solution could be something. I was spoiled a few weeks ago having many days with 20 points on one contract and have over the last few days have trades revert on me for a scratch as I got too greedy.