I shared a lot of stuff here many years ago which some of you still use such as gaps and etc.. They're stuff that I don't mind to share which works over and over again for years. Stuff that you won't find it on any textbooks or on www. However. I plan to share this stuff privately this time to some selected members, not openly to everyone as some people are axxxholes.
Yes, after OPM, get out and run "family office" with own money. Smart. Unfortunately as an amateur retail, no OPM possibility for me. No, have not read either. Will put them on my to read list. Thank you.
Anyone keeping an eye on this Israel/Iran situation? Tomorrow is the anniversary of the Hamas attack.
Personally, I don't think market makers target retail traders per se. If you don't trade tomorrow, the chart will most likely look the exact same way after the close. Of course, the shorter your time frame the more likely you are to be subject to noisy and random chop. If you risk 1 to gain 2, you can do well with a 50 % win rate. If you risk 1 to gain 3, you can do very well with a 50 % winrate. If you can throw in the occasional 5-20R trade, you're golden. I think scalping can be done successfully, especially if you use ATM strategies, but I think it's easier to zoom out and shoot for larger targets relative to your risk. Of course, it's still not easy. You need good entries and patience in order to not waste your bullets before the move actually comes. Here, position sizing is key. One mental exercise could be to just consider the day as a scratch day and hold your trade once it's in the money with a breakeven stop. If you're stopped out - no biggie. Since I'm not a very good trader, I know that once I have a good position, I need to hold it if I am to get ahead by the end of the day or week. That's why I stopped sharing specifics ages ago. Have had enough flame wars and heated debates on this site to bother sharing any secrets I may have publicly.
IMHO, the key here is "ride a profit", that is, let your winners run. We've all tried this, we've been burned by trades with a decent open profit turning on us to hit our stop, etc., so then we start killing good trades out of fear that the profits will vanish. But, again, unless you have some system with great expectancy that churns out many trades, the key to huge profits is to let winning positions take wild swings (i.e. drawdowns from peak open profits) while you keep on adding on pullbacks till you max your leverage [Edit: assuming you use overnight exchange margin, not 500 USD for ES, etc.). And then sit on your hands, cross your fingers and hope to get lucky
Certainly the presence or absence of my few lots won't change what the market does tomorrow or any day for that matter. But there are little patterns I see that suggest to me that there is some attempt both to manipulate regular guys like us to get into positions, as well as to then cause immediate pain. The I see times where the market will come down to a "logical" stop level and take it out by as little as 1 tick or even several points. Then the market rallies only to come back and do the same thing to this new "logical" stop point. That is often the time to buy, but at this point they just took my money twice, so I hesitate, maybe I chase and lose again, or maybe I don't do anything and miss a good opportunity. The final conclusion of course places the blame squarely on myself, my ineptitude, my inability to control my emotions. But the environment that causes the emotional turmoil and lays bare my ineptitude seems often to be "engineered" to take my money, expose my weaknesses, and frustrate me. The reason the market won't look any different should any of us here or even all of us here take off tomorrow is because there is an unlimited supply of guys like me for the market, and for those large enough to actually make the market do their bidding to take advantage of.