Funny. I am too old and fossilized to trade with six monitors. I use one laptop. Watch some of the videos in my journal.
Not me. That is why I use wide SLs and dynamic SLs. I do my best to stay out of their range as they try to take money from each other. It is also why a minimum scalp for me is 1 point in the ES.
The big boys don't care about us little retail traders. They are after each others money. We are not worth their turning their head to look at us. But they are worth us turning our head to look at them. They cannot hide. Whatever they do to push the market around well it shows up on the chart.
My point is you guys are basing your stops and profit taking levels on dubious methods...so this whole risk/rewards concept is a fallacy. You are risking what you risk, your reward is what you get. There is no correlation. For example, your trade criteria is wait for a certain candlestick to form, there is some crossover of something, and its raining outside. Let's backtest that and develop a strategy.
Now that I am learning risk and rewards and how to make money from you guys, I feel like I can push it. This is it. My chance
Exactly. And it was the same way for me. The beauty of it is that my results improved dramatically without any change at all in my methodology. I simply started to really tighten up my entry criteria (reasonably sized stops which are not increased) AND run my trades all the way to target which would always be a minimum of 2R. That's my hope with this thread. That something may click for somebody and they realize why they're currently failing and how it's possible they may even become successful with what they already know with just a few adjustments. Prior to this, I could see the larger moves and where the market was going, but I was too focused on securing profits, playing it safe with a breakeven stop or securing a green day. The problem was of course that with all my tiny profits regardless of how long my winning streak was - I was not in a robust place to handle a drawdown. In a sense, big wins may be the best risk mangement. I feel there's a prevailing view that day trading is about nailing down very small moves, but it really doesn't have to be that way. For me, this process started with separate conversations with two traders who claimed to be taking home day trades to the tune of 100 points on ES. That blew my mind at the time - a few years ago by now. How on earth can you hold a day trade for 100 points through all those oscillations and counter-moves? What if your small profit goes back to breakeven, right? Anyway, it's been a long process. One of these fine gentlemen actually offered to review my trades and one of the first thing he commented on was that although many were profitable I was getting out of them for a small profit after seconds or moving my stop to breakeven way too quickly. While also taking full losses. Essentially, my expectancy was negative. Why? I'm not sure, but I definitely think there was fear involved. Fear of what exactly? Completely irrational, but I guess I was fearing that open profit would turn into a loss. Anyway, his main message was that I needed to move away from the lower time frames and focus on the larger moves/trends on the 60-minute time frame. The gist of his system was trend following using the 60/15/5-minute timeframes. Of course, there's a bit more to it than that, but that was the gist of it. Eventually, I think I realized that in order to have a fighting chance at this I really needed to bring home some medium/big winners as my current play had a negative expectancy.
Hhmmnn are you just figuring out that if you eliminate stops, and let profits run you will make more money than having tight stops and being forced out early? This is the problem with daytraders...their winners do not cover their losers. When you get out of a trade early, it doesn't matter if you made 1k...if you left 3k on the table you actually lost 2k on the trade.
I'll rather avoid any philosophical debates with you on the subject, but yes, generally I think day trading is a very bad idea for most people as the competence, experience and expertise required is beyond most people. I think it's far easier to succeed as a a swing trader as your profit potential by default is larger and you can typically be more calm about your trade selection and trade mangement versus day trading where you're making decisions in a live market which frequently moves rapidly. Anyway, you would of course need stops or a way to take losses in day trading. If not, you'd blow up very quickly. Obviously. All my day trades have a target of 2R minimum, but I had multiple exceeding 10R last year and even a few exceeding 20R. On December 20 I banked 70 points with an initial risk of 5 points. That's 14 times my initial risk. These trades don't happen every day of course. Yesterday I only traded the afternoon. 5 points risked for a 20 point gain. That's 4R.