padu is an Indian trader around here with a very thick Hindi accent. He's kinda' become the near-east version of Morgnaist. If you have to ask who Morganist is, well, yer lost man.
My 2 cents based on my own daytrading journey. Discipline is as important as method. Risk control is MOST important. I used to have 5-6 consecutive winning days and then give it all back in 1 day. Happened a few times after which I got wise. Never keep mental stops, put in a hard stop within 2 seconds of the entry.
I have an OCO order every trade I place- the problem was that I punted way too much and broke my discipline. Risk management is always in place.
I was actually short f I used to look at all equity indexes in the past when trading equities in the past. When there is a confluence on all equities, I usually place a trade. However in the past, I also would get pulled to trading others and not focusing on ONE. I may one day trade a different vehicle but for now I want to focus on ES. But to be extremely disciplined. I have stated in the 1st page, that I plan to leave for a different company for personal reasons. I may even take a job as a server, just so I can trade the entire morning/afternoon.
Sorry I did not update the ticks/points loss- I was revenge trading trying to get green before work and time was up... MES was down 5.75 points and ES also down 5.75 points today. No one to blame but myself. I broke my discipline-got careless, played sloppy. I need to really put in my head that if there is no quality trade, DO NOT PUNT. Being disciplined to not punt is one of my most challenging weakness. And I should have at least punted with micros than with ES. The other thing I plan to do with risk management is let my maximum daily loss equal my average daily gain. Although I do not have enough sample size yet, I should have turned off the computer at -200 technically speaking. I will come back with extra super discipline tomorrow and rest of the week. It's better to wait all week for 1 good setup than punting just because I have the need to play. I'm here to be a professional, and punting is just plain stupid.
I wouldn't characterize my approach as 'gambling on charts'. I think the key to profit in any market is a deep understanding of how it moves. My model/system/associated statistics is tailored for ES. As such, I couldn't simply move to another market which I don't know the first thing about and start profiting. What I can say for certain is that the ES is a very technical market and fairly predictable at certain times. I can only assume this is so because there's a lot of technical players in this market as there seems to be in most other markets in this day and age. A big part of trading is knowing when to transact and when to stay out. The latter is one of my sticking points. As for defining trading - I think trading can be many things as shown by all the myriad of approaches that are utilized. Interesting. Could you expand on this with a practical example? Maybe from your own trading? What kind of markets do you operate in? Well, trading size generally requires a sizeable account. But I'll say that if your strategies require low commissions you're probably picking up crumbs where it would be better to focus on capturing a larger part of the daily swings. Personally, I'm not really interested in taking a trade unless I can expect a minimum of 3 points profit on ES. Lately, my profits have ranged between 5-30 points per trade. If you're trading for ticks I'd agree that you're operating in a domain where you're actually in competition with other players, i.e., HFT. I wouldn't recommend that.
this dude stared with like 4 k a few days ago: just trades NQ using bollinger bands on tick chart I think