You can do it when your young, no family and no other obligations. Other than that, you may be able to do it if you have no obligations on particular trading days. In contrast, if you're older, family or have other obligations...you're just going to eventual burn yourself out or cause a lot of stress with your personal life. I know a few guys that were so serious about trading that time period...they relocated to a time zone more suitable to trading those markets...gotta do what's needed if serious about a particular market.
Thats the benefit of being in the london time zone, or living in europe, 0300-0400ET is 8/9am here, by no means early in the day. I got up at 8am today and caught a move in the GBP/USD, I could have never done that living in NYC trading at 3am.
I realized that if you're going to day trade futures and currencies, getting up early is a requirement. Since I've switched to day trading, I see that most of the good moves start before the equity markets open. After noon ET, everything is usually dull.
I get up at 3:40am to trade chop in Crude Oil at 4am MDT, I like chop, consistent, can watch other markets while doing it so by time reports comes out for Bonds and ES, I am all awake.
I was thinking 5:00 am early - pffftttt - guy needs to go deer hunting sometime - that's getting up early LMAO RN
Thats dedication, Im gonna start getting up at 6am gmt and catch the early directional moves and be done for the day by the new york open.
really sorry for you guys, I know how it's like to get too little sleep! In my opinion, it's not worth missing sleep for trading! what about switching trading to a higher timeframe - say hourly or even daily? Most likely your results won't be worse when trading longer timeframes. If you're young and dedicated to trading, you could also relocate. Africa would be great - Morocco or Kenya in particular. European time zone, pretty western and developped, good mild climate all year round, oh and the cost of living is really cheap compared to the US. you'll get by nicely on 500 and live like a king on 1000 USD a month. oh, and then there're still the ladies. cute, lovely, willing ladies ) Personally, I live in Germany and trade US futures. I find that it is enough to get to the screen at 09.30 NY or the very earliest 08.00 NY. That equals to 14.00 German time and is a very lovely time for me. Honestly, there're hardly ever any significant moves before 08.00 NY. So you can do very well in futures if you just trade 08.00 to 16.00 NY, both equities and commodities.
When I was in Army, worked some for Veterinary and since I had next to nothing rank, their idea of Deer hunting was us stringing out mile of webbed fence, I sit on top of jeep hanging on with dart rifle and helicopter would scare deer into fencing and we shoot them, it be few weeks before hunting season, we spend two weeks doing that and extract blood, tag and take measurements then release. Was fun, got me out of the boredom of other duties. I have noticed as gotten older, I just wake up in middle of night for whatever reason or never fall asleep. I like being done by 8:30am, can rock in rocker and watch "I Love Lucy" sipping Hot Cocoa.