What's your personal exit strategy upon losing? Do you always stick to your original stop loss? Do you try to Martingale a few times before conceding defeat? A problem I'm having coming up with a strategy is that my SL will get hit if I do the R:R anywhere close to 1:1 or even 2:1. Especially since I'm trying to be a scalper at this point. I would get stopped out of trades that I would have won if I just held out longer.
Consider yourself lucky. Sometimes it NEVER comes back and your small loss turns into an uncontrollable avalanche. What traders don't realize is the danger of demoralization. While small losses don't cripple your spirit, a big loss will demoralize you, which in turn will have adverse effect on your trading for days, if not weeks or months. Never ever allow yourself to fall into that mental trap.
The problem is that the strategy isn’t profitable. You can’t really fix what’s broken. You better find something that works. Then try to sabotage it.
Between the last week of August through mid-December, I profited $28,000 eyeballing ES trades. It would have been much more, but I took a $31,000 loss during that time before I realized the market wasn't going to go back down to it's 3550 lows in October. This is trading between 1-6 contracts.
for me the first trade is the rush trade because i am afraid of missing out. Then in a trade for 20 minutes i can decide if it's a loser or a potential winner. Cut the bad trade but if a good trade but bad entry then why not double or even triple. All depend on your ability to read the market.
%% YES; because by definition, time is not your friend by 3:00 CST daytrade exits. [IF you ever find a very smooth trender in a bullmarket, you my want to make some adjustments, but i would not include breaking a stop loss in a good plan.] Sometimes it pays to change. About the only exception i can think of; it takes me about a minute to sell, unless i've double checked my order+ written stop loss. And in a good bear trend, it can pay to not to try to be a a scalper . Scale out helps, but i seldom try to pick up pennies only,on Wall Street
With platforms that let you day trade ES with just $500/contract, the amount of money you could make/lose is unbelievable. For example, when I used Schwab ($14300 margin requirement), I made $2500 in less than a minute by following the market immediately after a FOMC speech. With the $500 margin requirement, I would have made $71,500.
After many years of being a scalper, I switched length of trades. Traders seldom consider cost of scalping as in commissions, it often requires 100% just to pay fees. Length of trades was seldom longer than 90 seconds, sounds like you unaware of mean average of winning trades. At so long in seconds, where does your target drop down to breakeven plus fees? Have to know all the answers before questions arise.