sell strudel! Sorry Nkhoi, I could not resist. By the way, selling straddles in a low volatility environment exposes the seller to a lot of risk. Personally I would not do it. On the other hand, it we are talking about time frames out past 60 days, I would consider selling hedged volatility. Less than 60 days, It is better to simply learn to trade the market. Best Regards, steve (strong like bull)46.
Hey steve46 thanks for the advise but I wasn't really interested in anyone elses method per say. I was really trying to find out how many people change there styles based on the current market conditions and if so how much weight they gave it. Also I had never done a poll before and thought it would be cool.
I'm sorry Samson, I need to learn to slow down and think a little bit before I comment. My apologies.
Doing a poll and then not wondering how the people adapt their strategies? A very nice bonus imho to find out what a good approach may be in a trading range. Thank you steve46. I know many daytraders say: I am not entering the market with a bias, I only daytrade and do not care what happened yesterday, last week, last month. But......Peter Steidlmayer, when he developped the Market Profile, informs us that there are basically two types of traders in the market: The short term trader, (who basically exploits technological gimmicks which are soon to be obsolete and hence the high casuality rate) and the longer term position trader. A trend will happen when the position trader starts buying (selling) into the market. The major diference is that the short term player does not give a tick away (an inch) when trading and that the long term player is prepared to sacrifice some slippage in order to be in the market. Now what has this to do with the daytrader? Let us reflect what I said at the beginning of this week: The Euro was bottoming towards a double top of last year May / June, last year October and a flag in November. The DIA, QQQ and SPY were all rising towards a top of early 2002. So all the long term players are watching these levels. Do you think this might affect the daytrader or that we will have a trend (or trading range) at this time? Are the long term players testing if the market will go higher / lower? What is their behaviour doing for the short term player? I'll now leave it up to yourself to determine if it makes sense for a daytrader: A) to oberserve the longer term what is happening and B) to change your trading style when timely. In order to be long term succesfull you'll might want to understand first the players, then their (and your own) aspirations and lastly the games that are played to relief others (Wall Street expression: "goats") of their money. Where do YOU belong in this game? PS thanks for the poll, the results are revealing. Peace
Bali ... Personally I agree with you. I see it this way you can either become so speacialized in short term trading, that you can become successful OR You can become more of a generalist and do the same. Kind of like a Heart surgeon versus a General Surgeon. I was very curious to find out the balance of traders that do both here on ET because how they view the markets may be some of the reasons we have so many differences of opinion but we all may be right. It may just depend on what we are looking at.
Yes you nicely summarize the 2 arguments, Samson 77. For me, I can see no point jacking around with longer term play when the same juice or more is available to take on a daily basis. But each to his own. Horses for courses.
When intraday trading it IS necessary to take into account the probability of an intraday trend developing inside of the current Major trend. Example: If the TASR is in a "bullmarket" and lets say that this uptrend is overextended and due for a pullback. On an intraday basis the stock may pullback about $5.00. This is NO WAY constitutes a selloff for a stock that is up as much as this stock and has as much volatility as this one. Problem: let's say that you want to still trade in the direction of the major trend so you buy at the open and the mkt drops $4.00 from the open and you were only willing to take a $1.20 stop loss on the trade that you would be obviously stopped out. That is the problem with trading in the direction of the trend. Trend following by its vary nature had steep inherit drawdown and risk as opposed to intraday trading i.e. daytrading. Solution: Examining a 1 min or 5min chart could have alerted you to the fact that the mkt was ready to pullback intraday and thus could have placed you on the right side of the mkt right at the open.