Yeah, I know. I play for little daily swings in the ES myself. But my big money is in playing for "range swings", and has been for many a year.
That's something I can work with. I am not a scalper and have never been one. However, there are those who are consistently profitable scalping (not that I know any of them).
Hey gnome, What percentage of the average daily range would you define the "range swing" TP as being? First time i've come across that term.
TP=Take Profit. Therefore if your going for a point and the average daily range is 10 points on the instrument your trading then your TP is averging 10% of the ATR.(Averge True Range). Range Swing sounds like abo0ut a 30% move of the days range to me??
Oh no, waaay bigger than that. Every security/index has a "normal noise oscillation range"... the amount it can swing without changing the trend. It's measured during sideways periods. (The SPX is approximately 6%) Then when the trend changes to up, the swings change. Say, from +/- 6%, to +8% on the upside, but only 4% on the downside. So, buy when the index has declined -4%, be ready to TP after an upswing of 8% (with trailing stop discipline in case it doesn't get that high this time)... that's 100+ points in the SPX right now. The concept applies to all stocks, sectors, indices. You need to get enough data that you can determine each individual's "normal noise oscillation range". Daily Range or Average True Range (Daily) mean absolutely nothing to my trading. And if you're wondering how well it works... (and I'm sure to take fire for opening my mouth about this, but nonetheless true), I averaged $14,000 per day for the last 2 years of the tech bubble . Not doing *that* well now but not trading as big or aggressively. That, and because of the principle, "you only have to get rich once".
San Diego. But even if I lived in Omaha, Nebraska....you think you could make a good living off of 50K a year? Guess I just have a much different definition of a good life????? Which is no surprise. Side note. I thought that Batman kid was being facetious until I read the next response. I love it when people tell me and the many more people I have known the last 5 years that very much make a good living intraday trading...."really aren't doing it". Come on Batman. Escape from that very narrow reality of yours.
Paul Rotter - aka "the Eurex Flipper" Paul is arguably the single largest and most successful individual futures trader on planet Earth, executing trades on the Eurex exchange primarily in the Bund, but also in the Bobl and Schatz interest rate futures. He trades between 200-300,000 round turns daily using the X_Trader platform, and clearing through GNI Touch. q: how long are you usually in a position? a: since I do trend plays very seldom and actually scalp the market, i constantly get fills in different markets on both sides which can cause constantly changing positions for hours. sometimes i change my opinion several times within a couple of minutes, which is not pretty hard for me, since I'm only looking for the next 3-5 ticks. http://www.trading-naked.com/paul_rotter.htm
why is it NO SURPRISE to you? whatever - it depends on whether you have family, etc. apart from that - if good life to you means several big cars - a multimillion$ house, boat, yacht, learjet, etc. - then 50K a year will be a problem - yes of course. but i think you will find a lot people - also here on et - who will tell you that at least for one single person 50K a year can make a good life possible. but if you make 50K per year with trading (consistently) - then you should also sooner or later be able to make much more than that anyway.