Day Trading is actually one of my favorites. I will also not mentions amounts, for obvious reasons, but i can say that i have traded in a lot of ways and day trading is one of the few whom i absolutely love doing. I am def. one of those who understands proper TA and say "why would a trader use anything other".
i have a monthly target, and i have an idea of how much i want to do per week/day but it all depends on the opportunity that i see and if i choose to trade it it took me a while to adjust to TA and be able to recognize a lot of the tricks, the headfakes and what not that's what people like marketsurfer don't understand, TA works just fine, but you have to realize that there are a lot of illusions in this market - patterns can be deceiving
It's time and effort to learn to recognize the trees within the Gestalt of forest. Those who lack such skills prefer to proclaim that they don't exist.
HaHa...good one. For those of us who use TA to make a living, they just sound like fools baying at the moon (there's that orb again). The problem arises when the newbie and or struggling trader comes to an ET looking for advice or guidance and is subjected to the negative nonsense.
I have changed my trading to take more trades on a winning day so that I don't just take more trades on a losing day. This has helped me recently. By doing this you overcome the physiological problem of not wanting to trade after a winner because you are afraid of giving back your gains for the day, and wanting to trade after a loser since you are now angry and want to make back your loss. Also, I have been trying to get up a little earlier to try to find more of my setups that occur during an earlier time frame. I may need to still work on letting my 2nd winner run a little longer.
This makes good sense. I always have some difficulty understanding the perceptions of people who like to do "one trade per day". It's always seemed to me that they must be missing some of the best trades which might happen to arise after they've done one good trade, and that once you have an edge, you should try to apply it to the market as often as you can, really? (I suppose there are some exceptions, like "opening range first breakouts", which arise only once a day, by definition.)
You don't know whether it's going to be a losing or a winning day until it's over and you look at your P&L. If you want to arbitrarily just take trades before noon for example, then it's just part of your trade plan. Best to just take your signals and accept that some days will be better than others.
Especially in day trading, you have to have open mind cause most books don't go far enough in how to use TA properly and often strict TA people never learned about price structure or well enough and patterns or failure of patterns so divisions cast in the sand. Blending both well can only help in overall knowledge and back test so you can see if what you see works over years/decades. If anything, if you know what others use and pattern fails, you can jump on board going other way as "they' getting out is driving price to extend. My goals are based on one lot, if you can't make money on a one lot, more will wipe you out. I look to make 4-6 points based on time which I have back tested, so many points in so much time. I am increasing size so I can trade less minutes, I would like to reduce the 75 minutes I trade ES to 30-45 and still make same amounts. Hope all have a better New Year.
Ah ... you're looking at technical analysis as excluding price structure, perhaps? Not a criticism at all: it just goes to show how people can mean different things, in forums. I don't use indicators at all (I know some people mean - or assume - "indicator trading" when they say "TA"). There's plenty of other technical analysis that doesn't depend on indicators at all.