Heres another one, be satisfied with average and simple... average is the key.. average and simple settings, simple ideas... perfect does not exist, perfection leads you to overfitting.... average and simple on not to tight account, will make you a killing in the end.. however you can be lucky OR extremely lucky to lets say start trading Feb 2020 in this voll environment with a good strategy , and save yourself a few grinding early years
First of all - stay away from day trading full stop. The risk/reward is just shit. I agree with demo or paper trading for a year before you even contemplate risking real $$$ in a Live market. Your most important Task is to be able to manage trade positions that mark against you. How and when you take a loss is the most important skill for you to develop. Because when you have real $$$ at risk that reality usually blows trading plans apart. There’s an emotional component you’ll have to learn to manage as well.
This is just plain wrong. The R:R is no different on a day trade than on a long term swing. If you put $2000 into AMZN and plan to make 25%, so you hold till $2500, no matter how long it takes, and take a loss at $1500, so you risk $500, this is no different than buying 1 ES contract and getting either 10 points profit or losing 10 points. The only difference is that it happens much faster. With swing trading, your brain has more time to process what is going on, and your emotions have more time to also play out. Hopefully, what also happens is that your brain eventually learns to overcome your emotions, since they are no good in a trading environment. So with swing trading, perhaps there is a higher percentage of surviving. But with day trading, you get to practice more. This of course isn't good for the gambler, but if you consider that you need dozens, if not hundreds of trades to see if you have an edge, the swing trader might think he is good when he is in fact just lucky after a few years. But the day trader might really in a couple of weeks if he actually has something that works or not. I also don't advise paper trading for too long. Most people when they go live completely run off the tracks with regards to what they were doing in SIM. There is no point in continuing to practice a way of trading that will change if you go live. You need to see sooner, rather than later, what will happen to you when trading real money. The secret to trading is learning how to trade within the confines of your personality type. You can only figure this out if you put real money on the line. A trading system has to be built around what the trader can handle emotionally.
I know it sounds hokey and terribly OG - but start a daily personal trading journal. I don’t mean here on ET; but on your PC in Word or in a spiral notebook. You will be able to check yourself in terms of destructive emotions, repeating mistakes, and tracking / developing ideas. I tell my own clients that eliminating mistakes is positive account equity and that one thing can make or break your trading future. Eliminating mistakes pays itself forward exponentially. I’ve seen brilliant ideas and sound trading systems get sabotaged countless times by foolish position management practices and destructive negative emotional feedback loops.
it depends if you are talking about initial risks or actual risk. That difference sums up the real R:r
If Manual day trading at present was legitimately viable for mere mortals - then Bright Trading in Las Vegas and a hundred proprietary day trading firms in Chicago, NYC, London, Sydney, Singapore, Frankfurt, etc. etc. would still be going strong. The CME and Eurex have a small fraction of the registered electronic proprietary trading firms that they once had in the late ‘90’s and early 2000’s. And that’s a fact.
It sounds like you're saying it's not even reasonable or possible to day trade anymore. That is just not factually correct, I know quite a few people who have day traded for years to decades profitably and they were also profitable in these last 2 months. Some of them I've watched live trade and I've also seen verifiable past results(all this done via Manual day trading). It's always been difficult to be a day trader particularly as your primary income source, but even if you're correct on it being more difficult, it still is not as impossible as you're implying. If you think about it, if he's ever lucky enough to find a mentor who's consistently profitable now, his chances to be successful may actually be higher now than in the past, because if it truly is more difficult as you're claiming than the person trading has to have a really solid edge in order to still be consistent.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEM7BtG8lO8t0J5qUmwwgXg/videos watch this guy so you see how to analyze trading programs.
Incorrect. If you put $2000 into Amazon, you own $2000 of Amazon. You own that for life. With AMZN, you own a piece of the company. With ES you own nothing. If you buy 1 ES contract, you are now at unlimited profit and unlimited risk within a 3-9 month timeframe, and you own nothing, and have a time expiration on your back. If you time it wrong, you will lose your entire investment of $2000, and fairly quickly these days, too! That's 40 points in ES. A frickin' blip on the PA lately, but because you will be FORCED TO SELL. So spend $2000 to own a company you believe in, or "spend" $2000 on the ES future, which could tank so hard and so fast you could owe your brokers 10s of thousands of dollars before their margin system kicks in and calls you. The kicker of that one would be one of those days where the entire market is tanking, but your selected stocks, like AMZN, happen to be going up. Man, what a feeling that would be.