Stops are no good. You regularly get 50%+ swings and don't want to get stopped out early and sometimes the biggest moves are during after hours so stops would be useless anyways.
I'm sorry to hear about your unfortunate turnaround. Hopefully you have learned from the experience. If your account was up from $7,000 to $52,000 in 2007, I do hope that you set aside some money to pay the taxes. If you had profits on closed trades in 2007, then your losses in early 2008 will not reduce your 2007 tax liability. Arch
and a lot of them are like u who give these percentages because you yourself are a loser. WTF? I know there's a lot of bullshit on here but u just add to it with your assumptions and guesses about who makes money and who doesn't. that makes u just as bad as them.
Every time you bump your head you learn... and that's one less ceiling to bump your head on. The problem is (can't find the quote .... but from reminiscenses...) not that learning from mistakes is hard, but that every mistake has hundreds and thousands of sister mistakes.
I am in complete agreement with the quote below. If you like trading and work hard at it you can succeed. Do what you want to do. But if you decide to stick it out, you have learned a valuable but costly lessen, and that is not to confuse good luck with trading ability. If your returns are as great as yours initially were, you were taking too much risk, or else you were very, very lucky, or possibly both. A reasonable expectation for a trader is 20-40% return per year. Make fewer trades, but better ones, and most importantly, keep your loses small by using carefully considered stop loss orders. Your initial goal should be to not lose your trading capital while learning how to trade. After you learn to do that, you can began the long road to consistent positive returns. Trading is an interesting, challenging and worthwhile pursuit, but it is not easy to learn. It becomes relatively easy after much study, hard work and experience. You just passed a milestone in the experience aspect. Best of luck to you, but you'll need more than that should you decide to stick with trading. You'll find many seasoned traders on ET that are willing to give you good advice and pointers, and too, some that are perhaps not so helpful.
I love the fucking retard ET traders who tell a guy, trading Equities and Options to "Use Stops". Idiots on this site are fun to read. Keep trading. Volatility is a killer and your time frame will cause you to take some wild swings. Swing trading in Vol. markets takes conviction but not stupidity. I have no idea on how you trade, so I can't comment on that. But your rise and fall is normal. I have been trading for a while. Started with Schonfeld. Even the best traders, my mentor included, took draw downs. So keep at it and take this site with a grain of salt. More than half the nitwitz on ET are worthless.
I never used stops for options before (only mental one) I think technically it is possible (say $0.2 stop), but essentially useless. Probably, the better solution will be to use spreads for protection, no?
Off topic here but I have seen a lot of deteriorated lead paint in my day and those cabnets look like it may be lead paint on them. If you have the ability to contact the parents of the child in the photo you may want to see if that youngster has elevated BLL. Just a thought, not a joke. Peace and prosperity to you. Lar
hey Van boy, if you specifically want to learn to trade PM me, if you are tired of beating around the bush for years