Thanks for this; nice to see a positive post about the possibilities of trading. In most fields it is usually accepted wisdom that things were always easier in some long gone golden age. I'm not sure I believe it though. I think it has always been quite hard to make money/buy a house/become a pop star, and now is not that much different.
I get it. This is something I've become more interested in - we're all told early on to make sure we have a positive win rate and a positive r:r. Well maybe you've done some work on getting a net positive return without worrying about these metrics. Are you doing this on forex by any chance (which is where I mostly am operating)?
in 2000-5 while the cme building still had the pit big swing trading was working so well that it was predictable to a fault. by 05 we were trading smaller swings, more frequently with larger size. tt was the hot ticket and you had to office in the cme, clear at member rates and be on the fiber sonet ring to pull it off. not to mention be well funded. fills were hard to get on size. today it's much better and algo's have clearly spread the the swings into predictable rhythms and size "number of points". maybe it's just that i have more knowledge than ever to reflect on. but it's easier than ever to make money trading. the broad market is more tractable than ever because of faster communications, but i realize that it's significance is often obscured by pure price action of the futures itself. m
Well in theory you just need a system with a positive expectancy, and keep trading it, scaling up as your account increases in size. The point of the thread was that it is far from easy to get positive expectancy (an edge), certainly in day trading from my experience, and I suspect in swing trading too though I haven't tried it. Even if you think you have an edge, and it is easy to think you have when you don't, the discipline of trading it is much harder than you might suspect if it starts to lose money. I have given up discretionary trading as I am hopeless at it, though I have had some success in ending trades before they hit a stop loss as they look doomed from the price action. However that is about losing less money, not actually making money. I don't trade forex as I couldn't get any kind of system that showed positive expectancy. I trade (in a very small way) indices, particularly at the start of the trading day as there is generally high volatility then. You don't get that with forex I think, because it trades more or less 24 hours, though to be honest I know very little about forex.
a decade ago? folks have been doing this for 30 years. Tradestation was around in the 90's Get real .
Assume one has a solid edge on day trading ES, assume he need to use stop order frequently.Assume he trade $10000 per contract. What is amount of money he can grow before he encounter liquidity constrain? Assume he can tolerate one tick slippage?
are you asking for a friend , because the chance of you ever needing to worry about liquidity ,( besides the most volatile times where the bid ask is 5 lots ) is zer0