If it comes to that, you can do 20% per year by doing nothing more than buying and holding a basket of beaten-down high dividend paying stocks and reinvesting the dividends to compound the gains. When this mess ends, the stocks will recover so you can have both income and speculative gains. And which stocks are those? Google Finance is your friend. Now start doing your homework.
20% a year, every year is not pathetic regardless the type of trading. If you can do that, and establish a track record of doing that with relatively low drawdown, you will have rich people banging on your door throwing you their money to manage.
For a TRADER, 20% is pathetic unless you're managing a lot of money. However, for an INVESTOR, 20%-25% is reasonable. Note the difference: A trader is active and shorter-term oriented while an investor is rather passive and longer-term oriented. Over the longer term, the markets have an habit of un-doing previous moves.
Have a look at all of the scripts on wl4.wealth-lab.com. Every single possible system you could come up with is there, and already ranked for you. Not that I advise trading any one of them, certainly there's some that would work, but that this is a repository for every single trading idea ever devised in the last ten years.
I was speaking to the person that started this thread and was having difficulty. Inadvertently saw he started the thread in March, so I guess he's gone.
I didnt read the whole thread, but I'll chime in... I would suggest you trade the Qs, every day... or the SPY or whatever index ETF, but I suggest the Qs.. The Qs have ample volume, penny bid/ask spread & you don't have individual stock risk... Maybe just watch it for awhile on different time frames. Consider a simple system buying support and selling resistance. When you are ready to trade, try to force yourself to take the best trade you can according to your plan/system - maybe limit yourself to two trades a day with say a dime stop loss, so your maximum daily drawdown is like 20 bucks plus commish & slippage. But note thats 2 trades a day, not just 2 losers before stopping. Focus on trading the plan/system, not making money - you can always adjust the system if you are getting out too early, staying in too long or whatever... focus on discipline & patience, not making money... if you are buying S and selling R, plan to stay out of the middle of the road. After market hours, go back & review the chart & see the trades you took & the ones you didnt take and THINK. At $20/day max stop, you can trade for like a year with $5,000... which is alot less tuition than most pay. and w/o starting a food fight, i would read through the first 60-100 pages or so of Anekdoten's (spelling) thread as a primer to see if it gives you any ideas.
learn to trade fibonacci. EVERY stock will pullback at some time, ON EVERY time frame no matter how long or short, should it be an intraday, 1hr, 15min, daily, weekly and so on. not only do these work because stocks MUST retrace, they work because a lot of people look at their levels (38, 50, 61%) and react to them (especially in forex) this is really just pure s/r trading at a basic level. Dont confuse this with Elliot wave..its NOT the same thing. cm69