Ditto. I think when you are mentally geared for intraday trading, gaps up/down the next day can wreck havoc with your system.
I myself have gone through that transition which I tried to day trade, then swing trade then back to day trading....after finally realizing that swing trading is what is best for me. The way that you've described your situation, I'd say stick to swing trading. If it was only that one loss that took you out of the game, why quit because of that? Especially if you were profitable using that method before. Just take the lesson from that loss and continue on as you were doing.
Can you be more specific of what day trading involves for you in terms of markets, timeframes, commissions, hardware/software, etc. so then we can get a better idea of what drives your success?
Evolve towards swing trading which allows more freedom time-wise, more time to make decisions and is much less commission-intensive. Plus larger moves make more sense to me.
Exactly. I think that's what Jesse Livermore did as well, even though he was successful scalping stocks initially. Still, I definitely see that value of a profitable and robust day trading system for those fortunate enough to have developed that. For day trading to be "worth it", you'd definitely be wanting to get paid for it though and comparatively more so than what you would swing trading. But I may be repeating myself by now...
After so many years I found day trading pretty draining. Probably linked to the fact I lost ability to produce profits as I did in past or maybe it's vice versa, I don't know. But macro awareness and speculative decisions based on combination of fundamentals and technicals look so much more interesting to me recently.
I think daytrading is worth it if you happen to have an 'edge'. Higher frequency of trading give more opportunity to explot the edge and make more money. Problem is, practically nobody here has an edge, so whether 'swing trading' or 'daytrading', you'll lose either way in the long run. Swing trading more infrequently makes it hard to build up a sample of any statistical significance and might fool people into thinkin they have an edge when it's just random luck. There's a trader on trade2win called 'dowjones' who posts his statements who seems to one of the few with a genuine edge. Seems to trade about 50 times per day on the dax making a good few K per day. Probably doesn't use charts/TA ect (all successful traders don't use the things we are aware of, but don't tend to let us know what they DO use! ) Only time I had an edge and was printing money for a period, was when exploiting a slow feed of a european spreadbet company and I was making lots of money every day until they closed my account a month or so down the line! It's about edge rather than swing vs day trading. Look at the PNL thread nowadays compared to years gone by. Basically nobody is making money.
What were the reasons you couldn't make a profit any more. Did the market change or was it you weren't following your rules any longer?