This is the most conducive environment for intraday scalping in many years, anyone who is unable to make money with this volatility/range ought to quit trading.
obviously depends on your style.. scalping is solid here agreed.. so long as you are on the right side or you will get crushed. swing trading right now.. God help them. I knwo I couldn't stomach these swings
I have "no opinion" -- I cannot afford nose-to-screen right now -- which for intra-minute stuff, is needed. You're either in, or you're hunting, or you're screening equities for high volume and good B/A spreads. Can nottttttttt do it. Nope nope nope. Turning away now.....
I've been learning to scalp since early November. Yes, I'm very very new at this. I started off with a SIM account trying to learn on my own. I was down close to $30,000 in this account in the first two weeks. Thus, realizing this isn't gonna work man. So, I started seeking out more education and found it. I've been reading about price action and studying charts on you tube with a very experienced price action trader who scalps. Since then I've gained back about $23,000 of that SIM account and I've made two profitable trades in my LIVE account. I had to really work on being patient and controlling my emotions. Keeping it simple has worked for me. I trade emini S&P 500 on a 2000 tick chart, a 21 bar EMA, and a ATM strategy with a profit target and stop loss. I read the price action, that's it. I study the charts daily sometimes all day even if I can't trade that day due to my current full time job. Whoever says day trading is easy is full of it. It's a lot of hard work and commitment. Is scalp trading profitable? I would have to say it is.
Thanks for posting. You certainly have done better than the average person. You have made back a substantial amount in your SIM account as well as having two profitable trades in your live account. You made mention of your using the term "ATM". Are you using options for these day-trades? Or did you mean ATR, Average True Range?
*raises hand* I stomached an Oct 1st NQZ18 long at 7,670 for 4 weeks, At one point before I closed, it was down 950 points. When it recovered to what I felt was the time to bail was when it recovered about to about 550 points down. And if I had held onto that swing trade until LTD on the Dec 20th, it would have been down 1,350 points! Good grief. It was the smartest decision I have made all year, as I have not had to make many decisions in the live market this year because I have been mostly out. But it was not a pleasant time. I had the buns of steel, yeah, but I saw at that point that this was not going to be a situation like what happened in beginning of February, where in 3 weeks the thing recovered beautifully.
A quick story, My family would rent out our beach house most summers. Every year we had the same tenant renting it for 6 weeks out of the summer. I ended up getting curious and asking him what he did for a living that allowed him the luxury of vacationing for 6 weeks. His bread and butter was scalping the ES using 100 Lots with amazing accuracy once or twice a day near the open and closing it up and calling it quits. Granted this was one of his many talents, but it seemed like trading just came easy to him. I sat in on his trading sessions 15-20 times over a period of a few years and only saw him take a handful of losers. He never gave up the 'grail' to me. He told me what to study, and even that required pressing him a lot. I never once doubted that scalping or trading was possible, like so many believe in these forums. I saw it with my own eyes. Hell, I wasn't even aware of these forums then. I was of the mindset that if I studied, I'd be successful. The people that are successful trading seem to be extremely reclusive individuals. It just breeds that type of personality. So the 'sharing' of knowledge ends up being extremely limited to a few lucky people, or those willing to spend thousands and thousands of hours reading charts and hoping they are looking at the right things.
So he had millions in his account to trade with from the start and got lucky. Without that, yer blown out. How much did the maestro have in his account when he was pulling off these magical mystical numbers?
You let an NQ trade go 950 points against you and you are talking to me about magical mystical numbers ? Anybody see the irony in this ?