A beginner in trading is a person who has studied the minimum theoretical basics and made at least a dozen real trades. Players on demo accounts and those who watched 1000 deals on YouTube are just interested. If regular trading experience exceeds 1 year - we have no longer a beginner. So, a newcomer in the stock exchange wars should find out: - Is he ready to spend every day, months, weeks, years in front of the terminal? - Is he really interested in the world of economics and finance, or is it just a thirst for money? - Can he abstract away from emotional expectations, and see money as bare numbers? - Can he (his family) afford to painlessly give away an N-percentage of his budget to trading? - Can he accept the inevitability of losing days without harming his health and psyche? If you answered "yes" to 3 or more questions, then trading is right for you. Where the answer was "no," refinements are needed. What the preponderance of negative answers indicates, you most likely understand. Be honest with yourself. Stop! You'll be better off!
Lol, took me 27 years to find first Grail then another 13 years been pumping out another seven. All but one is automated, new one is manually traded and only gets 90% winners. Took me 7 years to get profitable scalping, lost $105,000 in process, I made so many mistakes. Eyes lie, have to learn to code and backtesting. It's funny, except for system discovered by error in 2005, I don't do scalping any more as scalping has greatest risk for me. But learning scalping made me a better chartist. Six Grails trade options for profit, no one would believe my stats and be dumb of me to give calls, am a loner and don't care for most humans. Risk management is my edge, learn to get risk to zero or positive outcome. Took me a long long time. The game is truly rigged and knowledge is king. More money is made in long term commodities than day trading. Intraday trading, you often have to make 100% return just to pay retail commissions. If you can't triple $25,000 3 times in a row, forget about doing realtime. If you don't know your edge, you will lose.
So I have been thinking about this some more, and I can certainly look at it from another perspective than the one I gave earlier, which is very similar to I think what you are saying nooby. If we consider your above statement to be true 90% of the time, then its not difficult to see how trading is easy. If over 90% of the time you enter, your trade starts to work right away and you can move a stop to break even within a minute, then its easy to sit back and relax. For the 10% of the time where it goes against you right away and you take a loss, this wouldn't be painful because you know how rare this is and the that next trade will work out with a high degree of probability. Scalpers apparently have very high win rates, but from what I read, its mostly because of a 1:1 R:R ratio. Its very draining though because they have to have intense focus. If a person is going for 10 or 20 ES points, this wouldn't be nearly as taxing of course vs. 1 to 2 points over and over again. The minute you move up in hold times though, reaching 90% win rates becomes very difficult though. The hedge fund greats say over and over again that they are only right 50% of the time. Its not difficult to understand how much the "easy" part changes if you know you are only going to be right 50% of the time, even if your wins are much bigger than your losses. And since many will use something like a 1:2 risk to reward ratio, its not like they cut a trade that isn't working right away, this would be easy. (ie. exiting after only 2 points against you) If going for 20 ES points, they might sit through a 10 point drawdown, which is still within the 1:2 risk parameters, but its not easy of course to be down 7, 8, 9 points. Then for this trade to hit the target, it needs to go up 30 points from the -10 in order to be considered a winner for the 1:2 metric of 10 point stop and 20 point target. Anyone would think trading is easy if they put on a trade with a tight 2 point ES stop and a 10 point target and have this hit 80 or 90% of the time. Heck, even if it hit only 50% of the time this would be incredible with a 1:5 ratio. But most people don't have a high win rate and a very high R:R ratio. When you know you are only right 50% of the time, and price is just coming back to your entry after almost hitting your stop, its far to easy to take the break-even exit and be happy to get out without a loss. This of course may end up being a winner without, which now totally messes with your stats, but its justifiable. So saying all of this, I think its vital to put some metrics to this "trading is easy" statement. If you entries really are that good, and your win rate so high, and your stops very small so that a loss doesn't create a hole you need to dig out of, then you have the holy grail and trading is in fact easy. But I think most people commenting who say its not easy but are still profitable have these types of stats that I mention where every single trade is more of a toss up and requires decision making along the way, and not so much of a "fire and forget" type of trade. Since you already mentioned that you have scripts setup that do everything after you click to enter, I can see how extremely beneficial this is, but its still extraordinary to have such high win rates. Are you able to discuss your stats some more? This is I think the pivotal part about concluding if trading is easy or difficult.
With manual trading it is easy to remain discipline for a period of time. But hard to NEVER loose discipline. During the early phases, it always happens and you either give it all back or worse, until you get back your discipline. Rise-repeat. That is why a lot of people automate their setup-entry-exit-risk management heuristics. Then you learn that your manual system has a lot of nuances, that even if you did follow it strictly, if would not be that good. It is your intervention that cuts both ways good and bad. So you are caught between a manual system that requires special human handling and discipline, or an automated system just churns out smaller amount, in the worse case. Hope spring eternal that one can manually trade and maintain discipline and not give it back, but the road can be decades long.
You are (WAY) overthinking things. My long term win rate is closer to 70% and you are right, the higher the target, the less likely your target hits before you get stopped out. And? I don't run the market. How can I possibly know what the market is going to do? I don't.