It's obvious from your first post that you have no chance at all to succeed. Even if you become the 1 out of 1,000 (or fewer!) who's able to make consistent money day-trading index futures, you only have a small fraction of the capital needed to survive. You should quit trading immediately, close all your trading accounts, delete your username from this and other trading forums, and forget about it forever. Instead of wasting your time and money gambling on futures, put that effort+cash into getting education and skills that will let you succeed in the job market, or open a business providing tangible value-added for clients.
Do you have some metrics about your strategy ? Average frequencies and payoffs ? It’s not uncommon for a profitable strategy to experience huge drawdown. Now ... is it statistically significant enough to tell the strategy stopped working ?
You had an edge for those market conditions. The reason why it's so hard to become consistently profitable in trading is the fact that market conditions are forever changing. Surprising(or shall i say concerning?) no-one else has mentioned this.
I agree with the other poster who says there are persistent edges which can be used (with leverage) to get good returns. People are too caught up on finding anomalies. Why are anomalies necessary? They aren't. Every week, price of something goes up or goes down. It either keeps going up or keeps going down. There's your edge. I said that, watch yourself.
“It's not whether you're right or wrong, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong.” What you need to work on is finding actual setups with edge. When you are right you need to make a lot and when you lose, your risk should be limited. This is the core of profitable trading. Being right on the market is meaningless without a strategy and systematic approach(even if you are trading discretionary). Even once you have a profitable strategy, you've won only 10% of the battle. The other 90%, the true enemy in trading, is yourself. It will take thousands of hours to develop and years to master, there is no way around it. This is what it takes.
I agree with you. Most young traders concern themselves with entry, and entry is 1% of a method, risk management is 99% of a method and it entails much. Part is what is happening before the trade, where price is, beginning of new trend, middle, end? buying into resistance, selling into support, Trendlines off 60 minutes, daily, weekly, different patterns of S/R, and of course bar by bar patterns of timeframe you trade, some days 90% of trades are invalid cause the risk too great. Then, your signal you say you get in too early, so you not waiting for deep enough retracement, this is often a youth mistake of wanting to get in as nervous tension of possible missing the trade, there will always be other signals. Better the entry, usually means less risk and more profit potential. Then there is managing the trade after you get in, have to be able to identify price action for signs of price slowing down or speeding up. Some of this is of the 10,000 hours to learn how to read price. And learning where much of retail traders get in or exit is also bonus information. Helps to be able to read volume. Price do go up and down, how high is high and how low is low, buy the high and sell higher, buy low and sell higher, but can you define TREND? So unless you can have answers in a split second, you not ready to trade live. There are those who hope for luck and this is often hopeless, and other's make their own luck by understanding their profession. Good luck.
So you had to start daytrading just when the bear market reared its ugly head? Man, your timing couldn't have been any better if you were an experienced trader. But, as a novice, this is suicidal. You see, in a bull market, a rising tide will raise all boats so you're pretty safe if you just go long. But in a bear market, a sinking tide is known to crush both long and short alike.