This question can be answered by looking at your life style. How much time do you have? How much time do you want to spend concentrating on trading? How many distractions are there in your life style, family, commitments, employment, social? How much can you handle open positions for any lengths of time? The shorter the time frame the more energy required. The longer the time frame the more you are exposed to drawdowns. Short time frames require minimal investments vs longer where ideally you need more capital to carry through on several positions. Stress is there always, short term you have fast changing market stress and more acute attention reqd, less tolerance to distractions allowed, long term there is stress to exposure of larger sums of money plus more patience to allow things to play out. Manual trading carries stress due to needing several eyes in your head and more than one brain to remember everything. Both carry uncertainty stress. Younger people would probably gravitate toward shorter frame trading as they are more ok with using up high amounts of energy.
Hi SimpleMeLike, thats the thing. I know myself and I am not profitable in choppy markets. By choppy I do not mean ranging, to be clear. Choppy does not work for me therefore I stay out of choppy markets. Interesting points though. Did you try answering them yourself? Seems you do know where you need to work on - but are you doing something in this direction?
Hello themickey, Correct. I am scalper until I make $1,000,000 in one year. I only trade ES for 0 minutes to 30 minutes per day and stop. Then I go do other fun things for 23.5 hours per day. I think working hard in manual trading is stupid and a waste of time and eventually lead to mental health issues of traders. Because they work very hard and waste so much time manual trading efforts, and still no reward, just losses. Manual trading is gambling, so it is stupid to gamble all day in randomness with no verified edge. I know a few people loss $XXX,XXX to $X,XXX,XXX in manual trading. They have sever mental issue and personal life issues. Working all that hard to lose all that money, and nothing to show for it.
Hello Tradess0610, I manual trader for 30 minutes a day and go do other fun things in life sir. Hopefully, I make a million dollars this year trading 30 minutes a day. There is nothing to change. You are either right or wrong as a manual guessing and gambling trader. If you work too hard and still fail, you will eventually have mental issues because now you are gambler and losing money. Manual trading is gambling unless you have a verifed edge. If you have a verified edge, then yes trade all day. Do not overwork yourself as a manual trader. Do other fun stuff in life. Hurry up and fail, and start a new trading method. Keep failing so you do not destroy your life and spend years at this. And do not risk your own money in the family saving account Another thing that has helped me is that I traded SIM for years man and got alot of practice. market replay helps
Your posts are a fun read. 30 minutes is too brief. Why not go the length of a movie at least? That would be 24-30 bars on the 5m bars. The low hanging fruit is not always found within the first six bars of the day. I concur with your comment about working hard and mental illness. This is not work in any case. For me there are few things in life that compare on the fun scale when the market is moving. Failing is not a big deal. It doesn’t take much money to get back into the game. Long gone are the days when it required $50,000 ($90,000 in today’s dollars) to open an account and a commute to an office with T-1 connections to the exchanges. People on social security are able to play from home now. Cheaper than playing BINGO at the local church.
Good Evening savoir, How it goes man? 30 minutes is more than enough. Hit me a few licks on ES charts, and I am out. Chart closed, then back to fun life. Why work harder for. why work harder starring at chart all day? When you done and have losses, you just wasted the entire day to lose money. That makes no sense. The point of working is make money right, so now you work 8 hours watching the chart and get nothing. Waste of life and time. I only trade 30 minutes per day and done. Never saw the point of trading longer and whenever I did, I was very tired and normally just lose money trading too much. I am just gambling and guessing and taking educated/experienced guess anyway. Then hop in my 86 Chevy, turn the radio up and burn out and have fun man. This my buddy driving my box chevy here below. https://youtube.com/shorts/V2L-aVdjTO4?feature=share https://youtube.com/shorts/WS_PkR7pfn4?feature=share I am working on building something like this now, takes alot of time and I see the reward as well.
I Of course daytrading is not doomed, Algo trading is actually wasteful and a terrible waste of a developers time. To get a Algo to a live chart takes 500 -2000 hours of testing and developing - then they mostly perform badly. It's just another retail trader's money pit.
Here's the 5 last days on the e-mini S&P 500 futures contract using a 5-minute chart. Related to the opening post and some comments along the way. 1. Why can't this be manually traded? Surely there's plenty of time to both enter and exit? 2. Why would a manual retail trader need to concern himself with HFT or algorithms? If you wanted to buy or sell a few contracts at any spot on this chart - how are algorithms competing with you? How are they a threat? In my view, there is no competition for a retail trader trading in a liquid market and it's a completely unnecessary and unproductive mindset to adopt. The only concern for a retail trader should be to figure out where the market is going and then trade in that direction - be that up or down. PS: The opening period is the one part of the day where a lot of traders can find themselves getting chopped up on fast moves. Leave that for the experts.
Yeah true. I was thinking about studying the algos some years ago, but then I thought it is just way too much to learn to be able to compete on the same level with professionals. I would always prefer to outsource the coding to a specialized expert instead of waste thousands of hours to learn it myself.
Why do you want Algo's to trade for you ? You can't compete with professionals as your Algo will get slaughter generally. There are three ways to destroy retail traders. 1.. Take their Stops 2.. Talk them into trading Algo's. 3.. Talk them into trading funded accounts from Fake prop firms who never give you live market access.