Stock, this will be my last response to you. I am not a daytrader. I swing trade both long and short. My timeframe could be a few days to a few months. You are a momentum investor. Your "method" is working i'll agree, but if you never sell anything for a gain, all you have is increased buying power. With your relative inexperience and arrogance, that may not be such a great thing in the long run. You may be having a "good day" today, but this market is starting to show cracks. If you were around from 2000-02 you would know what i'm talking about. Over both the short and long terms, I will make multiples of what you do. Good luck, I wish you the best in you're journey, but you better get ready to be flexible. After reading your last response you show how little you really know. The stocks/indexes i'm short are in downtrends. The stocks/indexes i'm long are at least not going down. I make money everyday both long and short. You can only make it one way...Get it?
I asked him about shorting way back when he first started his cheerleading crap. Apparently he doesn't short. Doubt he can even spell SHORT. He's probably still holding dot com stuff from 2000. It's been a great trading market recently with all the volatility.
I have daytraded and can turn a good profit on a lot of trades. One good strategy is buying in the afterhours when a stock has huge earnings and then selling it at 8PM. But the statistics show that most daytraders lose money and underperform the market. Just because you have a small group of daytraders that are successful doesn't change the statistic.
Are you for real? The market may go up long term but stocks go up AND down. You can get in on pullbacks and oversold conditions. The Naz COMPX only needs a 100% gain from here to re-test the 2000 highs. So your buy & hold mentality doesn't carry much weight when you look at that time frame. To NOT short as a trader is foolish but something you don't comprehend. If semi's are weak why can't you short them and go long biotech if that's strong? Or any other many combinations of sectors, individual stocks, etc. Traders can, and do, often play BOTH sides of the market intra-day.
My little friend, my trades last from a few secs to 30 mins tops. I KNOW how to trade intraday and have been earning 6 figures since 2001. YOU, guy, are the one who doesnt seem to understand that there exists a world out there beyond your "buy and hold" world. For the full year 2006, I had 10k in my account with a well know daytrading firm and finished the year up $176,000 net. You can do the math on your own but that return trumps whatever you think is a good return for your strategy. See, by successfully trading intraday, I am allowing myself to experience a greater number of profit making opportunities. No sitting through slow periods or holding through retraces, I am making it count each and every day with NO BIAS! Like Grimes said, your are a momentum investor and that can definitely work. But if you dont remain nimble and flexible the market will eventually get you. It gets EVERYONE with a stroing bias at some point.
I don't knock on ST because he's a bull. I'm neither bear nor bull. I trade, and by definition that means I seek opportunity whether it is down or up. I dislike ST because he is not a trader. I don't even think he is an investor. He shows up when there is a severe down day and makes comments like "buy something". He has no reasoning behind his commentary, no analysis. Just opinion. He touts the up days, screaming to all that he was right. Mr. Market is the same way. Screaming to everyone that he has 31 consecutive winning trades. Why? Because he never closes positions and tries to play the drawdown game. That's not trading. That's praying. And then he disappears on down days. Let me quote something from Jack Crooks in today's "Currency Currents". He was speaking of Cramer, but ST is just the same as Cramer here on ET: Now, ST is actually worse than Cramer. Cramer, at least, has some understanding of how things work. ST will just show up and go "buy something" in the midst of rampant chaos in the market place. He does not offer sound advice...or any actual advice at all. He merely puffs his chest and sounds the ST mating call: "100% up room to go$$" and then turns tail when it goes south. That is why he is considered a joke. It has absolutely nothing to do with his belief that the market is going up.
Maybe you're right. I dunno. Too unmotivated to get an advanced trading platform, three giant CRTs and play for ticks. If you do that good for you. I find it stressful and hard to make money with factors like bid/ask spreads slippage and other factors.
You already answered my point in your post. When the markets are in selling chaos that is the best time to buy. Look at 1987 for example. In 2000-02 many quality large cap stocks were dragged down by the internet bubble collapse and made great buying opportunities. I know about the subprime and the bear sterns but I recommend buying simply cause from my analysis it doesn't seem like a very big deal. Could it be a big deal? Maybe but i doubt it. So what do you do? Go to login to your online broker and buy 70K of the DDM, or DIA and EWZ and hold em while the market is selling. When the dow goes to 14,000 again you'll have made a lot of money. Simple huh? Doesn't involve much work. You don't even need to buy stocks. ETFs are great in that regard. Less risk, lots of upside if you time it right.
I had to take you off ignore for a moment because I was thinking you might actually say something relatively useful. "Too unmotivated" just further supports the reasoning why people here loathe you. Traders bust their ass day in and out to make a buck, following trends and market analysis and their own gut. The last thing they are looking for is some unexperienced, back yard investor to come in and tell them to buy and hold (perhaps forever). This isn't trading, and this is a trading website. You're like a pharmaceutical rep showing up on an ASPCA website to debate the benefits of animal testing. Or a gay guy who frequents a Harley forum. You don't fit. And the more you spout advice about something you don't know, to people who make it their life studying about it, the more people you'll piss off.