I started following this thread when the author had as his goal to make 100K by January 1st. I stopped shortly thereafter when he didn't. 1) But, I wonder how he has faired recently and if he has posted a P/L tally of his performance since? That would be a great help and source of inspiration. 2) Anybody have any thoughts on making a RIMM play?
The market humbles without regard, one must humble the market with less regard. Slices of time, space, and energy still comprise elementary market action. Dream of walking right-side up off ceilings; harmonically tune your energy. Do you own RIMM shares or options?
PnL amounts to 4K over the initial 10K started in September. Profit by December was a far cry from the set goal, hence my reason for not posting it here. However, I'm almost done working on a software being designed by some programmers...software will help generate 2-3 trades per week based on my criteria, albeit not all generated trades will be traded.
Well, you are right but that was nothing compared to my results when over 800 traders were sending me picks based on my criteria. My undoing was that I shifted to intraday hoping that capturing $3-$4 move would help skyrocket my profit, but experience informs me that a trader will be dead 10 times before he captures one good intraday trend. The process is tasking! You can imagine going through intraday charts for over 1,000 stocks. I must admit that day-trading is not good for me considering the number of contracts that I buy.
I fell for the same trap last year, but with futures. The little change of instruments and time frames became a really good lesson.... Live and learn...... Good luck !!
There is nothing wrong with daytrading and/or catching intraday instrument trading action. The problem is not the odds you state; the problem is that you somehow convinced yourself, brain-washed, that you could make money daytrading using some of your methodology from a completely irrelevant trading plan. If you have the right technology, experience, and mastering of options then you can daytrade and/or scalp options to make whatever return/risk you want for yourself. If that's what you want then start working at it. You've already made money trading options a certain way; you have exposure; start working on a good daytrading plan. Have faith in your ability to grow into a 'day-trader'.
I see absolutely no benefit to "day- trading" except for being glued to a computer all day. Any method can be profitable, but I prefer to have my days free to do other interesting projects ! "Entre gustos no hay disgustos" as some would say...
When you trade smaller time frames you turn your money faster, but the price swings are smaller. The relation is not linear: the swing decreases slower than the number of trades increase. Also, compounding formula initial_amount * (1 + %profit) ** number_of_trades shows that increasing the number of trades has a bigger impact than increasing the profit per trade. OTOH, options' trading has to deal with its high slippage that becomes prohibitive as the price swings decrease. Directional options trading has a sweet spot somewhere between 1 day and 1 week, keeping their time decay small even for the front month options. In my opinion, these are the reasons why Multiopion is trying to reduce the time he's holding his trades. Also, his past results probably showed a pretty high expectancy, and this is why he's confident to risk so much per trade, trying to take advantage of profit compounding. Multioption definitely knows what he's doing. He's not a gambler.
I think you're somewhat right especially with your remark on trading plans. The technology, however, is the most important aspect of it. I was used to getting picks and recommending them. These picks were/are manually picked by a group of traders, but the task of teaching traders what to look for without compensation (long story) was killing.......so I thought of getting down with charts and trade based on intraday moves.......won't try that again. With right technology, intraday charts should provide most rewarding trading opportunities but having to search for trades manually makes the profit prospect unattractive.