I do.I curious about method of sustain mental stamina and focus. Under intrady scalping my alert level is as reading a book closely. Can I read a book every day. Do I need to? Is mental long run stamina is a factor? Can I improve my mental stamina?
Do that for 250 days, every single day. Do that when the market has a 4pt range and do it when it has a 5% crash. Do it when you are behind for the month and need the money and when life get's out of whack and you have stress on another front. Then we talk. As I said, trade low maintenance positions over weeks and months. The risk/reward is better and you can trade these for stupid size. You'll make the same amount of money and you have a fraction of the stress. I started out as a scalper in STIRs but I'm glad that these days are behind me.
Limit your hours per day. 1-3 hours should be enough to collect some ticks. Get/ stay in shape. Do some training every day. Does not have to be hardcore. Eat balanced. A good healthy basis and some fun food. In essence, keep your whole life in a balance. With the purpose to keep the fun in everything. Then you will see, progress will come by itself.
By time 3pm cdt comes, am exhausted. First hour am on one minute charts and second hour switch to two minutes for rest of the day. Scalping is like long marathon, you have to build up to doing all day especially at your age, am almost 65yo and wears me out and been doing it good part half my age. Get lot of sleep, don't eat snacks, drink plenty of water, take small walk every 30 minutes...
I don't worry about slippage as it is basically non existence for me as 99.9% of my entries and exits are with limit orders. It is rare I use a market order. Sometimes I will use a market order in a fast moving BO as I just want in and do not want to wait to see if it will come back to a limit order for my entry. And sometimes if I have a position on, and the market is about to close, in last seconds before session close I will exit with a market order so as to be flat at the session close.
BINGO! What a novel idea? You are the first to mention it to the gentleman! I don't trade every day. I am 67 and love scalping but if I get mentally or physically tired I just stop and go do something else. Work in garden. Errands to town. Take a walk. Or go to sleep! Then get my lazy carcass up for another round if the market is still open.
I'd suggest leveraging your background in software engineering to become a systematic trader. If you distill your trading rules into an algorithm you can backtest the results and see how they perform through a variety of situations. What you may find, ultimately, is that there are no trading rules that consistently generate returns, and with a decent sample (e.g. trades for a year) you may find that such an approach is losing. Once you realize that rules-based technical analysis doesn't work, you can start the real work of trying to figure out what does. One way to do this is by conducting a historical analysis of price conditions (change, volatility, and volume) prior to a significant breakout and then building an algorithm that you can run on liquid securities to find them. High frequency trading is typically low edge high volume, so you'll need to improve your speed and trading costs, in order to generate enough margin for this to be worthwhile. Alternatively, you can choose not test your assumptions and continue to believe that with a simple chart and mouse, you too can be a market wizard.
I am glad these days are in front of me. I can't hardly wait for the market to open and get my lazy carcass out of bed to start scalping. I occasionally trade NQ or YM but my preference is ES or it's smaller version MES. I like the competition. And I am 67. I would be bored sh$tless if I had to wait around for several months for some darn stock or two or three to go up. Scalping isn't for everyone but it suits my personality. I likes to be in the ACTION with guns ablazing.
Hello. Are you are polluting the thread with a lot of BS. I don't do none of that crap you are talking about. I don't need a large historical sample. Usually a few hours or minutes suffices. I don't need or care to devise an algorithm. I don't need to improve my speed (too old 67) and I don't care about my trading costs. I know what my commissions are up front and am willing to scalp for enough to keep the brokers eating. There is enough to go around. I just have to scalp large enough to cover brokers bread and butter and make me some money. Why are you talking all that crap that the average retail trader is never going to be able to do? A body can learn to scalp with a chart and a mouse. Period.