This is the key. Great traders examine the other traders and find their weaknesses. If you know what your enemy is good at, then you know how to make money trading with them. If you know what your enemy is not good at, then you know how to make money trading against them. The most important skill that I learned in all of my studying and training is to be able to take a transaction, no matter how complex it is, and reduce it to a set of incentives, risks, and rewards. Then you can run through all of the potential outcomes. This works for all transactions. Risk is always the most important thing to understand. You have to know how the market is treating different types of risk. These are the higher level trading skills. This is how you get one or two steps ahead of the market. It is not easy though. This is actually what makes a trader. This is how you find an edge. The trader knows how the market is likely to react to events because they have done the things I said here.
Exactly why intraday scalping is a solid strategy. Grab what the market gives you over and over again jumping off the bull when your 8 seconds are up, if you catch my drift.
I will only add to this that the more leverage you use, the shorter time frame you will be able to hold the trade. I'm not saying that you can't hold a highly levered trade for longer but since the losses are also magnified, it will make sense to take the profits. If you spread levered positions against each other, this changes things.
My opinion, day trading you need to work your ass off and so your hourly rate of return is lower than long term trading. I suppose there are a handful of priveleged traders who run a fully automated system where this doesn't apply. Saying that, to become fully automated is no mean feat, takes a lot of work and investment into the structure to achieve that and probably requires more than one person, a one man band fully automated? - nigh on impossible imo .
That can depend on the size one is trading. 50 Es contracts scalping 2 points each time and doing that twice in one hour is 10,000.00 in an hour before commission. That is a pretty good hourly rate I’d say. If you made 6 of those trades instead of 2 in a day then that is 30,000 for the day before comm are deducted. Plus if flat by end of day session don’t have to worry about gap down or up openings on the next session.
Mickey, the work is getting to where you can do it. Once there... not much work. I spend much of the day doing guitar scales, pieces of martial arts form, yakking on here, paying bills, listening to music and otherwise waiting for a signal, putting it on and waiting for it to work or not. I spend an additional couple of hours a week reviewing and analyzing signals and making any time frame or target-stop adjustments. if I didn't enjoy my days, I'd do something else.