Do you think it's realistic for an untrained, inexperienced part-timer with a demanding full-time non-trading job to outcompete full-time trading professionals who have been doing this for years? How would a part-time combat medic, whose day job was on Wall Street, stack up against you or your colleagues in terms of performance? My suspicion is that he'd be hopelessly outclassed, and that most likely is what you will be as you try to take on the markets with 2 hours a day. Quite frankly it's disrespectful to people who make a profession out of beating the markets, to think you can do it just as well with 1/5th of the effort.
I'm not completely inexperienced. I made consistent but small profit daytrading equities at a prop firm for about 6 months. My current approach seems much easier. It doesn't take anything too amazing to make a good trade here and there. Of course I dont know the answer to your question. That is why I am testing with very small size. As far as disrespect, that is irrelevant. This business is not about respect. It is about finding an edge and exploiting it. My edge is that I don't need to trade. I can wait and trade when things look good.
I actually find it a little disrespectful for you to say that only a professional can manage to make one good trade a week. It isn't that difficult to track strength and weakness.
I'm looking at initiating a longer term position trade USD/CAD long on Monday unless it gaps down big or something.
Out the rest at nearly 3x initial risk. Haven't had time to look at charts all week so figure I should call it good here.
So if it's that easy, why aren't the pros up 100%+ per annum? And 50 good trades a year? Many pro traders say the bulk of their profits come from 2 or 3 trades/positions each year, but here you are saying you can find 1 every week. I take my hat off to you, clearly you have found a way to find 10-20 times as many good trades as top pros, whilst doing only 10-20% of the work.
I'm not expecting those kind of returns. I'm hoping to beat what I can get through traditional investments for normal guys like me that can't invest in a hedge fund or something. I'm also not expecting to make money every week. I guess a better way to put it is that I hope to make one good bet a week. Obviously a lot of them will lose. In all seriousness(and respect), what are you suggesting? Are you saying non-professionals should not even bother attempting to trade their own accounts? I really don't understand your attitude especially on a trading forum.
I agree with most of what you are saying about inexperienced and untrained players,....but trading is one place that the little guy actually has ONE big advantage that the institutional money does not have. That is our size and speed. We can liquidate and completely reverse course on our entire account in less than 3 min. Big players can NOT do this. They have to play everyday and have to incrementally buy and sell to fully establish there positions. When 80% of all asset managers underperform the market it is NOT that hard to at least do as good as they do just by investing in low cost index funds. I do think it is possible to outperform the "big money" with fewer trades and only a few hours a day. In fact I use mostly end of day data and have been clearly outperforming the market and most of "big money". Have you ever noticed that even when the market goes down "big money" is responsible for much of the market drop but at the end of the year they still perform only as well as the S&P and many times much worse? Thats because they can not move quickly and it takes them time to reverse course,...so they lose money in market volatility. Its the people that BUY and HOLD and day trade that I think are at a HUGE disadvantage. In those cases I would agree with you that you will have a hard time outperforming the pros. Just my opinion.