IRS? Whats that? lol I have done 1200 trades in one day (not punching them myself tho!). But I monitor each one of them (or at least try to), and I closely watch the total in both points and $. No problem. Manually I have punched close to 200. That was not a problem either, you just feel like you have taken 2 math exams while you have been running all the time at the end of the day. It did not last long doing it that way, my heart said cool down.
This has never been a problem for me. I just list the security as "Various" and put the combined total purchase, sales and profit amounts in the appropriate column. The last thing the IRS wants is a flood of paperwork (my 1099 form for last year was over 1900 pages, as I recall, sent to me on CD-ROM).
the irs asking for every trade is bs. i'm aprofessional mtm trader who has done this for a living for 15 years. the irs doesn't want 3000 pages sch d's. they want a summary of all trades. if they want all they have to do is get your jan 1st bal and dec 31st bal and take out all your withdrawels and they have your profit.in reality the irs has never said one could use one line accounting
Why and the hell do you want to do that many trades a day ? How and the hell do you do that many trades in 390 minutes ?
Isn't that not a good thing? That is on about every list i see about why traders lose money. Sounds like overtrading instead of waiting for a high probability setup.
I admire people who do a few trades a day and make more money than the scalper with his hundreds or thousands of trades. Scalping hundreds of trades is a proof of idiocy to me. A trader needs to understand the market. So he takes positions for a longer time than the nanoseconds of the scalper. The scalper scalps because he has no idea what the market will do, so he gambles. If he would know what the market would do he would take bigger moves instead of hopping in and out.
Successful short term trading, or scalping, is much like the roulette wheel in the casino. The successful trader takes the role of the house, and accepts bets from 'gamblers.' The odds on a roulette wheel may only favor the casino by about 3%, however, over a very large number of wheel spins, the casino is almost certainly going to be profitable every single day (ignoring high tech roulette wheel 'cheaters'). It would be great if the casino could only accept 10 huge 'bets' per day, at an excellent win/loss ratio. But, it's tough to find a huge edge that can be exploited with very large trading size. Instead, it is much easier to find small edges that can be exploited using small trading size, many times every day. Idiocy, in my opinion, is trading any strategy that has a negative expectation. -Eric
This confirms what i said: a real trader will find an edge that can be traded with a larger trading size. A scalper is a person that is unable to find that edge. So he has only one choice: scalping, because that's all he can do.
Someone mentioned doing hundreds of trades taking 2-6 cents per share in 100-500 shares lots. Therefore, one need to use a very low cost broker. Which broker do you guys use for scalping and whats the cost per round turn?