Truly this may be the best advice for the OP and other aspiring traders. At 2.5 years in it's still not too late to let it go. Money lost is one thing, but the opportunity cost is what's been bothering myself the most. If I pursued a career or a business with the same amount of hours and grit I've put into trading. Wow. Who knows where I would be in life. On the other hand, there are people who waste their evenings on other trivial stuff, so for the opportunity cost to be considered one have to really think hard about what else one would do with their time. I've been at this for over 10 years and in some ways already gave up, but it's only recently that I'm starting to think that maybe I have a shot at making it. And that's with tons of hours and building a statistical model (hired a professional firm to build it) and investing a lot of money in the process.
Yes, like lindq said, best advice might be to just move on into something else. Real estate, business, etc. If you want to be in the market a nearly 100% successful method is to put a decent % of your income into the SP500 every month, for at least 10 years and just freakin leave it there. 20 years would be even better. If you lose doing that, I'll eat a bug. If you just have to trade a little, do the above and also trade in a very small way (stocks only) but do it very systematically. Try this: Learn Amibroker (easy) and come up with some simple and NON CURVE FIT trading models. https://www.amibroker.com/ Books by Howard Bandy could help:
You trade irrationally, you have no fear of losing, your brain gets the shakes when in profitable trade. Most will say this is mean approach, but ever dumb loss is taking monies away from the family. Allow your wife to do this after being dumb, won't take many of this to stop being dumb. https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-ta...oogle&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
Hello Laissez Faire, I am with you buddy. I am at about 6 years strong at it, and still trying to get consistent. But I keep on pushing. So for the OP, PLEASE get a full time job career and do this trading hustle on the side. Do not dedicated your entire life this trading business. Because it will take years and years to get profitable, maybe.
Could be, but it's one of the few approaches for swing trading that has a decent chance to work. The Gvmnt and Fed really backstop the market when things look grim. Much market risk has been removed, at least trading the indexes without much leverage. Just my (worthless) 2cents.
Trading has a way of bringing out the worst in us initially as noobs. It's like a threshing machine which exposes our weaknesses. "....so many times see the trades I were in developing into huge winners without me...." This is a mental bias, its not fact. We are acutely aware in our heads of all the opportunities we've missed, but block out the losers we could have been entangled in. In trading, you take your hits, whether good or bad, then move onto the next trade/opportunity. Bad traders look back, good traders look ahead.
NT8 seem like a good platform. I would really like to automate with it, except their commissions is crap. 1.44 micro and 5 for emini? wtffff