acrary: could you shed some light on why/how you determine to increase size as opposed to reducing? One would think that if conditions are less than favorable, then reducing the #contracts/shares would appear to be the thing to do. Thanks!
self appraisal, winning attitudes, yadda, yadda, yadda... all well and good. a person is walking through a mine field. another person says, "it's no mine field. if you call it a mine field, you're defeating yourself. I haven't stepped on any miiiiiiiiiii....................." well, the first step to successfully negotiating a mine field is to acknowledge that it <i>is</i> a mine field. the next step would be to identify all known mines. beware, young soldiers will call you pessimistic for doing so. but do what you have to do.
C'mon, give me a break ! Daytrading is still all about discipline and risk. Discipline : Keep it simple and always use stops. Risk : Only risk 1% per trade.
As an-ex market maker for 8 years, I can tell you that you are dead wrong. The market makers are hurting as much as most traders are. Look at Merrill, they just laid off 20% more of their market makers. I still have a lot of friends who are still markets makers, and they also say its hard to make a buck. I "switched sides" about 2 years ago when we started trading in decimals. It is pretty tough, but trust me, there are a lot of day traders making money. My advice to anyone who wants it is this: Trade the active stocks of the day. I trade NYSE stocks 90% of the time. For around $50/month, you can get the NYSE Open Book. That means YOU get to see where all the orders are, just like the specialist. Its as close to a level playing field as you can get. Forget CSCO, MSFT and those NASDAQ pigs, they are controlled by market makers who are working tickets that you dont know about. Its not level. Our office has been open for 3 years and we are all making a lot of money every month by keeping it small and not taking losses. We've had the same 12 traders the whole time. Don't force trading on a day when there is no money to be made. Its better to sit there all day and breakeven than to lose a few hundred bucks and rack up commissions. On crappy days I usually surf the net looking for good trading sites, or diving deeper into technical analysis, or playing around with my charting software. Just my 2 cents worth! Jeff
You're right. Always has been. Always will be. I think trading is only somewhat more difficult and less profitable than before... mostly because it's different. A few years back, the play was to pay up on momo stocks and buy shallow dips on momo stocks (expecting higher highs for the day). That seemed easier, and perhaps it was. But now, it's more like "hardly anything follows through". Presuming that's correct, then the right play is to presume dips and bounces are going to fail and try to play the turns technically. This is different than before, but offers only modestly smaller overall profit potential.
in NYC today ... ( online trading expo ) seems like the attendance is down as well as the number of vendors ... I think there are still profitable "daytraders" out there but maybe more are looking to trade outside of equities forex , commodities , ( for example)
Exactly! There is nothing wrong with calling the situation what it is. Nobody is saying that every person here is doomed to fail. But this is the toughest time in at least a couple decades in a very tough profession. Its unfair to newer people wanting to access the markets and the potential of trading to mislead about how tough the environment is now. That is like the institutional analysts who misled the general public (mostly the newer, naive traders) about a company or sector's status. If a newer trader is ready and eager to face this challenge, more power to him or her. But let's at least offer an honest assessment so that he or she can make a decision based on candid analysis.
Actually, the expo had booths, platforms and lectures on futures, options and commodities. It just seems as though there are fewer people still interested after, or who have survived, the last year (and the same for the reduction in vendors). Even the atmosphere seems different. There just doesn't seem to be as much motivation nor participation. People have been burned, burned, and burned some more. That is why I think this market will probably be tough for a long while to come.
Jeff, What is the web page to subscribe to the NYSE Open Book service? Also, I thought only the Specialist can see their Order Book and they do not show it to anyone. It is one of their special privileges for making the market. Is that no longer true ?
There is a reason that there has never been any hype about this (as has been pointed out in other threads). The book you see is only the other electronic limit orders. It doesn't include what is going on on the floor, the orders that the specialist is making deals for on the floor, stops, special orders, etc. What's more, the specialist usually is very slow to update the book, "accidently" leaves orders long canceled in the book (thereby misleading people), and others use it to scare or encourage traders with misleading quotes. This is also the reason that many of the top traders refuse to even look at it (because it often misleads and scares people out of good positions).