Like any skill, playing music, driving in ice, landing a plane it becomes a subconscious process. That is not to say it is good for your heart. Being bathed in a low level soup of stress chemicals from feeling 'on point' for hours a day, day after day requires balancing with exercise.
Problem is you hold your breath while being stuck with your monitoring and decision making.Control your breath, fully exhale.Good exercise is to count exhales from 1 to 10, you get rid of the excesive carbon dioxide that way, and supply your brain with oxygen.
A good point, focus can lead to a kind of waking sleep apnea. I always try to breath correctly. I was a competitive swimmer & part dolphin in my younger days I am sure this is a good part of the reason I've been able to handle chart scalping 5-6 futures instruments in parallel for years now.
How about buying the day low and selling the day high or vice versa? You don't need to scalp ticks to qualify as a day trader. I think stress correlates with both frequency of trading, but most importantly the degree of discretion involved. If you plan the day in advance and have a sound methodology without overleverage, I don't think it should be very stressful at all.
In my opinion Day Trading is about the choice of risk not always about the frequency of trading. Those who day trade do not want to have overnight exposure and choose different parameters to evaluate the markets. To the outside beginner, day trading seems like one universe where a day trader must make a decision and trade each moment. In reality, I find that most day traders vary in their frequency of trading, size and risk tolerance.
When you work on the floor, you start and quit at a specific time. Globex and the home computer has made it much more challenging for the individual. You have to keep it real, and stick to a small trading window. This will help keep you grounded with some level of normality. But just to let you know, even in the pits every one is not trading non stop. Some traders prefer the front months and trade just the opening, while others do not and much more Blah-blah after that. The noise and the excitement keeps them occupied and this element is missing from the homebody operation. So what we have is screen hypnosis or some level of disconnect and you force yourself to trade just to trade. Speaking for myself as a day trader, if I need more than 5 seconds to make a decision on a trade, I walk away. The setup is either there or its not. The after is another story? I control (me) every step of the way. But in the end, you need to treat trading like a job, and if you don't control your job, your job will control you. Cheers*
90 to 300 trades a day! Mate, that is some activity! - serious trading. When you say 23 hours a day, I assume you mean you have the option to trade any window of 23 hours? In reality, how many hours do you set yourself to? I place on average about 5 trades a week. Yesterday jumped back into gold again with 6 positions simultaneously and that was 10 minutes (trading on a crappy ING platform which came out of Noah's Arc). The rest of the day spent on research plus went to restauraunt for wife's birthday lunch for a couple of hours.
Mickey, if you have clearly defined signals and the ability to adhere to the rules of your plan, it's not that tough. What is tough is the road getting to that point. The days eventually become routine and relaxing. The idea of holding overnight is what gives me the shakes.