On trades I am stalking that depend on price reaching a certain level I will place a bracketed stop or limit order with the alert on fill going to my tablet & cell, that way I can be doing other things without worrying about missing the trade.
I could live a normal live with at least €2000/month. Ideally i want to make more than that in order to scale the account over time. That is why i am currently working part time to keep the profits in the account as much as possible.
Once my trade is open i can set my levels. One thing i can't do for example is place buy/sell orders in advance because i never know when i might see something that i want to take advantage of. Some trades i might only have 30 seconds or so to decide to get in or not, if i miss that moment the trade is gone. My trades usually don't last longer than 30 minutes or so, so getting in at a later point is difficult as well.
Just suffer it and keep increasing your trade size to maximise profit and increase your interest to make stuck on the PC better. I'm only making wage currently, need to up game and grow the account and increase my own income, pay rise needed
That is exactly what i am doing and planning on doing. I just need to find a way to stay focused without leaving the desk to much to avoid missing trades.
Unfortunately not everything can be automated, at least not with my programming skill. How would you program something like this, this is a setup that i trade every now and then: Vix slowly going down all day, ES slowly going down as well or staying in a tight range. ES reaching a level of interest, a support level in this case. At that point i would watch for price action and some TA to confirm if we are going to get some upward action in the ES or not. No fixed rules at all. This is one of the basic setups that you can see coming up in advance, some just pop up and are gone in less than 30 seconds.
COKE 100% focus for hours I believe. ( don't do drugs never tried 100% joke ) Without ruining your method, likely isn't a way, so just keep suffering and doing your best and accept your going to miss some. I miss 70% of my setups, hesitate and price is gone seconds later, all part of the fun.
That's the only long call in this forum, that i ever made : (not that i remember of any others) source : https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/irbt.299573/ It went from $42 to $60. Nothing magical, but let's say you placed $5 000 in it. That would be - those $2 000 per month and you would need, 40 times less than $200 000, to meet that monthly cost of living, per single position. Conclusion : #1 - the necessary amount of the capital, to make a living, based on your expectations - is to big (you can make with less, like $20k - 4 or 8 positions). #2 - that shows, that you probably still have some work to do, on your swing approach because $200 000 and $2000 per month = 1%, which is 12% per year, so basically SnP returns. (an average person can have that) p.s, it will fly to the moon, still, great company.
Ignore programming it, can't teach a computer to think, only basic rules and basic rules don't work, its a dream but a waste of time. If it was that simple we'd all just be running some code at home, while at the beach on holiday spending it as we make it. Notice, everyone has a profitable EA, but nobody shares ever, odd that.
I have been working on the swing strategy for some time now and trading it with a lower amount just doesn't work. It is a strategy that has 10-15 positions at once, short and long at the same time. Average win rate is just around 50% with a positive risk:reward of around 1:1,6. I can not open 10-15 positions at once with just $20K. There are periods when the return is limited and there are periods when the return is exceptional, i need to build some sort of buffer to survive periods of just a few % return per month or even breaking even in order to make it to the periods where the return is significant. Also i need to pay taxes on the money generated and pay other trading related costs, in order to get €2K net i need to make at least $4,5K. Tax is quite high where i live. So to open all the positions my strategy needs, in order to survive some period of close to no return, to have enough money to pay taxes over the return after paying myself and other related costs AND being able to keep money in the account to grow it over time, $200K is a realistic number. I could start picking trades from the signals my system is generating but then i am not following the system anymore and all stats i have from the past are worthless. Besides, who says i am picking the winning trades and not the losing ones and make the performance worse by doing so.