Personally, I think that traders who do not employ stops of any kind and survive are either exceptional, lucky, or exceptionally lucky. Unfortunately for me, I am none of the above. Therefore, I plod along with mental stops.
So you are saying that a newb will be able to trade for a living off of a 10k trading account in stocks ? If leverage is not a problem then why should they not be trading futures ? The only difference between trading ES and spy is the leverage.
Tortoise, are you a noob ES trader ? Tell us more about your style, How big your stops were on those trades, how long you have been trading etc...
Tortoise......i think its pretty clear that most traders view your idea of not using stops because they are losing you money is not a wise one.......some view it as stupidity....then they view the opinions of those on here that encourage you not to use stops as absolutely moronic....which tends to lead to hostility because nobody wants to be associated with stupidity....however it is your money and you are free to do with it as you will and i agree that the hostility does not help with any type of productive discussion...... as for the opinion that futures are the worst thing to trade......this comes from the fact that their is no leading indicator to help you with your decision to enter a trade or not....when trading a stock....say microsoft....sunw....intc........a person knows with 70-80% accuracy when the s&p futures shoot up...these stocks are going to shoot up as well so it is a buying opportunity.....but what was your indicator to buy the futures......cause once you see the futures shooting up.....its to late jump on the bandwagon cause it has already happened. Maybe i am wrong and there is a leading indicator for futures traders. Is there?????...........so with leading indicators to use as entry signals stocks seem to be the wiser choice for profitable trading. again......only my humble opinions lol...and Tortoise.....its madmuNNy.....not muMMY.......
Not really. I think that the term "deep pockets" is a misnomer. Suppose that a trader normally trades 4 to 6 contracts with what he considers to be reasonably tight stops. Then, he decides that he will only trade 1 contract with no stops in order to better ride the waves that may come about. Suddenly, he is a "deep pocket" in the relative sense. Unless Mr. Deep Pockets enters a friendly market, he may find himself just treading water with nominal returns for his efforts, if any. I think that, at some point, just as tight stops can become too restrictive for a given market or strategy, so too can "deep pockets" become "stupid pockets."
And what if one of those "shoot ups" was just noise and the s&p falls right back down and now you are long MSFT and it turned back to a loss ? I use the cash index SPX to pick entry points in ES as well as trading known reversal time periods and gaps using support and resistance. FWIW, when I was trading stocks, I never used futures to determine my trades, I only used the index of what ever stock I was trading in. IE. DOW for WMT, QQQQ for PMCS
My definition of deep pockets is someone who has the ching to sit through the rough times and can stomach the drawdown such as Buffet. A million to him has a different meaning than a million to us.
But it is all relative. A million dollars left languishing for him is like less than 50 dollars left languishing for most of us here. From a percentage return perspective, the results can be similar. But, rightly or wrongly, most of us choose to leverage our trades partly by virtue of our stops and the trade size that those stops afford us. If Mr. Buffett chose to leverage himself substantially more, then his pockets would become relatively that much less deep. Yes, Mr. Buffett's pockets are indeed deep, but I don't think that alone defines his investment strategy. From a trading perspective, I think that the concept of "deep pockets" is entirely scalable. I think it represents a type of trading more than an absolute dollar account value.