very true. Much better to focus on the behavior. Nail that and the profits will follow. Although, risk goals are probably necessary versus profit.
While I agreed that the daily/weekly are where the big profits are being made, I wouldn't totally discount the intraday trading with size. I'm not talking pure scalping for a couple of ticks. There are definitely enough intraday moves, trends, volatility that a very experienced intraday trader can make very good money holding much longer timeframe than seconds. Maybe even tens of minutes or hours depending on how long the trend lasts.
The account they are managing are several millions. On a smaller account 200%, 300% or even 1000% is totally achievable.
To dangerously simplify it, you won’t survive. Unless your strategy entails tail risk protection, which will give up some of your alpha(if any). Start a business.
I assume that you meant to say that you believe that I will not figure out a way to make trading profitable. You're probably right. But I would consider myself to be wasting an opportunity if I did not try to figure it out. So here I am. And you're effectively saying "go away." No, I didn't reference "tail risk" in my post. There's a couple of you here that seem to be obsessively fixated on one single aspect of trading that you have personally found beneficial and then erroneously concluded that what worked for you must certainly be the only thing that separates good traders from bad ones. I categorically disagree with the idea that there is any one thing, even very good concepts such as "tail risk" and "risk management," that is the golden bullet for any endeavor, let alone trading. Perhaps that wasn't your intent and I misunderstood you.
Don’t assume anything and don’t strawman my point. I said very simple that you aren’t going to get any returns over 12 years unless you have tail risk protection. 1) Never cross a river if it is 4 feet deep, on average. - Nassim Taleb 2) In order to succeed, you must first survive - Warren Buffett 3) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-05-12/nassim-taleb-on-the-importance-of-probability Don’t like my 2 cents? Block me and move on, I don’t give a sh*t. Also this figure below sums up what looking at daily charts is really like .. Facts aside... you’re ahead with your odds if you start a business like your spouse. You’re in your thirties and you’re an engineer. I’m assuming you’re aware of information theory and should have a sense of the concepts signal and noise... you need to understand that trading that occurs on a daily chart is 99.95% noise, trading over the course of 12 months is 50% noise, 50% signal... so on and so forth. For you to say you’ll be day trading and growing to a million and you’ll be trading pure random noise, searching for voodoo patterns is a joke. I’ll never buy such bullsh*t. Its a facade that millions of epistemically arrogant people fall into, especially retail fall into. Go ahead and do it so you don’t regret it later, just survive, and see if you're able to profit over a large frequency of trades, on average. Maybe I’m stupid and you’re smart. I just think it is so unattractive... risking dollars for pennies and assuming a stop-loss will protect you (it will most of the time, but not when it matters most).
Your point is well taken that managing millions is a different ballgame. However, this point has been overstated on this forum ad nauseam. You gambled your $1000 account on earnings one time and made 1000%. So what? That's not a sustainable trading system. You just got lucky. Let's pick a standard account size for someone who joins ET and thinks they can quit their job and trade for a living: $100k. How many traders have turned 100k into 200k and not given it all back within a year? Maybe even just 150k (50%)? Not many, from what I've seen.
Sorry. Evidently I did misunderstand you. I interpreted that first post of yours to be self-serving. Your follow-up proves I was wrong. It was not my intention to offend you. I would have responded differently to your first post if I had read your second post before your first. But then that would mean that your second post would have been your first and now I think my brain is stuck in an infinite loop. To be fair, this post is titled "tell me why I can't..." and your first answer provided exactly one reason: tail risk. So I see no strawman since I called tail risk a very good concept in my response. I agree that tail risk could take me out. I wasn't claiming that your answer was wrong. I just didn't like your post. Regardless, I may have mixed you up with someone else on ET who preaches only tail risk and virtually nothing else (I say that because your follow-up included far more than just tail risk). For assuming that you're a one-trick pony (tail risk) I also apologize. No hard feelings? I really like the SNR analogy to compare intraday to swing. So no, I will not be blocking you. Maybe I'm naive, but I consider blocking people for such things as "I just didn't like your post" to defeat the purpose of such great sites as ET. Had I blocked you, I wouldn't have heard the SNR analogy, WITH a picture. For what it's worth, I think that you and I are in total agreement of the importance of tail risk. I just think that many here on ET understand and employ it differently. The river crossing is a great example. For example, I could cross a river that has an average depth much greater than 4' provided that all of the deep parts are too narrow to pose a threat. The model / strategy just needs to account for all of the river's deep parts, all types of losing streaks, all types of market aberrations (like Trumps tweetstorm this morning) etc, right? But what you call tail risk someone else may call risk management. Someone else may call it operating on probabilities. Another, simply "edge." Another may not have a word for it because it's the least of their worries as it's already inherently baked into their overall process because they had a great mentor to show them the ropes. They may be doing exactly what you want but they may not even know it. It's like that with politics, religion, you name it. We put words on concepts and expect that other people do so in the same way - when in fact there's quite a spectrum of how different people categorize various concepts. It's a pet peeve of mine and I'm sorry if I took it out on you. I prefer intraday at this point precisely because of tail risk. Sure it may provide a lower win rate and lower % gain per trade, but holding overnight scares the crap out of me. And I think you're right about the SNR. I'll add you to the list (with dozu888) of people to watch me eat some crow if / when I conclude that swing is where it's at. Until then I can't ignore that there are people out there that are successfully making a good living with intraday.