The Truth about Daytrading Futures..

Here is a fact. I have never met or spoken to a single person that actually daytrades futures and makes real consistent money. Real money is atleast $100k a year consistently. (I live in NYC so I have a high cost of living.)

Yet I have met countless people that have made millions holding(long or short) stocks/futures for the longer run . These people have consistently every year.. made serious money. They did not make money every week or every month.. but at the end of the year they were way ahead of the crowd.

Here is what I have come to at the end of years of trading and years of seeing other traders succeed and go bust..

#1. NO such thing as making consistent money every single day daytrading. That is a biggest myth. NO such thing as making consistent money every week daytrading. I mean.. maybe you will break even a few times and make chump change.. but you will not make a living every single week.

Here is what traders want.... they want great liquidity.. super fast fills... no worries overnight... massive leverage, cheap commisions.. The answer to these needs is EMINIS. The only problem is that no one really makes a living daytrading them.

--MIKE

 

i agree, i have been daytrading futures for the past 2 years.
Not scalping, but trying to take intraday swings.

my main problem is that you always have to be before your screen not to miss an opportunity, because when you ty to swing intra day you only get a few setups every week ( especially nowadays)

So sitting so long before your screen, sometimes makes you trade secundary setups, which almost always are losers.

I trade other strategies, ( eod swinging), and my return there is much more.

my lesson : i make more money sitting less behind my PC

 

I am just annoyed when I lurk these threads and I read countless posts of people trying to trade the Eminis on 1 min. charts.

I just want to share with all the newbies that are getting their feet wet with trading.. to skip the eminis and get a reality check.

Personally.. I have traded many different types of instruments and methods... and the only real money I have ever made was when I was trading to hold more than 1 day. And I realize that this is the case for many more people besides myself.


The biggest problem most people have with holding overnight are those overnight bombshells. But in reality.. if position sized properly they will not dent your overall performance.

Traders should start getting used to holding overnight and accept the risk.


--MIKE

 

You wouldn't want to overstate your case now, would you.

 

lol

 

The fact that you never met such a trader does not mean that these traders do not exist. I know several daytraders, both in stocks and futures, who make money consistently on a weekly basis. Although there are some down days, and even down weeks but on a monthly basis they withdraw their "salary" from the account.

This kind of trading does not learnt overnight. It takes years to develop, learn the markets and all that is involved with it.

Being a good daytrader is not finding a few setups that work and sitting infront of a monitor to look for them - This is the point were most new traders fail. You need to learn how the market operate, how different conditions effect market direction and many other principals.

To say that daytraders do not make money just because they are using smaller timeframes or because you never met such a trader is absurd.

TM Trader

 

People do better trading stocks, there easier !

 

I live in NYC.. and have many friends that work in hedge funds and are pro traders.... I am only speaking from my own own experience.. that is how my beliefs are formed. I worked on wall street and my uncle worked on wall street for almost 20 years.

I am sharing the reality of my own experiences.. nothing more nothing less... You should only take it for what it is.


--MIKE

 

Sure, but you state this:

as a fact, while it is surely not. You can't really believe that there are no profitable daytraders just because you havn't met one.

TM Trader

 

And what exactly does this mean???

You just study how the markets work? Who in their right mind actually understands how the most complex markets in the world actually operates?

As if all the sudden one person wakes up and really understands and has a true reasoning on how the Eminis operate on a daily basis and can exploit this and make money consistently every week??




--MIKE