Follow the gyrations - not the trend. For daytrading you need liquid markets. Take YM as an example. Compared to CL, YM (and ES) are sedate markets to play. Now the range for YM on Monday August 4 2008 was 164. So play YM intraday, from open to close. Specifically you play the gyrations, that is you buy the upmoves and sell the downmoves sequentially. The sequence (August 4) in the session's gyrations (up/down repeating 9.30 to 16.00) produced 5 macro 'legs' of minimum 45 points. The mean average of those 5 'legs' was 95 points per 'leg'. Thats 475 points which were on offer. If you take a lower measurement - 12 'micro' legs of minimum 25 points, that was 727 points (better than 4xR) offered to you for the day. Nice, huh? Using an accurate methodology, you can easily see that you can start making yourself rich, using YM.
Certainly true that CL is a much wilder beast these days than YM/ES. In fact, I'm not sure that many traders are doing that well in this market--especially if they are leveraged. A slip of the tongue by Olmert and good night... I have day traded stocks that have taken a few minutes to unload (at 1/4 mill USD). But for scalping, YM certainly provides all one needs. Btw, respect to anybody who can handle YM's intra-day gyrations. My time frame is a bit longer and I should have specified that I was refering to longer term trends (that may or may not affect systems traders.) Still, thanks for your response.
Depends on how you identify the "trend." There can be many "trends" within the same price movement. Load a 10, 50, and 100 period moving average. How many trends do you see? Anyway, my answer is sometimes. I have a trend system and I'm working on a fading system.
Hi Cheese, can you give some example of what you described? Do you take all the moves one by another during the day? What is the timeframe of the candles/bars you use for intraday trading?