After 34 years, "The thrill is gone", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6gDeGdQ3rM it is a job, I risk less than one percent of my account that I have built up. I generally always use limits for getting into any trade, I can't even remember when I used a market order last, on bad trades I hit bids/offers for exiting since I don't use protective stops (I don't remcommend doing what I do), I ave down on each trade (I don't remcommend doing what I do), I trade numb. My best trades that I actually remember are breakeven plus one tick trades cause a time stop was activated and I was in the hole. You need to backtest, a lot. Trading for a living and consistently being profitable almost each day is not a guessing game and yet in a way, it is, unless you have backtested your brains out. I remember a few years ago, I backtested my way of trading over ten years and biggest drawdown was $750k, I said to myself, heck, I am a smart son-of-a-bitch, I would never take that big of a drawdown day trading.....ROFL, I somehow find that so funny now, and yet when it does happen, you are numb, you go over all the trades and they were perfect, so you chalk it up to designing a good method and tomorrow is another day. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhb9Ualb_Ik What was funny of the three days I had massive losses, cause of the averaging down, had I only traded the original signal only, all three days were profitable. BUT THIS is a game, you trade next day as per you rules and eventually I recovered in a few weeks, but had to trade all day long instead of my 40 minutes in morning and two hours in afternoon. And that is in the rules too. You are trading against the very best who loves new meat, approx 60,000 new day traders a year. I am Bad to the Bone when it comes to trading, take no prisoners. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7VsoxT_FUY Everything and anything you think can go wrong trading, it is best to have some kind of rule or backup. Cable goes out, what do you do? Have DSL and satelite for backups. Have landline and cell phones in case one not working. Hard disk goes out, backup computer is there, backup brokerages. But when you first starting out, you do as you can. Each morning you wake up just knowing you are ready for war. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7VsoxT_FUY Then of course when you stayed out too late the night before and you didn't go over your trades the day before to get into price action or go over something you could have done better which at the time you lost your cool, something like this might have happened. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7VsoxT_FUY You just have to put in years of hard work till your long hairs are long and you dance kind of funny. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIKz1phnuCc
y'ver notice these master of the universe types crawl out of the woodwork to tell us how much they have made, but rarely if ever even a morsel of how it might have been done.