Im a technical trader and ever since I stopped trading pre market, after hours, and stopped chasing, i have done incredibly well. Its also patience and of course disciple. I wait for set ups and what may look like a great set up to me, may look like chinese finger painting to others. Technicals are important but the “ x factor” and intuition are equally as important. Thats why you can have a large group of traders that read every book, study technicals, have a set of disciplined rules and yet they cannot trade consistently. My problem was deviating from a disciplined strategy i designed for myself. I always felt I had the intuition, that special something that enabled me to be consistent. Once i stopped reverting to bad habits, I because incredibly consistent. Im being 100% honest. Trading is NOT for most people, thats just a stark reality. There is an extremely fine line between trading and gambling and most traders wind becoming degenerate gamblers that masquerade themselves as traders “that just need to change their strategy a little”. I must admit, i made some changes but my strategy always worked, i was just always violating my rules. Trust me, its hard to be disciplined. Anyone see HUBS earnings after hours yesterday? Just incredible.it gapped up 30 points after hours and i was going to buy 300 shares on the gap up and hold overnight knowing analysts were going to be substantially raising their price targets. My plan was to sell pre market or at the open. I was right, the street loved the numbers and the stock moved up more. However, I never bought and missed out because my discipline says NO after hours trading!!! The truth is, most times you will get hurt doing that and although a few times it does pan out, you cant bank on something going right “ a few times”. Dont chase, stick to your discipline, and grab the low hanging fruit. The beauty of trading is that each day presents a bunch of new opportunities, its actually fascinating. I never short individual stocks, You can always go long a short ETF which I have done. Good luck fellow traders ! Ps, i do own a business so not relying on trading to pay the bills helps a lot with not having all that pressure of making a trade that you shouldnt just because you need the money. That said, I trade very often.
%% Good, wise small business points; sorry i missed HUBS, but i seldom if ever buy gap ups like that\ even less if its a $4-500 single stock i dont really know. I so seldom study or trade after hours; some time do buy or sellsome or study WSJ post market-delayed paper WSJ/IBD newspaper Good vol on HUBS lately; but semi liquid regular volume+ YTD; parabolic stop + reverse\ monthly candles = exit!!
I think where a lot of traders have problems with is discretionary trading. Once, you use discretion to trade, it makes it harder for you. For one, when you have a decent amount of profit, you are tempted to ring the cash register and close the trade. Most times, that is the wrong decision. At other times, your mental stop loss is hit but, you keep waiting, hoping your trade goes in your direction. Again, most times, it goes very badly, for you. So, I have started to make my trading as mechanical as I can where I do not have any say when it gets sold. My stop loss will determine how far a trade will go for me. No more guessing, no more itchy fingers that hit that sell button. Of course, option trades still need a mental stop and requires discipline to follow stop losses when hit.
I didn't read everything s/he wrote, but what Innervoice started off saying, from my point of view, is what argues that trading is not so much an art as it is a discipline!
%% He writes like a man with a fine female pic[, i read it all]; sounds like discipline, art [+ intuition]+ ''almost a science'' an elite trader termed it. NOthing subjective about an objective 200 day moving average; of course there are quite a few different 200dma s, but not great differences in all of them. I use auto drawn 200dma, not hand drawn.........................................
Yeah...again, just speaking personally...the last thing I want to do is act on "intuition." I want whatever decisions I make to be justified by concrete criterion, data, information and/or reasons. Now, if your version of intuition is the processing of all that kind of stuff subconsciously, more power to you. But for me, I want to know what I know—consciously.
Good Morning mason macgregorson, May I please request some documentation on how you know 94-96% of all futures trading is algorithmic? I very much appreciate it fully. I did not know this.