Fellow traders, I am constantly pondering on everything related to trading, but aside from trading psychology, I've found the next best thing that a trader should develop is a sound trading approach - a mental roadmap of what is to be done every day in order to be "at least overall profitable" from your trading. Experienced traders know that it takes 100%+ effort for good results, 100% effort for some results and 95% effort put into trading for absolutely no results. When I have the time I will be sharing some of my experience here, pieces of information on my approach and what I have found that works for me and I would be glad to read yours in order to gain insights on how to improve myself. Of course, all of this would be good for newcomers as well and I hope the thread would be a valuable educational resource for everyone that stumbles upon this forum on his journey as a trader. Having this in mind, please try and keep it clean and professional.
We are all professionals, so of course we keep it professional ;-) Looking forward to your gold nuggets...
%% SOME include copper, cash copper, different grades.......... IN some cases, every 6 days = better profit than daily, even though some metal dealers time stamp in minutes + seconds.
I will start with some general beliefs that I've adopted regarding trading. In trading it is good to be a specialist - focus on one thing, specialize in it, stalk it, know it in and out... I know it is hard to do at the beginning of a trading journey, but later, when you see that you can't trade crypto, forex, commodities, stocks and options profitably, you are going to come to this realization. Nevertheless, having traded everything at some point is beneficial for one's development as a trader. How else would you come to the conclusion what best fits your personality, what are the relationships between asset classes, the market dynamics, etc. I've chosen to actively trade only equities listed in the US. I have selected some sector ETFs that I follow closely that give me the general picture of what is happening with the markets. The main criteria that I use to distinguish them is interest rate sensitivity vs non-sensitivity(that changes with cycles though), fixed-income based vs equity based, volatile vs less volatile sectors, growth vs value. I watch them on a daily basis and try and follow the correlations between them as well as how they behave in terms of relative strength and relative weakness(more on those when I talk about the technical rules that I use).
I believe you can't be successful until you are 99% consistent. A systematic approach will solve all your problems. Personally ... I am way too much behind the screens, Simply because I like it but ideally I would simply Run an EOD Screen for leading stocks on the 1, 3 and 6 months. Look for High Tight Flags which are my bread and butter. Set a buy stop order with an attached stop loss. Manage positions. Currently I also look at what's moving on above average volume, + what the big liquid stocks (>100M Dollar Volume) are doing. ETFs are also very interesting of course. Because I want to get a feel for the market, What is making new high, new low. Still learning by going through hundredth of chart per day.