Sorry for the confusion. The picture above is from my real money account. When I first opened the account, I utilized the demo feature. The site tracks how long ago your demo account expired. My only reason for posting that is to show how long it's been since I started trading. I stopped demo trading and started trading real money around pretty much the same time that the demo account on my real money account expired. This is important to me because many have spent decades or longer trying to make money in the markets. I want to prove to myself I'm ahead of the bell curve in terms of time. Most demo accounts I know of don't start with a random number, like $24,000 regardless...
Guess I still know nothing.. all 5 positions went against me today. All 5 were green this morning, and now I have 3 open trades that are in the red. @ $25k (+4%)
People like you give this forum no credibility because you sound really stupid.... what does stocks have to do with this? The S&P 500 is a group of stocks last I checked. Don't you mean learn to day trade? I work like a fool during the day.... believe me I want to start day trading ASAP. Anyways, back to the drawing board.
You aren't qualified to trade futures, and don't have any discussions about strategies. What little screen time you've had in the last thousand days should have been spent building models. The easiest way to learn to trade is know what drives stocks higher. Once you know that you can learn about other technical forces that move commodities markets. You are losing because you have no edge, and need to learn simpler trading methods such as when to buy and hold first, then once you know that you'll be more familiar with what factors went into those trades if you have good memory.
the worst thing in trading is look at the "account balance" and " P&L", anything related to money. when money in your mind, you will be very emotional. while not cold blooded, do what should be done, and objective. when you look at that number, if you win, you feel you can do more. when you see loss, you feel pissed and want to fight back, unnoticabley you are being mislead to the road of overtrading ... trading is a kind of game, some guys use technical setups to play, some just use hunch, some use fundamentals to play. some one just gamble. I am an example.
I day traded today... -1k... Back to the drawing board... like I said. By the way, I don't care that much about trading anymore or my profits or losses. I've made and lost so much now I don't have a problem executing orders like a machine. This is part of growth as a trader. As I have posted before, most days I don't even check to see what the market is doing anymore. This is because I know once my orders are in, I have no control over the outcome of the trade. I think my problem still lies in having an actual edge or high probability trade. I traded over 30 contracts in different instruments today and it just seems too random and that I have no edge intra-day in the market. @ $24k (starting balance)
Again, you don't need to waste money. Step back while you haven't been hurt, and realize the power of modelling is superior to anything you can possibly do in the short term. Recognize that. Go to tradestation and code for awhile. Maybe pickup some datasets and if futures are really what you want to do you will need to get down to coding. Trading short terms without models or even indicators is doomed to failure except 1 in 10,000 times, not just 99.9% but 99.99%. Get a clue and quit trading in markets you don't understand and know you have no edge in. I've had lots of dry spells in the 3-12 month range as I was figuring out what I wanted to use as a basis for my trading. If you don't do this being succesful may not be your priority but I read about 2 pages of this thread and noticed you weren't talking about your edge, therefore you didn't and now admit don't have one. You will not learn anything about trading futures markets until you actually read financial literature such as CFA textbooks and not commercial literature or informal writing about trading. It's a hard business. Learn something, do some coding, but don't think 1-3 read throughs of say, 20 books is going to help. It won't. Find your creative part of your left brain and get to coding. If you don't ever start coding you will continue to have no success. Again, learn to trade stocks. You aren't ready to trade unless you can define your methods quantitatively because the variability of results and risk of ruin approaches 100% certainty the longer you trade without an edge. If you find an edge first, the ror reduces significantly to approach that of about 1.5 to 2 times your highest expected drawdown of any model you might develop. I traded about 8 round turns today, so trading 30 round turns is overtrading and will do nothing but feed your broker money. You aren't learning anything unless you can explain what you're learning. People on Wall Street have their ways of investing, but rely on quants like myself to code inefficiencies out of the market and hope that they continue to exist for as long as they can extract $100 bills laying on the ground or in front of their counterparties lunchplate before they even sit down for lunch. Get to coding. No system means no success is guaranteed. Staring at screens is useless, but get to know CNBC. They might be "entertainment" but the anchors can give you a "mood" and immediate feedback sometimes on news releases by qualified business professionals, and that's the only reason to watch them.
psh, I'm taking level III in June and it doesn't help with trading. take a probability/statistics class. write your own backtester in R or Octave. don't waste your time with the CFA if you want to trade.