Truly ROTFLMAO....! Hehhhhhhhhh..... At any event, as a winter mountaineering type, you learn to value the ehhh, "quick drop" if you follow my meaning.... "Woot!" ((( This thread has gone to crap, I tell ya.)))
Pretty much. Retail scalping has never been viable, pre or post HFT. Intraday momentum/trend following still works, just offers much less than it used too. Volatility died down. More trading capital is needed now. Highest probability (for US markets) is to have a method that establishes bias within first hour trading and run with that one trade. Think outside the box. Forget about off the shelf indicators, MA crossovers, minute bar high/low breakouts, and all that mook fleecing garbage. Statistically align your method, plan the trade, and trade the plan. If your not automating today, you’re a fool. Time is money.
From my experience, the bid/ask trades out TOO FAST in order to effectively buy bids and sell offers with a chance to scratch in big, liquid names in electronic markets. And open outcry these days is only viable with certain less liquid markets and it would be a closed boy’s club if it were available. It was, in years past, possible to quote stuff or game the order matching algorithm in electronic markets but those days are also gone.
For you guys who scalp, are you placing the orders ahead of time? Since if you use a market order you get a terrible fill, it's better to stick your order out there true?
1) I don't want to *encourage* anything here......Go watch the DOM of your favorite thing to trade.... 2) Brackets brackets brackets. (If you wish to move 'em, that's fine, but at least they're in place as soon as your order is taken. In a 'golden' market, a good portion of your trades (regardless of direction of market or the trade) might be hit before your finger lifts off the [mouse-button] that sent it.) 3) In the ES, you're camped with the crowd, watching the trades-per-minute and mentally re-calculating-recalculating-recalculating when your contract will be hit. In equities, your Buy should be BID+ [one or two cents] and your Sell should be Ask- [one or two cents] to always put you in front. 4) Always know the cumBIDS and cumASKS -- that's where the market is going (for the next 30 seconds, anyway...)
This depends so much on the current situation right in front of me. Is the day just starting, or am I about to finish it for today ? Is it a very fast volatile market, or is it more of a slow day ? Am I ahead already, or do I already have an ugly loss in the book ? Depending on these and other factors, I might usually want to get out of a trade once I see that the market is not really moving the way I want. Many times this will be already at -1 tick, or -2 or -3 ticks. Sometimes I might be expecting a breakout or snapback, but it does not come, so I scratch the trade or get out with 1 tick profit if possible. Other times the market has maybe already fooled me multiple times, and I get pissed and stubborn. Then it can happen that I let it run much more against me, maybe 10 ticks, maybe even 20. Or on days when I am very nicely ahead, for example I made already 30 ticks profit. And the past few days have all been good. Then I might want to take some more risk, like playing with the banks money. I might accept to sacrifice the 30 ticks that I already made for trying to catch a bigger move, from a breakout for example. Sometimes it works, and I go home with zero for that day. Sometimes it works, and you go home with your biggest day for the month. What I try to do is to finish every day positive, which of course is not possible. So what I really try to achieve is to finish every week positive, which works most of the time. No perfection needed. It is ok to have a -2000 day if the rest of your week is +500, +3000, +800, +4000. I liked lescor's thread very much, he was a great example that you dont have to and should not strive for perfection in trading. Many good things to learn in his thread: https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/grinding-it-out-day-after-day.187730/ So like I said, I would not overanalyze this stuff. I like math and numbers, but some things are very hard to quantify. The market is all about psychology and your experience, your psychology interacting with the mass psychology of the market. There is no computer yet that can grasp all these thousands of fine nuances. Just like there is no computer yet that can form and bake the perfect cake. With some things, human brain and hands are still ahead of the machines.