While I agree that once you are wealthy you have a luxury and experience to hold on long terms, for the past three years I am mastering very accurate scalping. We are called to show different step and there will be always someone to bring something new on earth and in every art and science. I prefer to be glued to my screen for the whole time of the main activity of CME - 07.00 am till 4.15 pm, sometimes, rarely 4.30-44.5 pm ECT. This erasing me from uncomfortable damaging feeling that was created on us back in 2008. Novice and naive we left an order for the gold in May 2008 and have not heard anything from our banksters of BNP Paribas, Lugano, Switzerland, until October 2008, when in the middle of the crash (the words like go short, stop losses were all unkwon and unheard by us) we got a call from this bankster who advised us that we are losing 500,000$ and "politely" asked how much more we are intended to go down? He told us a story that once we did not cancel the order they bought position later - in the midst of falling market! What a bad joke, but the capital was ours, and the huge loss was ours too. Well, we are still thinking to sue them for this episode and couple others, once we will have a little bit of time more, but for now, scalping trading looks to be only one way. First, our capital is ridiculously small. Second I can not effort one more time going through the risk of being in the hands of somebody else and not knowing whats going on with your position, even for a moment. So, in our case, I feel we are literally called to bring scalping at another level, as more accurate and less risky method of trading for us.
E-mini on CME, only for now. The brief story of our evolution: stocks, no, no, especially all penny stocks and those which are not blue-chips. So, from the stocks, we arrived at ETFs nine years ago, 2009, FAZ and FAS, just the beginning... Then a friend told us about futures, my husband read Leo Melamed book "Escape to the futures", our teachers were on futures, so we tried even if we were far with understanding what it is and how it works. So since 2011 only futures, only CME group. Tried some Forex, still, love currencies but unfortunately fell with strange brokers. However, CME group is offering currencies futures too, which are pretty good for me.
I don't want to imply you are totally wrong...but in my way of thinking you are. You don't get wealthy overnite, you spend huge amount of hours into life of being a trader and most of what other people do in life...just don't feel comfortable in my own skin or being with other people unless I have to be so. You try trading over 100,000 trades and not learn a thing or two or over 100,000 hours of screen time and learn what most of what people think in trading, economy and life is wrong. You couldn't see before the huge drop in 2008 before it happened? Sounded to me you were not knowledgeable on how to even trade or allow others to trade for you and now you want to blame others? Ten years have gone by and you still thinking about this? People have so little time to understand what they getting into and yet they spend months talking about future vacations, I don't understand. Unless you have a concept on how to trade and either have no risk or positive expectancy based on back testing, I see no reason to trade long term. And cause I included "back testing", forward trading will have some losses but extremely low. And I can't scalp or day trade with zero risk, so therefore it is great risk for me to do. But I am very good at it by maintaining under 5% losses and I add additional risk so I am told by many here by averaging down and add to losing trades, but this makes perfect sense to me as I do not have abilities yet to guess where price will stop but get close enough. I don't bet the farm neither as all trades have rules within rules so there never be risk of ruin. An experienced trader can start with $4,000 and make millions in couple years. My partner and I planning of attempting this end of the year for a Hedge fund, between us we have 70 years of experience.
That quote explained everything!!! Back testing is a process, it has nothing to do with experience. It's the basis of finding a strategy/model that makes money. You need to do what's you need to do. If you're looking for shortcuts, then trying to make money with trading is probably not for you. Just my 2 cents.
Incorrect... 100% dependent on the platform used to backtest, and the traders "interest" in learning how to use exposed values or variables. Not necessarily "programming" in the standard sense, as some platforms have other options or syntax for working with values and/or variables that are exposed. Could be as simple as writing an excel-like formula. 100% dependent on the platform.