There are at least a couple of ways to look at how to make a living: 1. You work a job, make $20-$30 an hour, work 40 hours a week. 2. You sell real estates, make a few sales a year, after expenses in some cities in Southern Cal you make $100K a year. If your approach in trading is #2, most months you lose a little money but make it big a few times a year. Few people trades this way.
My version of success is consistency each day. Being able to hit my daily target in ES 4 out of 5 days per week, and one marginal loser each week. As a scalper, I'm looking for a smoother profit curve.
Sure. IMO, this is the number 1 noob trap anyways for people who are just looking at charts. Trading does not scale indefinitely. It's pretty easy to turn 1k into 10k because you can trade illiquid trash that's really inefficient. But turning going beyond 1m profit per year is way harder. 5k per day is about 1m per year. Now think about how you need to trade in order to make 5k/day. You cannot trade low floaters or micro caps anymore because the liquidity is not there. You need to get into midcaps with decent float and volume and this is were the sharks are. Now you mastered these assets, but getting in and out of even AAPL with 50k shares per clip is difficult, so at a certain point there just isn't enough liquidity for exploiting short term moves. The larger you trade, the less trades you get...so you have to lengthen your timeframe or just plateu. And now the monkeys will chime in saying WhY DonT YuO jUsT tRAdE the ES oR CL? Well good luck competing with the 1%ers...if you're good enough, you probably wont ask questions here on ET.
I'm one of those monkeys. Are you then saying that it's easier to trade/profit on AAPL or stocks in general compared to index futures? If so - care to elaborate on that one? It's a statement I've heard in the past and the answers been mixed - coming from people who have experience both with futures and stocks.