After hanging around, I've noticed the majority seem to day trade (or maybe that's just the losers, who are the majority around here according to many). To you day traders - have you never sat down with a pencil and paper and figured what the available leverage can do with good risk management? The answer is, pretty much anything. Get a couple hundred points on a couple of contracts and your few thousand dollar investment will be more than an annual income-all in one quarter, with a 100%+ max draw down. Rinse and repeat for the next big trend. It's not that difficult to do with everyone else around to follow - not to mention the relatively small stops on huge leveraged trades. Someone back me up on this.....
The reason I trade on a short time scale is statistical confidence. The shorter, more active strategies have more testable data points, which results in more confidence in the back testing results.
this and i'm suck at any long term investing. every time i buy something for 'long term' -some apocalyptic s**t happens.
That's the point. The market is almost a random walk intraday. You shouldn't be trading on past data, you should be trading on forward data.
say who? it's not random. you test your idea on data from past and trade on what you have. at least you can have general idea,what you can expect from your set of rules. not sure how you can trade on forward data.
It takes a very long time when you realize "Ahaa" - so thats whats happeneing and I now know wht i need to do !!! Then it happens a few more times over next few years ... and then .... it becomes all irrelavent.
Not really. There is randomness, but I see alignments of the same patterns over and over and over again. The same stuff that set up 13 years ago, I see set up today. If this wasn't the case, I wouldn't still be trading after 13 years. If you don't know how to identify high probability trading situations consistently intraday, then it's very easy to just label the market as a random walk.