I daytrade because i know its a consistent way for me to make an above average wage. I know that given enough reps, I will make money. Because daytrading allows me plenty of oppourunities to trade each day, the chance of me making money everyday is very high. I have not attempted much swing trading, and what little i have has not gone well. I kinda think of swing trading as 'putting all my eggs in one basket'. If i succeed say 60% of the time, and i only take 5, 10, even 20 trades a week, that means i better hit one out of the park or im barely making anything. (unless my account is several million$$) These are my assumptions on swing trading compared to the OP's assumptions on daytrading. Its also easier to get large intraday margin, so that given the win % and number of trades per day, I can increase my profit take home faster than if i tried to build up a swing accounts a couple % at a time.
What works well for one trader may not work well for the other. Good for you that you swing trade. I've been day trading successfully for well over 8 years. I'll stick with my day trading thank you.
It aint that simple. You have to work at it a little bit! Go back to the 1960's and track those three chart patterns on the S&P to the present day. There are repeating, predictable, obvious, tradeable patterns. They repeat over and over for the last 40 years.
So you trade once every 5 or 10 years or how does this work exactly? By the way, no argument here about repeatable patterns...just wondering about how you trade this realization.
Well, not everyone has a mind quick enough to make lightning fast decisions on small time frames. It's true. Whatever suits you best.
Sometimes it depends on what your edge is fit for. Sometimes the edge is time-independent, ie. trend-following. Edges can work just for overnight setups, or maybe it is based on an inefficiency in the intraday timeframe (ie. some big player steps in with buy orders at 3:30 pm every day, you would need to daytrade to use this edge). Or maybe your edge doesn't work in 5-days, 20-days, it needs 50-days to play out. I'm reading Way of the Turtles now, and the Turtles used something called an edge ratio they calculated and it showed in the near term the probability was for them to lose money (<1), but over time their edge was (1.2+)
those traders making 2 million/ year has 2 million in their account and they are probably have somebody else trade for them (automated trading systems) if they've been trading for 20 years ans still in the game.
What I meant was... if you look over the last 40 years, the situation we are in right now is a repeat of several times in the past. What happened on Friday; what may happen on Tuesday has all happened before. I have been doing this for 15 years. This little dip happened on 8/16 many times in the past 15 years. The way we handle it from here to the next dip is very predicable. and if you look over the past 40 its the same stuff over and over.