this is the typical blabla talk from books like "trading in the zone" that might indeed be a very good suggestion for 98% of all traders here. Totaly agreed ! But would you also agree that you throw away an important part of information if you trade this way ? That is to watch the market AFTER you entered the trade ! There might be good reasons to change your profit target, increase/decrease positions or even move your stop depending - news flow - volume - how does it behave near support - and thousand more If I am short, seeing a huge 5m Bar from support and then retrace a little, wouldn't it be clever to exit the trade or even reverse the trade instead of watching it going against me until my stop is hit ?? The best traders can enter a trade and have the mental strenght to go through the trade and adjusting their initial target, positon size and ALSO stop ! I know that this is the wrong suggestion for most traders here but this is the way really profitable traders work. If you have to turn of the computer once you entered a trade, maybe trading is not the right thing for you.
Definition of average: take all data and divide by the number. Example Mon= 18 pts, Tues=10 pts, Wed=8 pts, today so far 4 pts, so 40/4= AVERAGE of 10. Get it? BTW, what losing days? I spend my time watching the market like a hawk and I take very little risk, thus no losing days. Even so, you could lose 2 out of 5 days and still make AVERAGE 8 pts a day. Let's not forget leverage... you only need 4 pts a day with 2 contracts. You can certainly trade 2 contracts intra day with a $5k account. That's well within the means for most people here I would think. When do you find the time to post 8000 times? It's taken me so long to write this and now I am +6 for the day.
Very VERY humorous post. Imagine a trader who never deals with the future. No one has to deal with the future, especially because the future is NEVER available. What if a person discovered there are only four words to deal with and only one is what is NECESSARY for dealing with the Present where all trading takes place. The word is probably the most health and wealth inducing word in any language.
Jack- It is very rarely I take sides-but I will this once as I feel you are misunderstood and mistreated by most on this site. Volume is money changing hands. The more money that changes hands the more profit can be made for some traders-and the more losses for others. It is obvious then that in order to profit one must be on the right side of the transactions. How can one do that? You are of course correct when you say that trying to predict the future is a fruitless effort. All one needs to do to get on the right side of the transactions-is trade on the right side. So simple-yet so hard for so many. The General
Hi. This is because the majority of profitable traders/those who trade for a living, don't come very often on internet forums to try to convince some newbie that is not possible to make smth like ~1900%/year. Instead, the majority that are here, are those who struggle to make money and they are not emotionaly OK. You know... in the begining emotions are very strong... so this why you see a lot of people here saying " dont trade! i would never recomme... " are you sure? is this a joke? this mean 1900% profit after 1 year. You trade in a paper/demo account ?
Most 'traders' will ultimately end up bankrupt if they don't have a real job or sizeable trust fund to finance the black hole. This is why manic-depressives are attracted to trading. It helps feed their addictive mania-suicidal psychological roller coaster ride - make a killing, lose it all then some, want to die - repeat, wash, rinse. People like Zanger are in the 0.008% of statistical outliers. They made a killing at a rare moment, where anyone could have, realized this, took their chips off the table, and are living off the interest now, probably only ever dedicating less than 5% to the markets of what they won in that lottery. The 'real' traders are the ones who get paid to trade OPM, and work at the desks of Goldman or UBS, and lose clients' money day after day, year after year, but still make buku $$$. You can find them in the 'Private Wealth Management' divisions. They are experts in turning large fortunes into small ones.
I, like others, do visit occassionally for the curiosity factor. Posting almost invariably leads to grief so I tend not to. Trading is a lonely profession. I keep the tv on all day while staring at the screens. I started trading during the bull markets of the seventies. I've never paper traded because it does not reflect real life. I've also never back tested for the same reason that the outcome is flawed. I test in real time. My best trades overall have been in crude oil and gold since they are so easy to "read." (right now an IHS is forming on the monthly gold chart). I recently had a 5 year trade in crude and gold. Trading the ES requires years to develop a valid, profitable, low risk system. When I see people on the ES forum trade with 5 pt. stops I cringe! Risk/reward ratio is out of wack. Will I continue to post here: NO. Ask Volente why he posted over 8000 times. That's what this forum is really about- certainly not trading for a living.
Not necessarily true. Some successful traders like to supplement their trading profits by offering their knowledge for sale to other traders. This is perfectly normal business transactions-and no one has to give money to anyone unless they want to. To think that ET is only used by people to pass their time-is not correct. While there are indeed time wasters here-as you will also find everywhere else as well-there are some very good experienced traders on this site-and it is very easy to see what a trader knows by what the trader posts. Take Mr. Hershey as an example. Most call him an old fool-but I can see from what he writes that he is no fool-in fact he is the very opposite. A TV show once tried the following-they sent a man out into a crowded public place with a sign around his neck saying "FREE MONEY TODAY". How many of the public do you think approached the man and asked him for some of the "FREE MONEY"? The General