If you can micro manage your fund you can come out ahead much better than the counter part of buy and hold, this is true for "traders" with the same amount of capital as the typical buy and hold guy, during slow periods you can always move the fund to other ventures rather than sitting idle and not making money for long period. With the exception of investors who put their money in stocks like goog from the beginning and ride it all the way up, I think very feel are that successful at trading, and most have a very low rate of returns investing long terms due to long period drawn downs. sg20
because this is a TRADING site, not an INVESTING site - everyone is waiting for you to figure that out (but certainly not holding their breath) please enlighten us as to how you obtain additional capital to take advantage of situations which may develop while all your capital is already tied up in shares that you are "riding out" (you explicitly warned against the perils of margin - although you have also previously claimed to have purchased shares on margin e.g. GOOG)
This thread question is one of whether you are using accuracy or hope when trading. Running a loss or an increasing loss simply means that you are wrong when a loss is happening and therefore you are instead relying on hope. In applying accuracy to intra-day trading (CL, YM, etc) you are micro trading the day wherein your reading of the market has to be finely tuned to the evidence you are using. Channel lines, in particular the right hand line (RHL), give close guidance. DOM and T&S can be used contextually in supplemental roles. The chart configurations you use are vital. Key aspects of volume start pinpointing you to the moment of the turn as it is coming up. Price itself when pace increases across time is keying you into the curve or point of reverse (or retracement). Remember, you are buying the upmoves and selling the downmoves as they follow each other. And CL puts all of this into faster mode compared to other markets; here you exercise your accuracy in the manner of a racing car driver where seconds matter.
I think if you're talking about the major indexes only, devoting a certain % of your funds to a scaling into weakness, scaling out into strength strategy is a very good way to go - in fact, it probably works 80% of the time in the intermediate term and more in the long run. I wouldn't ever come anywhere close to getting 100% long though, with the scaling into weakness - there should be a fairly conservative max allocation of total capital, always respecting the 'big crash' possibility. The tricky part is picking out the apparent buy on weakness points.