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Hi Millionaire This is actually my song of choice: You are right of course, it could all be baloney. Still, there is enough there to have a look and see how it goes. The only way to find out is to try it yourself and see how you get on. What is your method of choice, and how's it working out?

You are right; the similarities are superficial really. The main thing is that you can lose a lot of times in a row, even if the odds are in your favour. So you could bet on two columns in a roulette spin, with a probability of just less than 2/3 of winning each spin, and still lose 10 times...

Thanks for all the replies. I trade the Dow, Dax and FTSE indices, which have plenty of trends both up and down every day, even in a bear market as we seem to have at the moment. I trade mainly 5 minute bars, like Trader Tom, Al Brooks and a few people who post here who seem to have some...

Anyone who has been day trading for any length of time will have had this experience. You watch a market for a while, and you see a nice steady uptrend lasting maybe twenty minutes or more depending on your trading timescales. So you jump on the trend, maybe on a small pullback, and instantly...

I see the phrase 'We are in a bull (or bear) market' a lot. In that context it sounds predictive, even if subconsciously.

I think TA works well enough. My query was why anyone who thought it didn't could talk about a bull market, which to me pre-supposes some implicit TA.

I’m not a great proponent of TA, but when I see posts deriding it, and then in the next sentence see talk of bull markets and bear markets I am puzzled. At its simplest, surely TA seeks to find indications that price is a shade more likely to move up or down based on some previous price...

As stated before, you do not have to win every bet. It is down to an edge and an average expectation per bet. Say you have £1000, and spreadbet £1 a point on the Dow each day. You set a stop at 20 points. So your risk is £20 or 2% of capital. So first day the stop is hit and you lose £20...

I have come across two or three people on here who sound as if they are profitable day traders. It is hard to tell for sure of course, as a lot of people talk a good game, but some of them ring true to me at any rate. I think I agree with tradex - it is easier to perhaps think you are have an...

Yes perhaps so; but the majority lose money, so have a negative expectation for each trade.

Ok, I think we agree then. What size edge do you have?

Just going on the figures quoted by brokers that something like 80% of retail traders lose money. The figures seem to vary a bit, but it would not be that surprising as trading is not even as good as a zero sum game due to trading costs. Do you have reason to believe something else?

I don't 'dare to assume' anything about profits. If you set a stop at 2%, the average profit for most day traders will be negative, as most day traders lose money. It is just an example. I know that it is probably impossible to achieve. That is the point of the thread.

Not at all. Here’s an example. Say you have £1000, and spreadbet £1 a point on the Dow each day. You set a stop at 20 points. So your risk is £20 or 2% of capital. So first day the stop is hit and you lose £20. Second day you break even. Third day you win £20. Fourth day hurrah, you win...

Thanks for this. Actually I thought your previous chart was good too. Possibly the Dow is too volatile to have these more solid looking levels.

Thanks for the responses on this. I have done a small amount of research on my own chosen instrument, the Dow 30. Although there are some likely looking support and resistance points from time to time, it is hard to say whether they are likely to be tradeable, or if they are just a trick of...

Glad to hear you are making reasonable progress. I finished reading Brooks book for the second time today, and spent some time on the final chapter about his favoured set-ups. I have been useless at discretionary day trading before, and have moved to an automated system which has been passably...

I can imagine the concepts of support and resistance might work for individual stocks, or maybe for Forex. This is because I can imagine traders trading in these things by for example, value investing when prices fall above a certain level, or profit taking when they climb to a certain level...

How are you doing so far? Are you in credit? Any setups that are working better than others? I've just been looking at Brooks 10 favourite setups, and even those would be hard to keep on top of in real time I should think.

Thanks for your response about inside bars padutrader. I will look into them further.