In the futures side, I already went short on all the indexes for a longer term trade and did all using hedges for very short period of time. As far as length of move, I never was able to fortell the future, otherwise I would be knowing the numbers for the lottery each week. In other words, I go to breakeven at certain amount of points, I have one target on half my contracts and unless I have a very good reason, my protective stops stay at breakeven. The only way I can make a few times a year huge profits on a few trades almost each year.
Quote from Wide Tailz:
I've been thinking a lot about what you once posted: start your trading career on the weeklies, double your capital, then go to shorter time frames. It would definitely get you in the habit of not going against the longer term setup, when swing trading or scalping.
When I started, it was $125 bucks to do 100 shares of anything, no way you could day trade and make money. T-bills was the big market that was making the big moves in the futures. I spent like a decade before I went into futures which for me was a huge mistake, took seven years of finding out every single horrible emotion I had within me to overcome. Eventually I overcame, and found long term to be very boring and added short term till I was day trading.
I figured one time if I had never went into futures and just stayed totally with long term stocks, I would have seven times what I have accumulated, but...could'a, would'a, should'a. At a certain point, just too hard to double any more, you start thinking of percentage of risk to total portfolio whereas when first starting out, you think less in that.
I found day trading stocks to be easier when it traded in 1/16ths, but after it went to pennies and less, just became much tougher, so went to big S&P500 at $25 a nickel(.05 tick size) long ago, that was better than the ES of today, much easier to trade, much less false moves even though you had to call into the floor, retail commissions($12) were cheaper than today, now you have to trade 10 ES to get same point value, but tick size is horrible to retail trader today.
I no longer day trade these days, no energy, sick, lack of interest generally. I have employees that grind it out or automated systems. Best way to learn to day trade, don't, biggest moves are longer term trading, less stress, takes way too long to learn how to curb your emotions. Day trading makes you work too hard for the amount of risk to get much less reward, while longer term trading gives greatest return for sensible risk.
