Fun money
- Thread starter Visaria
- Start date
In general, retail day traders miss the forest for the trees. I personally don't know any successful retail day traders. The most successful ones that i have read about and studied, such as Marty Schwartz, seem to lose money most days but now and then make a ton of money. I reckon Marty, when he was trading the s&p, was making significant money about 1 in 5 trading days and even then those days would not be uniformly distributed through the month or year. The other 4 days were probably a net loss.
Yeah, I mean there's multiple ways to do it. I don't think any style of trading is necessarily correct or wrong. It all depends on your goals, capital, time you can spend and how you're trading. Everyone I know personally that's successful is a retail day trader, so I have exact opposite experience.
If you're trading very technical and based on patterns, there really is no difference between charts, besides needing to adjust your stop and profit based on the ATR. It's not like the patterns change from a Daily chart down to a 40000 tick or down to a 3000 tick. That's why I am confused at why he is so against day trading, his style of trading must be totally different from what I've learned and am accustomed to.
That's pretty impressive regarding your friend, can't argue with results like that. Definitely more than one way to get it done.
EDIT: Most of day traders I know it's rare they have a losing day. I am not at there level by any means, but doing my best to follow what they taught me and get there.
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Although patterns may stay the same (fractal), the signals become more and more lost in noise, the lower the time frame. Signals become part of the noise.
I don't believe this for a second. A poster called Acrary has done statistical work on daily returns for retail day traders on elitetrader...just to have 90% winning days let alone rare losing days, you need insanely good win rates.
It's fine if you don't believe it, I have nothing to gain from lying to you, nor do I take issues with you not believing me. But I've personally traded with someone for 6+ hours a day for months before and seen it first hand.
None of them have any accounts on any trading forum that I am aware of either. Only one of the traders I know uses stocktwits, but the rest don't really bother with social media.
Well ... it depends how many times a day you're trading, clearly? Someone scalping very frequently throughout the day with a 65% win-rate could have very few losing days. (We're dealing with a tiny minority of successful traders, here, I appreciate!).
I certainly don't have "insanely" good win rates, but I don't have very many losing days (I have a little more than one in ten, granted).
