Goodpunk,
I'm not sure if I came across the right way in my former post but you have admited to being in the market all the time. IMO this is a sure way to develop compulsive behaviours that are more similar to gambling rather than trading unless you have a very sophisticated arb strategy.
Picking your moments carefully and sitting on the sidelines for a majority of the trading day is an integral part of this buisness and something that a prop firm will discourage you from because it decreases their incentive.
I say this because you are at higher risk being in the market all the time - you are exposed all the time rather than only at the select times when conditions are favorable to your style.
Take the above with a grain of salt though - I am not a penny scalper and I like to hold out for bigger moves. I consider .25-.30 a scalp and I spend most of my time churning those type of trades and occasionally get the .75 or $1-2 move.
Think carefully about what intraday characteristics your basket of stocks display - it doesn't matter which stocks - and learn to take only the higher probability setups, i.e. only take positions when a criteria is met - this must be a specific criteria you are constantly perfecting.You should have enough screen time with the stocks you trade to know that certain days just produce junk moves and aren't worth being "in".
For your experience level (and maybe I am dead wrong on this) I see no reason to be trading more than 20k shares per day. Seriously. This should amount to 5 roundtrips of 2k shares on a stock like ORCL. More than this and you are really just over-exposing yourself.
Mike
I'm not sure if I came across the right way in my former post but you have admited to being in the market all the time. IMO this is a sure way to develop compulsive behaviours that are more similar to gambling rather than trading unless you have a very sophisticated arb strategy.
Picking your moments carefully and sitting on the sidelines for a majority of the trading day is an integral part of this buisness and something that a prop firm will discourage you from because it decreases their incentive.
I say this because you are at higher risk being in the market all the time - you are exposed all the time rather than only at the select times when conditions are favorable to your style.
Take the above with a grain of salt though - I am not a penny scalper and I like to hold out for bigger moves. I consider .25-.30 a scalp and I spend most of my time churning those type of trades and occasionally get the .75 or $1-2 move.
Think carefully about what intraday characteristics your basket of stocks display - it doesn't matter which stocks - and learn to take only the higher probability setups, i.e. only take positions when a criteria is met - this must be a specific criteria you are constantly perfecting.You should have enough screen time with the stocks you trade to know that certain days just produce junk moves and aren't worth being "in".
For your experience level (and maybe I am dead wrong on this) I see no reason to be trading more than 20k shares per day. Seriously. This should amount to 5 roundtrips of 2k shares on a stock like ORCL. More than this and you are really just over-exposing yourself.
Mike