Highly selective trading

I'm just a doorman who trades in the morning so I'm not as clever as most of you. I have no idea about programing and don't even understand half the comments I read here, but I sometimes get the impression that many of us overcomplicate trading. I average a net of .04 per share roundtrip. I keep shares for an average 5 minutes. I just don't have the guts to hang on longer, but its been a while since I did not have a net positive day. The only analytic I use is weighted moving average. Shares are going up I buy, shares are going down I sell. Thats it.

My advice is moonlight to make the money to get back to 25K. My suggestion is become a doorman, its honest humble work.
 
My trading style has definitely changed; and, to me, it's just the process of conforming to the current market we are given.

The uncertainty in the market since 9-11 and going to the decimal system has increased the risk in each trade and made it more difficult to have any big winners without putting on big size-- it takes a K lot size to get the same results as I use to get with a 100 lot size. The problem I have is that it's a lot harder to pull the trigger on a 1000 shares instead of a 100; this is the area I'm having to deal with. Selective trading has become a prerequisite; fewer trades, bigger size, no scalping, and forget about holding over night. In the end it will be the traders that have real skill (and I'm hope I'm one) that will have staying power.
 
... among many. No reason why, say, a scalper couldn't shift over and adopt it when the "big day" rolled around. Or that some retired trading legend couldn't come back to the floor to trade the big kahuna... You hear stories about guys doing that...

If, on the other hand, you've persuaded yourself, as some here seem to have, that day-trading successfully is impossible, or if you've discovered that you just don't like trading, then you can entertain yourself with the thought of a hyper-selective, extreme-events only method. You might even be able to put it into practice... Or you might just use the idea subconsciously as a way to help move yourself out of trading - maybe not a bad thing at all, and certainly beats the "death of a thousand cuts," or the big blow-out (whether your account, your brains, or both).
 
I know more than a few people on this forum dislike system trading, or even the idea of it, perhaps for good reason. As I see it however, system trading with a decent system is the epitome of "selective trading". I can't claim to have come back from the grave after dying the death of a thousand cuts, but I know one thing for sure: I certainly don't churn the way I used to. I think the churning is largely emotional, bordem, etc. and system trading removes all of that.
 
I posted on the wrong thread with my comment about getting back to 25K, sorry, told you I was not a genius, but since I'm here,

when I talk to other traders who are struggling, it seems they are trying to outsmart the market. Now its going to do this, or now its going to do that. I don't think that the market thinks, its more like the ocean, sometimes its sunny and fun, sometimes its stormy. It isn't thinking, your job is to study it to catch the wave that you can see, not try to figure out what might happen next.

Actually I hate analogies....
 
I think everybody finds their own way.

I honestly believe that if I sat down with someone and showed them exactly what I look at and how I execute my trading strategy, they may be able to take away certain elements of it but in the end he will trade in the style he eventually formulates through experience and comfort level.
 
i dont know about you people.......if you want fewer trades a year just adjust your trading timeframe to higher levels.....its a no brainer......we have different individual personalities...some can (ot thought they can) wait for days,weeks,months and even years for a good signal others like me.....don't/can't/won't.....

another thing..it is really self deceptive if one thinks they can nail the tops or the lows of a given period regularly.....yeah..right....they should seat watching it too for that/those days in a year the signal comes......

and is THERE any living human being can do this consistently year in year out?! yeah...right!!!!

to succeed in trading...we must constantly discern our fantasies and true reality......please join the church of "what's going on...."
 
Originally posted by acolyte2002
another thing..it is really self deceptive if one thinks they can nail the tops or the lows of a given period regularly.....yeah..right....they should seat watching it too for that/those days in a year the signal comes......

and is THERE any living human being can do this consistently year in year out?! yeah...right!!!!

to succeed in trading...we must constantly discern our fantasies and true reality......please join the church of "what's going on...."
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You may as well say it's self-deceptive if anyone thinks they can make money trading regularly. Nailing relative lows and tops of any given period is exactly what trading is all about. No one buys believing something will go lower, nor sells thinking it will go higher (yeah yeah, scaling etc). So let's not fantasize that we are actually onto some higher order of calling other that buying low and selling high, cuz I see no other reason for what we do :)
 
Originally posted by bone
I think everybody finds their own way.

I honestly believe that if I sat down with someone and showed them exactly what I look at and how I execute my trading strategy, they may be able to take away certain elements of it but in the end he will trade in the style he eventually formulates through experience and comfort level.
More...

Very correct. Its one of the reasons good traders can write books and not worry to much about their "signals" getting washed out.
 
you da man.

theres a lot of bs philosophy that day traders shouldn't try to pick tops and bottoms, and that they should stay neutral. This bs is based on a buy and hold philosophy using fundamental analysis and other crap.

the whole point of a trader (as opposed to an investor) is to pick tops and bottoms. Whether it's a top/bottom in price OR volatility.

even breakout/momentum traders are trying to catch the bottom/top because they are trading on the premise that it will go their way.

as you said!

:)

edit: it can be argued that one doesn't pick the top/bottom on the larger time frame. But in order for the trade to be profitable, you must catch the pivot on the smaller time frames.
 
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