Quote from Palatine:
Is my understanding about your objective correct that you wish to harness larger trends? If you are willing to become a trend trader, jinxu, then big profits are inevitable coupled with small losses. This requires you to look at the bigger several day picture instead and stay in a position for days to weeks. My observation of your trading is that you focus too much on the small ticks while day trading the intraday picture. A newbie is not proficient enough to maneuver the small swings. It leads to fatal mistakes, jinxu, and possibly blowups. Emotions come into your way which can be avoided if your focus are large trends.
I'm wondering, are you willing to take this leap and hold positions that long? Can you endure small counter moves while you patiently wait for trends to evolve? Do you want to give the market enough breathing room to serve as your money-printing machine?
Trends last days to weeks, jinxu, they do not reverse on you every few moments as your perception makes you believe. What you perceive as a bad move against you is merely a counter-reaction for the trend trader on the way up or down. You have to understand the dynamics behind the market to accurately trade large trends if that is your goal.
Palatine, your post is really spot on for jinxu. Trading a larger term trend is far more forgiving as long your account can endure the swings and you recognize the warning signs to get out.
Jinxu is trading a tiny account and I'm pretty sure is unable to hold e-mini positions overnight. Maybe he could trade options for larger trend swings, but before he trades anything again he needs to learn to identify a trend, the life cycle of a trend, the price action that triggers a low-risk entry point into the trend, and the difference between a retrace and reversal.
Day traders need to master the same concepts as swing traders, but they need to always trade within their time frame. You can't make a trading decision off a 5-min chart and then switch to a daily chart because a trade isn't going your way. If you trade a 5 minute time frame, your "trends" are found within that time frame in a single day's session. When trading a 5-min chart, a 5-min price bar is equivalent to the swing trader's "day".
"A newbie is not proficient enough to maneuver the small swings. It leads to fatal mistakes, jinxu, and possibly blowups. Emotions come into your way which can be avoided if your focus are large trends."
I think the biggest dangers for newbie day traders are that they don't yet understand trends, cycles, reversal signals, breakouts, etc. and aren't prepared to calculate entry triggers, stops and profit target zones quickly, over and over again throughout the day. They try to trade intraday with 1-, 2- and 5-min charts, no firm trading plan other than buy low/sell high/sell high/buy low, and when a trade goes against their opinion (usually an opinion made based on a much larger time frame or on news) they stay in it until it "comes back" or they add to it in an attempt to get back to even.
It's like a casual weekend bicyclist suddenly competing in a motocross competition with no prior training.
Best advice to jinxu that so many have offered is spend a lot of time in sim. Learn to identify trends, trend life cycles, reversal signals, breakouts, failed breakouts, etc., choose the setups you like best, then learn to properly enter a trade without chasing, and learn to use fixed survivable stops and flexible profit targets.