Quote from rtharp:
I voted and I'm more than 50+
but not sure if that is accurate as I tend to scale into /out of all my positions as I don't have ticket charges and trade anti trend.
When I trade anti trend --I have the greatest potential for reward when I first enter a trade and must enter with a huge position size. Later on as it moves into my favor the odds of it following through more and more decrease because the stocks trend long term is going the other way. To adjust for the lower odds I reduce my shares. I sometimes only do 4-9 trades a day in the morning but with scaling out it can easily turn into over 100 tickets from these trades. 100 shares here. 500 shares here, 300 shares there, and so on.
There are also times I will try to scalp a stock if I find it heavily overbought/oversold once or twice a day. I do not scalp though for the bid/offer.
I usually close out all my positions by the end of the day.
so I voted but also gave an explanation
rtharp
Before I looked at the dates I wanted to respond "Why didn't you tell me that in September of 2001?" Seriously!
It took me over a year to figure out that "Never trade against the trend" is the biggest load of bs and really the only thing that kept me from being profitable.
rtharp, I guess I now trade pretty much like you described in your post. I should have just read it when you wrote it. But then again, I don't think I would have been ready at that time. Back then I still believed in myths like "the trend is your friend" and "always use stops to cut your losers short" or "let your winners ride". Or that you need to make at least 3 times as much on every trade as your stop would make you lose. I could go on and on about all the misconceptions that traders apparently try to force into the minds of wannabe-traders and almost seem to be designed to provide money-flow from the latter group to the former. But that wouldn't be wise.
So just ignore this post and keep up the good work. Above all, use only market orders. After all, when you want in you want in, and when you want out you want out, right?