Quote from harrytrader:
It's worse then. 5 trades / day for a swing trader it is too much. There is about 2 big legs of swing per day, you should try only perharps twice and stop if you are stopped out. In fact you shoudn't even trade every day. You should try to enter the market at the best moment with the objective to wait until the close so that you are obliged to hold your gain. Multiplying the number of trades is equivalent to adding to leverage !
Your statement makes a lot of sense. I spent some time last night reviewing my trading records covering the past year and I found that there was a correlation between # of trades per day and my daily P&L. The higher the number of trades, the more money I lost, I discovered. I had already expected to find this result, but my statistics confirmed it. It turns out my optimum number of trades per day IS in fact around 2 each day. Actually, compiled from my winning days in 2002, it worked out to 2.3 trades per day when averaged out. My biggest losing days, on the other hand, were days when I traded 7 or more times. Plus you are right about not trading every day. For a leg trader, it is not even worth dabbling in the choppy consolidation days. Of course, sometimes it takes a stop-out before you find out that the day is a chopper.
I may add the Toni Turner choppy day rule to my trading regime. Basically it is this: Take the day off, or call it a day, when the TICK keeps bouncing back and forth between positive and negative and when TRIN flat-lines in the 0.90 to 1.10 area without showing any indication of trend.
. 5 trades / day for a swing trader it is too much. There is about 2 big legs of swing per day, you should try only perharps twice and stop if you are stopped out. In fact you shoudn't even trade every day. You should try to enter the market at the best moment with the objective to wait until the close so that you are obliged to hold your gain. Multiplying the number of trades is equivalent to adding to leverage !