Is day trading worth it?

[NoDoji]

Relax, Donna. Have a laugh. Don't take yourself so seriously. It was meant as a fun joke in good spirits. I laughed. Bigsnack laughed. Maybe a few others as well.

If you feel that I've wronged you in any way, maybe you can find it in your heart to forgive me.

Best regards.

No worries...I was smiling when I posted and it wasn't specifically directed at you, it was for the collective You

 

[niko]

At the risk of sounding 80s, don't confuse what you do with who you are. Trade, take the money, then go do something that actually matters.

Great advise.

 

[Scaleout.Scalper]

Never had much luck with patterns, because many of them don't manifest as they did in your studies, a lot of morphing and ugliness does tend to happen once they form. A case where practice is different than theory.

Kudos to those that can make them work but I had to look elsewhere.

 

[Pigsky]

Here is an example of what would happen to me.

Just like with the triangle examples here, I could find many examples when I would comb over old charts. They would catch my eye, and I would keep seeing them over and over again...... and think I am on to something good and set out to make a trade plan around it.

So I would look for ways to describe pattern break outs. lets assume triangle for now
1. Break out and pull back to triangle trendline before moving on (2 types)
-a. airspace between price and the line
-b. no airspace between price and the line
2. Break out and pull back to the b/o level before moving on
3. Breakout and run in a straight line with no pullback
4. Losing trade , breakout failure
5. Re-breakout after a losing trade falls back into tri and breaks out again (any of # 1-3)

OK, so then it's time to decide which method to use on entry.

1. If I decide to wait for price to pull back to the tri trendline before entry, then I miss all the winning trades of type #3 and type #2, because neither pulls back that far. But I get all the losses. So suddenly my actual expected results from this strategy do not look as good as the initial eyeball look at the hindsight charts that showed so many seeming winners.

2. If I decide to wait for price to pull back to the b/o level I will get some of those trades that don't pb all the way to the trendline, BUT I will take some extra losses on trades that trigger but DO pull back deeper to the trendline before moving on. I will still miss the type #3 trades and get all the losses. So again, it's not showing as rosy a picture.

3. If I decide to just buy on the breakout and get "in" so I can get all 3 types of winning trades that has problems too. I will be getting into trades that I never recorded in my initial observations.... trades that break out for one bar and then fall back in. So I get a bunch of extra losses that I hadn't planned on.

So either way you slice it..... it's very very hard to make even a small net profit over time. It can be a real mindfuck because it looks so good in initial eyeballing of the pattern, but so different in actual practice.

 

[NoDoji]

So either way you slice it..... it's very very hard to make even a small net profit over time. It can be a real mindfuck because it looks so good in initial eyeballing of the pattern, but so different in actual practice.

CL had turned to chop prior to the stock market open and I noticed one of those triangle pattern setups had formed in the NQ.

Pattern = symmetrical triangle

Context = downtrend

Then both the shallow and deep lower trend lines broke, signaling trend continuation.

Signal = With-trend breakout

The breakout was strong and I thought I missed the boat. No problem, I have another setup for those occasions. But then price pulled back strongly.

I saw an entry point that would fulfill all my trading plan criteria and prepared to sell short.

The pullback was about as textbook as it gets and the entry was the start of a superb no-heat trade.

Now the interesting part of the story took place later on when I was chatting with some NQ traders and mentioned my triangle breakout pullback trade and was informed that the setup I described is known as a "hinge" and the breakout pullback is know as a "RET". Yet, despite the fact that they're learning to trade price action from someone else, their entry method on this setup was the same as mine.

BTW, it would've taken quite a few failures of this setup to erase the 30 point profit it offered.

 

[bmwhendrix]

Your trading the 60 min. now? !

 

[Tonkadad]

Your trading the 60 min. now? !

No she is trading the 60 sec.

 

[cornix]

I wish I could elaborate more. It's hard to formulate but you will know the feeling when you have it. I think it boils down to your brain's perception of how money is earned. For me it has almost always meant hard work, or at the very least the completion of a project or the feeling of a job well done. Making a substantial amount of money on a stop entry based on your original trade being COMPLETELY DEAD WRONG is a very weird thing to accept. I wonder how long it will take (if ever) to be comfortable with it.

And for full disclosure, I am not killing it, but I'm making money that most people would deem a comfortable living. I don't plan on making any type of regular withdrawals from my trading account, so the balance might as well be SIM at this point.

It comes from belief system you adopted from others. Has really nothing to do with objective reality, which is: who said money has to be earned hard?

 

[dbphoenix]

Going back to what I said earlier, that it's worth it if you can do it and not worth it if you can't, the responses since appear to have more to do with ego than with whether or not daytrading is worth it. There are at least four categories:

1. I don't know whether I can do it or not because I've never tried it but I have no reason to believe that I can't.

2. I can do it.

3. I can't do it -- or don't want to -- but I have no reason to believe that it can't be done.

4. I can't do it therefore nobody can (resigned, aggressive, or passive-aggressive).

There are of course healthy egos and unhealthy egos*. Those who enjoy this sort of thing can busy themselves dividing the responses into the various categories and sub-categories. Since the topic itself seems to have been wrung dry, this may provide entertainment on a slow day.

*these have been broken down further into large, strong egos; large, weak egos; small, strong egos; and small, weak egos. More fun.

 

[pinkman]

Yes. So with all the mentoring here on ET, it would be interesting to know if any of the mentors or students are actually killing it.

There's a hell of a lot of these straight-line journals cropped up, so I imagine you can find the answer?

Game has had a journal for over a year now I think? I've not tracked his results or even viewed his thread more than once or twice, so can't tell you if he's killing it or not, but maybe going over his daily results for the last few months would shed some light?