Need Advice

OK. Time for reassessment. I was at one of my sister's house for a family dinner.

Then one of other sisters asked me how come I don't go back to a normal Corporate job. She's not aware that I've been doing my side consulting and now come to a client's office 2 days a week and the other 3 days I daytrade in the morning.

It shook me a bit. Here I am a very well educated multiple degrees white collar professional with many skills. Am I wasting my time?!

Then she added you probably doing OK with daytrading. You can probably easily make a few hundred bucks on $X capital base.

That's when I realized it. A few hundred bucks is nothing in daytrading! I've been making and losing more than that on substantially lower capital base thanks to leverage inherent in futures markets.

My signals are great. It's my losses that's killing me. I need a system to control losses. Otherwise I will never get out of this boom and bust cycle of making a lot then losing a lot then making a lot then losing a lot. Just plain stupid and insane!

But I need to be HONEST to myself. Here are the good, bad, ugly, and game plan proposal.

Good:
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1) I've done well in crypto trading. And it's NOT that I bought early. I didn't. I bought in late 2017 but I got out before it crashed. Since then I've been trading on and off and have done decent. I'm not a HODLer. And I'm no bitcoin millionaire. haha

2) When I'm right I make thousands on my futures trading easily.

Bad:
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1) I don't cut losses fast enough. Thus erasing all of my good gains.
2) I don't stick to one timeframe. If my small accounts can't handle swing trading then I should just stop it. And focused on daytrading with limited stop losses.
3) Bad tendency to try to predict rather than follow.

Ugly:
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1) Net net. I'm still down in 3 of my accounts. The other 2 are up nicely.
2) At times, I feel like I should give up else I'll lose everything in the 3 accounts that are down badly.

Game Plan:
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1) Like I said, this is my 2nd go with trying to daytrading. I'm in much better shape(financially, emotionally, and market knowledgewise) than the first time around.
2) I have a side consulting that I'm doing, which acts as a stabilizing element.

3) I'm thinking of giving myself til Sept 2018. If I don't make progress by then I just give up on daytrading dream. Go apply to a Corporate job my sister suggested.

4) I will implement strict loss control going forward. If between now and Sept 2018 that tight stop loss doesn't improve my trading net results then I probably don't have a real edge(?). If it does then it means the only thing holding me back was my risk management and I have good signals.

Is that a reasonable plan? This is the HIGHEST LEVEL stop loss! The trading stop losses are micro-level stop losses. I've learned so much about markets and myself.

Am I 5 ft from gold or 5000 ft?
 
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Frankly, OP you are more like 5000 ft from anything. I can also say you are just 5 ft from the ultimate Holy Grail, but that’ll push you into the abyss.

What you sound like is in a very early stage of the learning curve. Get a good corporate day job and learn on the side. It will take a little or a lot longer but you won’t be in the risk of ruin.

Also, earn good money from your day job to fund your trading account. A small account with high leverage is destined to failure.
 
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trader99 said:
I have realized in swing trading there are points to exit that are locally optimal. I suppose that's the same pattern intraday too.

On Wednesday night which according to futures would be start of 2/22/18 session, I should have covered my shorts. Then reversed and went long. I thought about it too. But then my longer term view took over. oh boy. I should have done that. That was like a 500 pts move overnight. Then re-short. The 1-2-3 days swings are huge number of points. No need for weekly or longer views.

Now I think a lot can be made pointwise to hold intraday and if the trend is good then extend to 1-2 days swing. No more than than. Sure, it might still eventually go my original view. But the swings and noise are too much to hold through.

Can't wait to get out of this. I think the short is still safe. It goes back up and totally break the down trend then I'll cover and eat the losses.

My point is there are these local minimas and local maximas that one could take advantage in a multiple day swings. Don't need to hold for weeks or months. My account is not big enough for that anyways. Especially if I want to generate positive cash flow regularly..

what do you think?
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Tough question, because even in hindsight, SPY seems to be exactly on 50 day moving average[2-22-2018].LOL
So even in hindsight/insight I'mm still bullish on small caps/QQQ/tech stocks@ last thru APR/ {Stock Traders 2001+ 2014 Almanac] I hate to call an honest print= fake moves but DOW/DIA looks like fake move compared to SPY.
 
murray t turtle said:
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Tough question, because even in hindsight, SPY seems to be exactly on 50 day moving average[2-22-2018].LOL
So even in hindsight/insight I'mm still bullish on small caps/QQQ/tech stocks@ last thru APR/ {Stock Traders 2001+ 2014 Almanac] I hate to call an honest print= fake moves but DOW/DIA looks like fake move compared to SPY.
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I'm actually still short YM futures. It's been a painful hold. But to be honest, I've been so busy with my non-trading activities that I didn't really have a chance to even look at my account. I'll see what happens next... If it does rebound then I'll be out. I have an exit plan.

From a higher timeframe, it looks like we might retest the lows the next few weeks. Which is fine by me because lately I have had no time to daytrade or look at the screen all day.

But once I'm out, I'll no longer swing trade like that! Just focus on the more consistently lower risk daytrades going forward and doing consulting to generate stablity
 
trader99 said:
I'm giving up! Swing trading is too scary relative to my small accounts.

I'll just do daytrading with limited predefined losses.

:(
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My experience is just the opposite. Day trading was too unpredictable for me and I have more successes with swing trades.

My humble suggestion is you should reexamine your methodology. After so many years if you are not net positive, have true positive expectancy, you could just be trading with a random system. One simple way to do this is calculate your Kelly, if it is negative, you need a new method.

Good luck.
 
Whew! I got out of my scary swing trade! Made a little since I shorted early. Not super early like Gartman at the bottom. But early enough that it was pretty scary ride up! Then now I finally covered today given the reversal. Now, if it goes down more on Monday then I'll go back in and short. But if it goes up then go long.

Had I timed my swing short better like wait for better entry signal, then I would still be holding my short. Since I timed it bad, I needed to exit now for a small profit given the reversal today. But there were a couple of points during this multi-week swing trade where I could have exited for a smaller loss then switch to going long then switch going short. That would be much more profitable than sitting through this scary ride up and finally covering for a small profit. I'm not there yet as a trader. One day...

@ironchef : If I were to be honest in assessing my trading performance, then I would say MOST if not ALL of my trading profits came from swing trading multiple days to weeks to months. So has been some of my biggest LOSERS too!

For daytrading, I have had good days and bad days. But the personal perception(though not fully backed by my trading data and performance) is that daytrading seems lower risk and safer. Daytrading is arguably less profitable for now. Maybe once I learn to cut my losses faster, then it would be a much steady profit center. I noticed for daytrading to work for me, I almost always have to be scalping. That's when I'm most profitable and generate the most steady profits. When I say scalping, I don't mean micropoints but a few points each time. That strategy seems to be the only strategy that worked in daytrading for now...

The real crux of the problem I found after digging deeper is NOT necessarily the timeframe. but rather poor risk management. I could make good money daytrading AND swing trading if I had cut my losses sooner. I'm working on that one in 2018. I think fixing that would make me a profitable trader.

Today was really confusing because I started to mix timeframe. On an intraday timeframe I should go long. On a higher timeframe, maybe I can short at the highs(?). I need to pick a pony and ride it. Don't confuse the two timeframes.
 
Carlll said:
If trader is really good he only deals with trading and he has no other job. Because he earns well on the Forex market.
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I really don't agree with this at all: the proportion of people fitting that description, who are trading in the forex market, is absolutely tiny, Carlll.

There may be a (very) few full-time, retail traders in that group, but most people with the skills, experience and capital to be trading their own funds full-time are no longer dealing with that market, simply because the criteria that make that market attractive and relevant to so many people no longer apply to its tiny minority of long-term survivors who have "turned professional". (If nothing else, they'll have switched to forex futures both because it's easier to trade with volume than without it and especially because the dealing-costs are so much lower. Few - if any - people can be more resistant to doing that than I was, and even I did so eventually.)
 
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