Quote from Raleigh Lee:
What have you found to be the most effective steps to becoming a consistently profitable trader?
This can be incredible hard to answer depending on years of trading, early on and limited experience it was make losses small and let profits run = WRONG. Unless you understand WHY price moves the way it does and that reactions are your friend, one is always getting out at worst places. Now learning by sight is so very important, have to learn price action first and memorize patterns, memorize successful patterns and memorize the failures to price. I found the concentrating on only the winning trades made more sense to me than trying to avoid the losing trades. I learned how long it takes for a winning trade to complete for day trading and broke that into longs and shorts, each being different, and if I am in the hole at end of this timeframe, my target is changed to one tick better than entry.
Buy incredible amount of data and test test test your ideas using computer, after awhile you should be able to put into code of what you saw in price action
Knowing what I know now, no way would I want to become a trader, 35 years, the game is so much tougher starting out, but so much easier with many years of experience. You learn after awhile where the newbies and their uncontrolled emotions/brains will enter and where their protective stops are. If is quite funny actually especially in the afternoons, newbies lost in the morning and get eaten away in afternoon.
You need to be able to look at a chart and instantly know what direction it should go towards more than 70% of the time. Anything less, extremely tough to be profitable day trader. Much longer term trading, percentage can be so much less cause profits should outweigh risks considerable and much less trading is much less comm.
