Quote from Wittgenstein:
But you are a scalper?!
Hi Wittgenstein. Did I say that? I used to be a scalper pretty exclusively, but that was over a couple of years ago. Now I trade short-term intraday scalp (breakouts and volatility), intraday swing, overnight swing (1-5 days), multi-week swing, and up to multi-month position. I even have some very-long-term trades, for example last year I entered an AUD long which I held for almost a year, with little "in-between" modfication (and that trade yielded over 30%). I believe in fractality in the markets and look at them from a "top-down" approach, I.e. I look at what a market does in the monthly, then weekly, daily, 120, 60, 30, 15, 5, 3, 1. You get the idea. It gives me a complete picture to trade from, in various timeframes with various opportunities.
Particularly in the currencies, I tend to want to have the "right" positions on at all times. Why? Because I don't want to watch my net worth erode due to currency fluctuations. I want to know where I stand. And since I can trade, why just protect my currency accounts if I can make some good profits on top of that?
It requires very little, if any extra work for me to position trade, so might as well.
If you're a day trader, you have to look at countless charts, evaluate oodles of info and and make instant decisions. And there are no absolute trends or sustenance, stop gunning everywhere etc. Day trading seriously trains you hard at this, you become a champion at looking at a chart for a couple of seconds and making a decision.
And after a while, when go "back" to position trading, you're like an NBA player working in Europe. On a daily chart, everything is so much clearer, easier, and more sustained, and you have all the time in the world to decide. I don't do much fundamentals on my position trades, if any. I just glance at a couple of currency charts or so for a few minutes, make a decision, enter my trades, and that's it.
In fact I'd say a secret to doing this is to take the last paragraph very literal - Look at a chart, read what it tells you and make a decision. Period. If you think about it too long, you'll start imagining things, second-guessing, etc. Forget it. If you're good at day trading, pick up a few currency dailies, look at where you can see the best opportunities (i.e. R:R, stages of a trend), enter where you think it takes you the least amount of loss to find out if you're wrong, and then switch off and go back to day trading.
I have found that this creates a decent extra income for me, kind of adds stability and balance to the intraday trading income regimen. Some days I might not be up much intraday, but still made some nice gains in swings or positions. It's a great thing. And obviously, it also helps me get a much better feel for the overall market, even when trading intraday.
One last note: Be careful with leverage if you're trading daily charts, you obviously can't trade 50 cars on a 100K account, your stops are much larger. That's the downside of position trading, but like I said, it's just for supplemental income anyway. Well, hope that helped / answered your question.
Peace!
S