Toughest trade in the world: S & P 500?
- Thread starter stockfrosty
- Start date
OldTrader
What timeframes would you consider?
Tnx
When I read a post like this, I often think of what any person should ask themselves about getting into trading.
Like asking a set of about 20 universal questions.
A key that would lead each person to where they could have a terrific place to begin and to operate from.
You wound up in a place, where for you, it all adds up to a very difficult trade. Others build a perfect place for repeated failure from which they will never emerge. Why can't people be reasonable?
By that I mean why can't people reason through some process like a tree of questions that simply take them to one of the many branches to be successful.
You are asking: "Why do so many insexperienced small time traders trade it?"
Certainly not an important question.
I often imagine just a regular person from any walk of life taking the trouble to reason through a set of questions that he can make up the answers to. The careful answers allow him to begin and follow a CPM or GANNT or something to being successful.
What ever your questions, you have gotten to:
Q1.
A1. No leading indicator.
Q2.
A2. Time and sales is useless
Q3.
A3. Intraday price action is close to random
Q4.
A4. No __________ to establish risk levels
Q5. Not for you but for others.
A5. essentially adds up to one big cash grab
Q6.
A6. endless number of variables which make intraday price action as close to random
and so on.......
Why can't a person like you come up with the Q's. Wrong Q's and who cares about these six answers. Then look at what was spawned by this beginning with other responders.
Spot on!
With stocks you sometimes have no chance of getting out because the market is closed, when some news break. The ES and similar futures (Kospi 200 as well) are the fastest growing instruments, gaining in popularity all around the world markets.
It get's to be more of a "game" with the big players using their bags of tricks, but it still beats stocks, because in the end you're still dependent on the broad market - in the case of the ES.
Stocks is way lazier when you've done the research and taken the position - the ES demands much more of your attention, especially when daytrading.
The ES is by far a much more level playingfield than the stocks with their shadowy marketmakers. Trading it however, requires that you be very alert and be very easy to influence with regards to opinion of market direction. ES and stocks are almost fundamentally different with regards to how you approach trades, in my opinion, because of the fact that you need to consider each trade like the first trade - and not as a continuation - because of the rapidly changing market bias.
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OldTrader
What timeframes would you consider?
Tnx [/QUOTE]
Not sure where you are headed with this question. I do not trade from intraday charts, so I have no time frame there. If you're talking about my holding period, alot depends on how confident I am about the direction. Some positions I'll hold for a few days. Most of the time though I'm an intraday type of trader. I'll take profits when the move gets overexuberant.
OldTrader
OldTrader
What timeframes would you consider?
Tnx [/QUOTE]
Not sure where you are headed with this question. I do not trade from intraday charts, so I have no time frame there. If you're talking about my holding period, alot depends on how confident I am about the direction. Some positions I'll hold for a few days. Most of the time though I'm an intraday type of trader. I'll take profits when the move gets overexuberant.
OldTrader
Not sure where you are headed with this question. I do not trade from intraday charts, so I have no time frame there. If you're talking about my holding period, alot depends on how confident I am about the direction. Some positions I'll hold for a few days. Most of the time though I'm an intraday type of trader. I'll take profits when the move gets overexuberant.
OldTrader [/QUOTE]
Thanks. I have send you a PM.
Just to give you people some context, I'm a filter trader. I use first alert (Neovest).
I've been extremely consistent as a day trader trading primarily NYSE but more recently I've been trading some volatile NAZ stocks like RIMM and TASR.
If I examine my P n L what I find is the following. Out of the last 100 days I've had 85 winning days and 15 losing days. 10 of the 15 losing days were days that I traded the SPY. And when I net my losses I've found that 67% of the loss was in the SPY (S n P 500)
I've had some success trading the S n P, (taken up to 12 handles in intraday swings) but over an extented period I've found I generally end up giving any gains right back to the thing. I believe it is a difficult trade relative to the stocks that pops into my filters and I gave a few of my reasons why.
If you are making money trading the S n P, my hat goes off to you. You are competing againts the best traders in the world and winning. At the end of the day, cash is king. So if ya make cash, keep doing what you are doing.
All I want people to take from my contribution to this forum is the fact that I am a trader who has been consistently profitable trading stocks but has had a difficult time with the S n P. I've given the thing my best shot and have decided to leave it alone. Because, again I've found easier money elsewhere, and as a professional trader, making money is my objective.
Draw whatever conclusions you'd like from my experience. But I figured some traders might find that information useful in some way.
Cheers to everyone who contributed to the discussion.
I've been extremely consistent as a day trader trading primarily NYSE but more recently I've been trading some volatile NAZ stocks like RIMM and TASR.
If I examine my P n L what I find is the following. Out of the last 100 days I've had 85 winning days and 15 losing days. 10 of the 15 losing days were days that I traded the SPY. And when I net my losses I've found that 67% of the loss was in the SPY (S n P 500)
I've had some success trading the S n P, (taken up to 12 handles in intraday swings) but over an extented period I've found I generally end up giving any gains right back to the thing. I believe it is a difficult trade relative to the stocks that pops into my filters and I gave a few of my reasons why.
If you are making money trading the S n P, my hat goes off to you. You are competing againts the best traders in the world and winning. At the end of the day, cash is king. So if ya make cash, keep doing what you are doing.
All I want people to take from my contribution to this forum is the fact that I am a trader who has been consistently profitable trading stocks but has had a difficult time with the S n P. I've given the thing my best shot and have decided to leave it alone. Because, again I've found easier money elsewhere, and as a professional trader, making money is my objective.
Draw whatever conclusions you'd like from my experience. But I figured some traders might find that information useful in some way.
Cheers to everyone who contributed to the discussion.
Haven't read this whole thread, but.......
Excellent advice lescor. If newbies could only realize when a nugget like this is thrown out here on ET, it would make their journey much easier. Reminds me of so many little gems in "Reminiscences Of A Stock Operator". (Had to reach over for my copy to spell that word..."reminiscences"
) "Back in the good ol' days" around here, learning was much easier. Now there's so much "noise", good advice is often hard to see. But, your post here is a good example. (You got a copyright on this nugget???)
Y'all keep saying the s&p has the best traders in the world, but since it tracks the underlying value of the stocks in the index very very closely, than those stocks must also have the best traders in the world.
Where, exactly, can I find the worst traders in the world to trade
against?
And don't answer EliteTrader, please.
Where, exactly, can I find the worst traders in the world to trade
against?
And don't answer EliteTrader, please.