Two Questions For Practicing Day Traders

ironchef said:
Early this year, I decided to give day trading another look, first picked trend following, backtested, next paper traded and finally went live two weeks ago with scaled down sizes. It is too early to tell if the method has positive expectancy.

I have a couple of questions for practicing day traders on ET:

1. How many trades a day do you make on average?

I know the answer depends on your style. I appreciate it if you guys can give me, a wannabe trend trader, some guidance.

2. What is your profit expectation?

My three months paper trades showed 1.2% profit a day, on average. That is 300% a year without compounding! What is a realistic annual return?

As a frame of reference, for the last decade, my stock portfolio only achieved several percentages in CAGR above SP500 and my options only a few percentages CAGR above my portfolio.

Thank you in advance.
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Hello ironchef,

Just remember, the longer you try to figure "it" out the less profits you make.

Just trade the market, thats all you have to do. Forget all this other fancy talk on trading.
 
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SunTrader said:
Here's another.

View attachment 325333

Simple Inside bars setups (White dot) arrows under/over bar after potential entry - based on close above/below inside bar. Some potential "easy" winners, some needing tight stop, some losers all depending on how they are executed.

edit: ignore that extraneous blue arrow down in the center.
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thks for the reminder.

for some stupid reason i do not trade inside bars.....they work well though they sometimes market whipsaw around them

i must work on noticing them... they are simple effective and i love a set up with those characteristics

usually they also offer a fantastic RR and a good win rate ......
 
SimpleMeLike said:
Just trade the market, thats all you have to do. Forget all this other fancy talk on trading.
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not good advice

learn simple things like inside bars for example... they work .. THERE IS NO FIGURING THEM OUT.

second signals work there is no figuring them out.

 
SunTrader said:
Rate of Change. Just price compared to itself in the past. Simple is better.

No Averaging, XAveraging, DisplacedAveraging.
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rate of change
yeah but all you need is your eyes for that.

you need no indicator or measuring device because approximately works in trading. you do not need exact
 
if you want simple than buy near or at the low and sell at or near the high.

the low of anything: bar low , leg low, swing low, low of anything put a stop below one tick of the low
 
SimpleMeLike said:
Hello ironchef,

Just remember, the longer you try to figure "it" out the less profits you make.

Just trade the market, thats all you have to do. Forget all this other fancy talk on trading.
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How do I just trade the market? Can you explain how you do that?
 
SunTrader said:
But on the other matter, why do you have to pay the offer and sell the bid?
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This topic deserves a more in depth discussion.

I am assuming I buy on ask and sell on bid as that is what I used in my real time paper trades. The difference between bid/ask is usually $0.01 and my limit order is in $0.01 increment. In live trades with MO I often did get fills that split the difference between bid/ask.

Trading with 1 minute chart, sometimes I executed several trades within a few minutes time span. If I use limit instead of market order, it usually took seconds instead of almost instantaneous to execute (sometimes no execution) if price moved too fast.

Lately I experimented with timing my MO but the outcome is not satisfactory because it is usually counter trend.

What should I do?
 
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