Why does it always rain on me?

Most days it’s a mean reversion pattern, meaning no significant trends. You can trade using the scalping method to take quick profits or losses. This is more of practice/training than making significant gains., until you become very good at it.

In rare occasions (about 10% time) a real trend emerges where you can ride it to a decent profit. Now the problem is how do you identify it in real time? Novice traders tend to see every market move as a trend, akin to a person holding a hammer and seeing everything as a nail.

This takes time and experience to master. One needs to have a holistic view seeing many things falling in place like a zigsaw puzzle.

On the other hand, win rate bears little significance on the eventual trading profitability. This is another misleading metric that most novice traders pursue in vain. It only serves as a psychological pacifier but is actually quite detrimental to profitable trading.
 
Jzwu2017 said:
Most days it’s a mean reversion pattern, meaning no significant trends. You can trade using the scalping method to take quick profits or losses. This is more of practice/training than making significant gains., until you become very good at it.

In rare occasions (about 10% time) a real trend emerges where you can ride it to a decent profit. Now the problem is how do you identify it in real time? Novice traders tend to see every market move as a trend, akin to a person holding a hammer and seeing everything as a nail.

This takes time and experience to master. One needs to have a holistic view seeing many things falling in place like a zigsaw puzzle.

On the other hand, win rate bears little significance on the eventual trading profitability. This is another misleading metric that most novice traders pursue in vain. It only serves as a psychological pacifier but is actually quite detrimental to profitable trading.
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True. My most profitable year I had just 28% win rate. 72/100 trades were stops.

If I take 100 $1 stops and get 30 $5 wins I'm profitable.
 
KCalhoun said:
True. My most profitable year I had just 28% win rate. 72/100 trades were stops.

If I take 100 $1 stops and get 30 $5 wins I'm profitable.
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Hello KCalhoun,

From your experience with manual traders, do you think the average manual day trader can have a 28% win rate strategy for the next 30 years of their life?

This means that out of next 30,000 trades (assuming 1000 trades per year) the manual trader will

win 8400 times
lose 21,000 times
 
Been scalping since 1992-ish, took me forever to develop day trading systems that had same losing percentages as scalping. I spend 99% of my time on getting losing percentages to 5% and under.

First off, you have to look to left of present to possible identify reasons not to take a trade, breaking down losing trades often will show the trade shouldn't of taken place. Second, have to keep running average of last three days of swing lengths of uptrend and downtrend, I want to get in up to 2/3rds of swing length and after looking for extreme patterns to reverse or counter trend trade with small risk. H&S, huge bars with smaller volume, tight resistance tops or support bottoms.

I stress entries need to be deep retracements so others will think trend changing, but these test previous pivot, so long as price don't go below pivot lows, they either form double bottom or higher low, can get in low and risk is low. Often times these form H&S patterns with trend.
 
Psychologically, most traders can’t endure 70-80% rate of losing trades. It’s simply human nature. Algo trading may be different since no human emotions are involved.
 
Also, most of the advice here is from master traders which are the top 1% which I am not. So I would actually suggest getting a job, and then trade part time so that your losses don't have any affect on your weekly income.

If you can actually get to the point where you can in fact make more money from trading then working, then you could switch to part time work and be a full time trader.

It puts too much stress on you if trading is your only source of income where you are breaking even or losing money.

Finally, I agree with some of the other posters in that many times you look at the chart and they are in a range, so you should develop some skills on trading the range. Are you only looking for a long trend to make profit? Those don't happen that often.
 
KCalhoun said:
No, most traders lose. It's very hard.
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Hello KCalhoun,

Exactly my point sir. Exactly my point.

Yet so many traders out there think they going to Pimp this market day to day for big winners and runners.

I rather win +85% of the time then lose 70% of the time when it comes to this trading manually day to day.
 
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