re: Any day traders out there?

DG buy at 233.66 & 234.74...out of TSLA at 211.82...held over night..cost average 204.196

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I’m serious, this strategy is very difficult to stomach “guh”. It was EFOI and literally dropped from .70 to now about .44, and seems to continue to hit lower lows. It will need to recover 60% just to get back to even. I guess the only answer now is to wait for that. So that’s it, next time you hear from me will be if it recovers.

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Ooof lol. Hopefully you're just messing around with beer money.

Looks like EFOI has been on a steady decline since 2020. Not good. Looks like it randomly has some crazy spikes though, hopefully you can catch another one of those up (if you actually plan on holding forever).

I've been trading casually for about 18 years, seriously over the past 6 months, paid for a trading course and everything.

My advice is learn to be a good loser. The name of the game is risk management, simply losing less on your losers and winning more on your winners. You will have losers, everyone does.

There are four possible outcomes when you place a trade, a large profit, a small profit, a small loss and a large loss. Three of these are acceptable and will keep your account intact. The large loss is what will sink you, but that's what you can control.

Determine what you're willing to lose on a single trade and stick to that. Place a stop loss on every trade. Don't increase position size to make up losses. If you're on a losing streak and feel yourself getting emotional (which happens to everyone) stop trading. There will always be tomorrow.

Studies indicate that most traders are actually pretty good at picking winners and have a good "win rate." They lose money because they lose a higher percentage of their position on their losers than they win on their winners.

It's like anything else, the more you do it the better you'll get. Just don't blow your account thinking about the Lamborghini you're going to buy or that you know what's going to happen or which way the market will turn because no one knows. I've grinded out a very modest profit overall and hopefully my results will continue as I add to my account.

I'm one that doesn't think strategies mean much other than providing structure for your process. Pick one that you'll stick to and practice good risk management and you should be fine.

EDIT: I see from some of these messages that like to hold everything until it profits. I used to think like that too, thinking there's a way to outsmart the market. There's a couple of reasons why I think that's a bad idea.

1. You don't know *when* that's going to happen. A lot of folks that bought GE have been waiting for years for it to recover. It may not ever recover in our lifetimes. You're letting the market control your risk instead of you doing it yourself.

2. There is a hidden opportunity cost that you're not considering. Whatever capital you have tied up in your loser is capital that can't be used in a better trade. For all you know you could've sold quickly and made that money back up that day. I've done that several times.


Just have a healthy respect for the markets and for what they can do to your account if you don't respect it, that's my TL:DR advice.

Thanks. I think those of us that have observed and participated in the markets for a while have at one time wanted to prove how smart we are, especially if we have some early success.

Having winning trades is the easy part of trading. Everyone can handle winners. How you handle the losers demonstrates if you have what it takes to last IMO. I don't think I'll ever master it but I just try to get a little better at it every day. It tries my patience when I get 3-4 losers in a row, but that's trading. You did everything right, your criteria were met, you put in the trade and it didn't work out in your favor. Some days you just have to walk away and live to fight another day.

Today was that type of day for me. Nothing was really clicking so I stopped trading and looked at some of the losers for possible errors in my process.

This idea about not selling until you make a profit is about ego, about the trader not wanting to admit they were wrong, and not part of a rational process. Ego doesn't serve a trader well.

Just to add another angle here, I like the idea of trading a company that you know really well. If you’ve watched the same stock for five years, I bet you could do pretty well trading it.

Especially one that’s high volume and high volatility.

I’m starting out kind of small with $5k not really comfortable buying over 10k shares of something even if it is less than dollar.

This morning UTRS is the top pre-market gainer currently up 66% will see if it holds the lead but that would be the one to buy 30 min before the open and hope for the 1-2% profit. Of course this is according to Gideon’s strategy.

I have no idea if this strategy will work I survived EFOI so this is just gambling in my opinion.
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Well MLGO ended up being the leading premarket gainer at 9am EST so I bought it right at 9am easily made 4% in 2 minutes. I’m still holding 400 shares because it looked pretty strong and I have a stop to protect my original profit.

It is an interesting strategy but I definitely don’t want another EFOI type situation.

LOL WTF

amazing bump

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By the way, do you mainly focus on equities or do you also trade options?

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I trade about 99% options. Want to get into futures eventually.

I just thought about the anecdote you shared about the guy that would rather let his stock go to 0 before selling for a loss. Just thinking about how crazy of a mindset that is, especially for those that want to do this seriously.

People have to treat this like a business. How absurd would it be for a restaurant owner to expect to never have a day where they have a net negative on the books? But a lot of us traders think taking a loss is unacceptable for some reason.

I'm trying to reprogram my mind to not think of losing days as "bad." Losing days are built in and aren't good or bad, they just are a cost of doing business.

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Yes it’s definitely risky to day trade and I get that.

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I wasn’t really referring to day trading in general. I was talking about this so called “strategy” that fellow came up with. I know more than a few very successful day traders in stocks and options. But not a single one of them would trade without risk controls or being ego driven and refusing to take a loss.

Just a suggestion, but if you have a real interest and passion for trading, spend your time learning legitimate trading strategies that are backtested and proven… and that include inherent risk management.

Good luck.