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For you guys/gals that trade for a living, are you in the green every day? If not are you in the green at the end of each week? Or do you have bad weeks and make it up another week to end up in the green for the month?
Just wondering if I ever get started trading what can I expect as far as this is concerned.
This should help you: If you're keeping yourself green while SIM TRADING FIRST, i.e. managing your stops like real money in SIM - for one straight month - go ahead and start trading with real money.
But this is a business - so expect to get stopped every now and then. If you want to keep profiting, manage your stops. Watch your risk to reward ratio. Keep making your strategies better and better by accepting the fact that NOT all strategies will run forever.
P. S. I am not sure if you have seen the videos of legendary trader Mark Douglas - How to think like a professional trader. Check all of them out in YouTube (4 parts) and only then go live.
Everyone has different styles but nobody has 100% green days, there are normally many red days and as you improve as a trader you will have fewer and fewer losing days.
Normally good traders have very big winning days and very small losing days. So for instance a good (small trader) will have some 10K winning day and some 4K loser and many average days in which he will make 1K or 2K and lose 500 to 1000.
This is a rule of thumb.
However one thing that I have noticed is that you need some big winning day to make you profitable, and you will see that many famous traders and investors had some "defining" moment in their career, some huge winners that made all the difference.
Markets distribute gains and losses in an uneven way.
You should expect to lose at first. Don't take that the wrong way, being profitable trading, comes most of the time after a long process.. Of losing. This is why so many people being themselves losers, or at least remembering this difficult time, would recommend to paper trade first, until you are profitable. And when testing waters, it should be done slow and tiny.
I look at the Profit Factor per day, the PF per week, and the monthly PF. This is how I see how good or bad I am.
And yes, red days and red weeks happen.
once you start printing money and feeling confident with your ability to do this then you should be able to use your P and L as the guide to wether or not you or something else is off as far as your game and your edge.
think about it. if i am normally batting .300 and in the last week i was .15 then something is way off perhaps a great pitcher? what were my stats
against this same pitcher and or the types of pitches he sent me. was it the weather was i feeling well did i et new shoes a fight with the wife or the kids are at it again
i mean you will have ebbs and flows in your equity.
if you really want to see your performance tthen all you need is a daily equity line chart to see exactly where you stand.
I know for me. I suck at cutting losses. i really do it is my weak point and 5 years ago i sucked at buying anything. I LOVED shorting i was the biggest bear in
the cave but you know what after getting my ass kicked over and over i said screw what i think is right or real and just trade long all the time and
i have been a perma bull for soo long that I am having to rework my muscle brain memory on shorting and shorting now is harder than i ever remember but
i also am having problems cutting losses because like pavlovs dog i am trained to buy dips and hold and that isnt good either.
this is why yesterday i did terrible on so many levels.
1. i oversized ON THE OPEN
2. I sat in losses and just watched like a tractor beam
3. i started losing confidence
4. i started rearranging my system a lil.. tweaks here and there..dumb..
5. i am making it all up and then some today
2 steps forward and 1 step back is all i can say but if a day trader then i would say your edge if any good should ALWAYS give you positive results by the end of the week.
more so than the end of the month but you will have losing days weeks and months and if you dont CUTLOSS you could BLOW OUT.
Successful scalpers should see very few red weeks because their success rate is high and their take is low. Unsuccessful scalpers often have their stop to blame, or they just get blown about like a tumbleweed. Both are difficult problems to solve, although the wind eventually solves the tumbleweed problem.
Trend traders have a very low success rate but the take is high, occasionally astronomically so.
One is like being a spider on a web, catching flies as fast as possible,
The other is like a spider in a wind storm, riding the silk to who knows where?
Coming, they can't be denied. Going, they can't be detained.
You need to develop some very good tools to be able to scalp , especially 1 tick..however that said there are still axioms at all of the time frames et al that one can think of..
Put in more than 15,000 hrs and one begins to see more clearly...and in this process you will get lucky... my gift is the patience to look at meaningless noise for hrs and days on end...and then something appears ... i trust this process 100% now whereas in early days i was racing all over the place
best of luck
