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Good question!
Personally I am reducing to the max...
For some - even 24h per day are not enough.
To be serious - one has to find "THE" moment within a day to
place *the* trade and to get out.
If one has not found this specific time zone - overtrading will result.
My best time is after opening - and closing some hours later.
Not getting into the late afternoon to lose the gains from the morning.
Crude opens at 9am Gold opens at 820am. I am done with my day by 1030am at the very latest and normally am done before the market opens at 0930am. I trade real money so all I do is get paid and get out. I actually turn the charts right off and just monitor & mange my open equities positions if need be.
AJ, Its the $64,000 question. Personally I believe in the law of diminishing returns, the 80/20 principal and the Decision Fatigue syndrome.
What does all this mean...simple...work less. At lot less. Figure out where your optimum and ideal trade hours are, work those and quit. I mean walk away. No charts. Nothing.
For me, its about 30 minutes in the evening to see what happened after I left for the day then since I'm in AZ, I hit the charts at 5:30AM until about 8AM. Two and a half hours. Thats it. I try to make 50 ticks or so in that time frame and I try to make 100 or so for the week. This allows me some loser days in the week without freaking out over the loss.
For more detail, the law of diminishing returns says that at some point, the reward for additional work is to small to justify the extra work. Its like you have an option to work a 10 hour day and the first hour is worth $100 and each additional hour is worth $10 less. At some point, it gets to zero and you have to decide where in the continuum you decide the effort is not worth the money.
The 80/20 principal says that you get 80% of your results from just 20% of your work.
And the decision fatigue syndrome says the longer you are forced to make decisions, the worse those decisions become. This is why car dealers like to sell you all the crap after you've been there for 5 hours....anything to make the pain go away!
Many many many pit traders have said they would have made more money if they had quit trading after the first 2-3 hours of the day. They made it in the morning and gave it back in the afternoon.
And then finally, I believe very strongly in the idea of The Two Economies.....
Economy 1 is the Time based economy. You get paid for the time you put in, not the results. Traders make the mistake of thinking they live in this economy. Its a linear expression.....Time X $ = payday.
Economy 2 is the results economy. Your pay is not commiserate with the time put in. And thankfully neither is the size of the pay. You get paid solely for results regardless of time expended. Its an exponential expression. The reward is all out of proportion with the time expended. Results in ticks * # of lots = Payday. You then get to expand your payday by increasing your lots when appropriate.
As a trader, we live in the results economy. Therefore, our job is to maximize pay in the least possible amount of time.
For me, its the time I've laid out above. Those are typically CL's best hours and my best mental hours. This results in me being able to walk away with zero guilt about not trading longer. Its the confluence of factors that make it the best for me.
You will need to examine your instrument, your best mental hours, your desired results and then design a trading plan around those three things.
It also helps if you have a life away from trading....no life, then just trade 24/7 if you can avoid losing money most of the time.
Long answer to a short question. Hope it helps.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci
Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
Over the last few weeks I have taken a leaf from the book of @GFIs1, cutting down hours significantly. Putting more emphasis on multiple shorter 1-2 hour sessions rather than one long day, taking plenty of breaks, making them real breaks, walking a lot, even restarting my old TM from uni days, forgot how good it was. Had only two really awful days in the last month, both absolute over-trading nightmares - the lesson is clear and damning.
I am in front of my screens 12 hours a day (btw, this is something I will be changing once I get to Ecuador).
I place several trades across several markets, usually in the morning. It doesn't take long because I've already mapped it out the night before.
But I think the real point of the question was how much time do I spend on trading as a whole. Between all the research and analysis, number crunching, chart drawing, Excel spreadsheets, database queries, etc it can easily be 4 or 5 hours of solid work. I multitask because I can't stand to work on one thing for that long so it takes me longer but I spread the work out around things like browsing the web, the forum, and lately stuff like floor plans for the house.
Throw in a few breaks, a couple of meals, and it is 12 hours.
Generally when it comes to actual trades, it's a set it and forget it for me almost always (unless something is really volatile). That means set it in the morning, and then don't touch it throughout the day, most days. But I am always watching, always stalking if you will...
I find myself spending more and more time away from charts and crunching numbers, generating spreadsheets, basically doing research to generate trade ideas. Lots of these are for my automated strategy work which is an ongoing hobby of mine. It helps keep me occupied during the day, and prevents me from overtrading.
BTW, I do this all the time (not entries, but trade ideas). My phone is nearby and I use Google Now to email myself "notes" for ideas I think of at night when trying to sleep.
After many years of most of my time awake in front of screens, I just recently started trading for 2-3 hours, then leaving. There are certain times of the day that are better for certain setups. Faster directional moves are what I have decided I prefer, and I burn out in "sideways" markets.
I watch charts from around 8:30am until I am done with the morning, maybe 9:30, maybe noon. Then sometimes back in for the 1:30-2:30 move, depending on how the morning went. Then 7-9pm forex news moves, if I am in.
I have shifted to the "less is more" camp, and find the open is most often rubber-to-the-road type of motion that can make your day in a few hours or less, if read correctly. And if not, there is another good time slot ahead.
Urgency is not real, and there is always another trade, but, when I can get my head in the game quickly and react to the morning surge, I find that best for life in general.
