Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
Intraday traders, how many trades do you make per day?
Talk about how many trades you make per day, and why..
Probably my earliest approach was to trade the high/low in trend channels, and this amounted to an inordinate number of small trades. Abandoning that, I moved to building positions (pyramiding) each time a new signal reinforces my belief, or scaling out of positions when signals do not reinforce my belief.
My trade count dropped from 100 per day, to about 5 on a good day. In days that do not offer a change in fundamentals, I can spend a lot of time not taking a position.
Do you suspect I am paying a high opportunity cost, or just keeping my money?
If I trade a "full day" (which is about 8.30am - 8.30pm with breaks, UK time, for me) I do an average of about 4 trades per day. I only ever try to do a full day on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
I stop for the day (at least - maybe for the week if it's Wednesday afternoon/evening or later) if I have three consecutive losses or am at any point "three trades down".
My trades can last anything between 5 minutes and about 5 hours, but the latter's incredibly rare, for me, and my average trade lasts just under half an hour. (If a trade goes on for longer than that, it's typically because my "third lot" is well in profit and still running, so my winning trade duration tends, therefore, to be much longer than my losing trade duration.)
I trade spot forex only, mostly GBP/USD and EUR/USD but some other major currency-pairs, too.
I estimate that, overall, I'm actually in a trade about 15%-20% of the time that I'm "trading". I'm very rarely in two trades at the same time (and never when they're closely correlated markets, and since all the major currency pairs are to some extent correlated, that's quite a significant issue to me).
I trade five different set-ups(!) each of which, independently, I'm satisfied has a genuine edge, but four of the five are based on slightly different types of breakouts of support and resistance and are broadly similar. After years of experiment and research, on and off, I've selected the five set-ups I routinely trade mostly because (a) I can conveniently trade all of them from the same charts, with only a couple of indicators which I find I look at less and less anyway, and (b) I can trade all of them with the same money-management (including position-sizing), with the same stop-losses and mostly with very similar take-profit procedures, too. So it's perhaps not quite as complicated as I've made it sound.
Very difficult to say, without knowing more, but if I had to guess I'd say "keeping your money".
This has the potential to become a very interesting thread, I think, and I look forward to seeing others' replies.
I would say you are keeping your money. If you get 100 setups a day, you either have too many setups or you are just randomly trading - I would hazard a guess it was the latter.
Plus simple math already tells you, you are keeping your money.
If you pay 1 pip per RT for 100 trades a day, you need to bring home more than 100 pips a day to break even.
I make at most, 1 trade a day, when my setup conditions are met. Jumping in and out and trading many times a day has proved detrimental to my account health in the past.
You are never in the wrong place... but sometimes you are in the right place looking at things in the wrong way.
I would say with 5 a day, you are still over-trading. The transaction cost will eat you alive... unless you have a monster edge (which no retail trader does).
You are never in the wrong place... but sometimes you are in the right place looking at things in the wrong way.
How can anyone answer that? Look at your PnL, there's your answer.
Everyone will have their own delusional ideas about how you should trade and how many trades per day you should take- Based on what's worked for them( Or what they think works for them).
Odds are if you're doing what the majority of others are doing then you're probably doing it wrong.
"Free markets work because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or incentives for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can"
Let me preface this by saying I only trade CL, TF and NQ.
It really depends on the day and how many instruments you are trading. In conditions like the last two months probably no more than 1-3 trades per instrument per day.
I love how this is thrown out there by some people. I know several "retail traders" that take $700-$2,000 per day on one contract. I would say that is a pretty good edge.
Just because the majority of the traders here don't do it, doesn't mean that it isn't being done consistently by many "retail" traders.
