Markets don't behave differently at all on shorter timeframes, as I said before, due to the fractal nature of the markets, it's a basic concept. A person just needs to be cut out for day trading, that's all. All that bs about HFTs, market makers and etc is irrelevant.
It’s true that markets are fractal but I strongly believe it is absolutely true higher time-frames provide higher probability setups than anything higher time-frame that a HFT program would run on (orderflow and tick by tick).
The common reasoning is that the lower the time-frame, the more individuals there are that will trade larger time-frame setups that you are not able to see. These participants are easily able to stop out a shorter time-frame trade.
While it is also true in reverse that higher time-frame traders do not see shorter time-frame price action, shorter time-frame traders trade smaller distances and do not move markets far enough to stop out a larger time-frame setup.
To test it, create any strategy that is designed to run on price action alone and backtest it from shorter to higher time frames. If it really performs better on shorter time-frames than higher ones, please pm me as I would be very interested in that .
I know nothing about coding and overall about what involves systematic trading including how to do any backtests, nor I'm interested in it. I'm just saying that I see my setups crystal clear on every timeframe and in every single trading vehicle out there, but that doesn't mean that those fast timeframes are for my personality. Only practice can tell this.
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Yep, I agree. The same setups are present in every timeframe. And personality compatibility is crucial for the success of your trading method. Al Brooks frequently teaches that. The main trade-off is between frequency and probability.
Timeframe makes a huge difference in market behavior. The "fractal" notion is cute but demonstrably false. There are very meaningful intraday variables that simply don't apply to daily timeframes. The cash open in ES, the mid-day / lunch-time lull, the initial reaction to unique events like economic data or news headlines etc. simply do not exist outside of the intraday. And these events can totally wreck both mean-reversion and breakout type strategies that might otherwise work well on a daily timeframe. Moreover, shorter time frames require smaller targets and tighter stops, which, with fixed (not fractal) per-unit transaction costs, meaningfully impact trade expectancies.
So yeah, zooming out and focusing on daily or longer timeframes can indeed lead to a substantial improvement in the performance of a given strategy.
And one last bit of advice for the OP - be careful what you read on the internet. Those who know the least often know it the loudest
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I've specified the thing in another post #25, about personality compatibility and setups.
Overall, maybe in systematic trading, it is totally different story, but discretionary setups are really the same. Just don't trade right before or during the news/opening and other events that of course lead to cracking every single method that is not specialized specifically for those events, as you've said. It's like holding a stock into earnings reports without a profit cushion and neither checking what kinda move option traders are pricing in, or holding through FDA data some biotech stock that can lead to 90% gaps, and of course, only morons do that.
I remember expressing frustration with one of my mentors back in 2017.
He asked me, "So, what do you do for a living?"
I replied, "I'm a systems administrator."
He then asked me, "how many years of experience do you have?"
I replied, "I have 17 years in."
He then asked, "how long would it take for me do your job?"
I replied, "It would take about five years to do my job at a moderate degree of competence."
He then said, "I have been trading since 1997. So. what makes you think you can do my job in less time?"
Then I had a "ah ha" moment. Most of us aren't full-time traders. We do this part-time. So, it's going to take a significant amount of time to trade with a consistent degree of success. There is just a lot that needs to be learned and experienced. You have to make the mistakes and learn from them.
Just as I honed my troubleshooting skills, as a system administrator, over the past 20 years, a trader has to hone his skills over an extended period of time. He has to develop the trading instincts You cannot learn them from a text book.
In my opinion, seven years isn't enough time for self-directed trader who isn't under the tutelage of a prop firm or institution.
Just my 2-cents.
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Sorry to hear man! Have you thought about trying with a prop firm like Apex? They currently have an 80% off sale, so about $29/mo for a sim account, but that already includes live market data. But this way you still have a little skin in the game and keeps learning exciting.
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I've specified the thing in another post #25, about personality compatibility and setups.