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There are many threads in this forum that shows how hard it is to succeed in trading. Latest one is about an individual who spent 25 years and still haven't seen a dime.
Sure, people do make good money at least it what is seems if you are looking on youtube or other places. Funny enough none of them will be keen to show their brokerage statements. 99% of the people who makes money won't be on youtube advertising about it. I don't want to discourage you from making an attempt to get into the market but do no expect anything from it.
If you want to do it for the love of it then go ahead and spend time to try to figure things out. I personally spent close to 12 years and I still haven't made anything yet. What i can tell you is I donated a lot to the market.
Perhaps you may be better off to utilised your knowledge of the marketing and advertisement to come up with a business idea. It has higher chances of you to succeed in it.
If you determined to proceed with this endeavour then many questions needs to be answered before you are going to take a direction.
Are you planning to Swing trading and hold position through out a week or months etc (require capital)?
Are you planning to day trade?
Are you planning to chart trade?
Are you planning to trade order flow (DOM) etc
Remember you need to execute a lot of trade to build up a statistics and see what is working and what is not. It will take you good amount of time.
Then you will have to deal with psychology it is the biggest enemy of all. Speaking based on my experience from being funded with multiple companies like TopStep, Leeloo, Apex etc.
Screen time is very important. You also need to be prepared seat and do nothing for the whole session. Let me tell you not an easy task.
Another hard thing to do is get to the bottom of things. what i mean by that is sticking to a single thing aka strategy. For example PATS trading you mentioned. You will need to practice that one thing without going side ways. You will need to determine when it is working when it is not. There is even a PATS thread going on here.
Anyways this post can go on and on. In personal opinion and what i went through, i think you will be better off with some sort of business.
If you decided that you want to dedicate the rest of your life to the market then accept that if you are not making any money after 5, 10, 15, or more years you will have no regrets.
This forum is very helpful just post a question and you will get plenty of responses.
Sorry didn't mentioned in my post about the mentor.
It is close to impossible to find a mentor. I've reached out to many and most of them do not have time and not interested to educate you.
A lot have been said about mentoring and many examples where successful strategy is given to a person and they still screw up.
What it tells you? you need to find what is working for you.
All you need to do it spent time in front of the screen and figure out what is working and what is not. It looks like you don't have an elite member access.
With Elite access you can view many journals and you can pick a strategy from any of the journals and make it working for you.
I can't remember the name's of couple people on the forum they articulated that all you need in relation to trading is available for free.
Spend time executing on SIM do not even touch a live market. Trade the SIM until you have track record and you can explain to any person what you are doing in simple terms.
Once you've reached to that level spend that money on evaluation account with any company and see if you can pass it.
Of course you are free to do what ever you want to
I'm interested in Futures ES only for now, because those are contracts and taxes works differently here towards the other trading products, a little less tax on contracts.
Also only scalping / daytrading for now as I my 8h hour sleep needs to be my reboot moment, I don't want to wakeup and run to my phone or computer.
I look for trades at 2 moments every day: between 16.00 and 17.00 (10-11 ET), then later between 19.00 and 21.00 (13-15 ET)
As I already told at the end of a previous post, I jumped to fast in the open sea, like a lot of us from what I read.
In may, after only 2 weeks of demo account, I putted 1000$ on my NT account, after one more week the temptation of going live on ES was to big.
I hadn't finished my book yet, hadn't found FIO yet,... I was to unconscious and excited.
But it went really well the first week, and then pretty bad, I didn't loose everything and after 2.5 weeks switched over to MES but... let me show you :
Month 1 in a new journey
So from my 1000$ there's only 390 over, I continue with demo and MES sometimes.
I noticed that in the beginning I was not scared, and jumped in orders, until the -3000 happened, even then I didn't really felt anything about losing that day
because I had win almost 4000 the days before, it wasn't my investment. I started to feel pissed when I went below my 1000 investment.
I also notice that most of the time I win 2-4 trades and then lose 10, I must maybe just learn to stop after 2 a day
So this error of jumping to fast in live trading was a good experience, to discover my feelings, my attitude, it wasn't useless for me.
Looking at your stats the issue is obvious to me right away.
1. Your largest winner is smaller than your largest loser. (poor risk management)
2. Your largest loser is too far away from your average loser. (poor risk management)
3. Your average winner is smaller than your average loser. (poor risk management)
4. Your average winning trade time is smaller than your average losing trade time. (holding and hoping)
Basically to sum up: you have no risk management plan and hold on to your losers for far too long.
This is both the easiest and the most difficult part of trading to get right.
I already had 2 agencies, and well I like to work alone, rely on myself only, so I'm not interested anymore at this point in making a business.
I plan to scalp only at 2 moments of the day actually while learning : between 16.00 and 17.00 (10-11 ET), then later between 19.00 and 21.00 (13-15 ET)
Screentime is already my life for the last 25 years, alone in front of my computer for the last 13 years, having long empty moments of just waiting feedback of clients...
I discovered the PATs tread yesterday I think, so much to read :-D
Thanks also for clarifying that you are trying to scalp.
Are you trying to use Jigsaw trading (DOM) or you just scalping candles?
Your stats says that you are holding your losers for a long time. Your draw down is large as well for the scalping.
It seems you are shooting from your hip. Scalping doesn't mean trade every single second.
Let's look at it a bit logically. What if you are going to take the time and analyse your trades see if you can pick a trade that occurred across multiple days.
Pick that one good trade and execute only that trade over and over and over again.
Let's say this trade brings you 10 ticks with 1 contract it is $100 dol. Almost forgot to mentioned try to use 10 ticks as a stop loss
Stick to it on SIM for a months and see if you can do it. If you don't see the set up it means no trading for a day.
Indeed and you're right, it was a necessary "pain" for me to have some numbers, to have something to think about and to analyse.
Actually my stop loss was at -8 and my take profit at +4, so yes...
- possibility to lose 2x more if I'm stopped
- it can take more time to get stopped
- the differences in amounts comes from the moment where all excited I tried 4 contracts and not 1
but I didn't really move my markers and holding/hoping, there where just moments of long sideways. the only times I changed my markers was to put them at 1:1
Don't know jigsaw, I use ninjatrader and a 1min chart + EMA 55 and EMA 200.
As I told I'm really at the very beginning of my journey
Sure I shooted a lot almost 2000 trades over both sim/live account in 1 month, for the next month I'm looking to do 1 or 2 a day on sim only
using what i've learned from this experience from the psy pov and also learning from my book and from what I read here all over the place.
Elite membership will come but there's already so much to process
One thing I learned for me in this last month was that I win when I respect my planning,
that means only trading 1h between 16.00 and 17.00 (Brussels time, must be 10-11 ET), then later 1h between 19.30 and 20.30 (13.30-14.30 ET)
Most of my losses happened outside that timeframe, maybe because I lose focus, or because I hope for more, or because it goes sideways and I'll better stop.
almost 2000 trades over both sim/live account in 1 month, for the next month I'm looking to do 1 or 2 a day on sim only