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For background I have been day trading ES mini on SIM for a month and just started day trading live 10 days ago but only on ES micro as started with a small account. Of course, first day beginners luck I was up, second day even and third day hit me very badly, lost 75% of my funds; now I am taking it slowly, trying to analyze each setup and not to over trade. Basically taking it easy to learn, hoping to get just break even for every month and keep learning as I would be in the SIM environment.
Thoughts:
1) My mind is sometimes playing tricks on me by seeing good setups that are really not there.
2) Scalping on Emicro with a small account is difficult for a beginner, commissions eating up the small profits when winning, accentuating the losing trades.
3) I think that as you get more knowledgeable/experienced on trading you'd better off by doing less number of trades per day and looking for higher runs (rather than scalping) and scaling up on the number of contracts.
Questions:
very curious about what everyone's strategy is and recommended guidelines for a beginner. How can I do a poll here?
1) What would you say is the minimum fund needed to start for...?
a) Emicro
b) Emini
2) When would you say you became profitable (on a per month or per year)?
a) 0-6 months
b) 6-12 months
c) 12-36 months
d) 36+months
e) not profitable yet
3) Overall strategy on Emini or Emicro
a) Scalping
b) longer runs
c) other
4) Main chart view that you use
a) 5min
b) 2000 ticks
c) 15min
d) other
my ideal scenario (that I am of course not prepared for yet as lacking a lot of knowledge and patience/mind management...) would be trading Emini with 1 or 2 contracts and scalping targeting 4 ticks ($50) for a $100 profit target per day.
Thanks and happy trading
Hugo
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
1) Capital depends on the margin per contract for the instrument you are trading and what your strategy requires per normal drawdowns.
2) 2 Years. @FuturesTrader71 often has said some can make the turn by 3 years without professional help. If you don't, you may never?
3) Find strategies with longer hold times...Else the market will have fun with you. I consider myself a swing trader and my usual hold times depend on the instrument. Most are between 1.5 to several days. I did start out day trading and know the difficulties that come with it. I now cringe at the thought of scalping. If you don't like overnight holding, at most look for 1 to 3 trades per day in each market.
4) Although I do enter on a ten minute chart, a chart Timeframe has no relevance with my trading strategies. All my trading strategies are based solely on a mathematical edge derived from price alone. I do like to watch volume profile based on my entries to get a feel, but its all habit of wanting to predict. Which you can't, so trade a proven strategy.
My only advice. Please find a real strategy with real proven results and trade it with loyalty. Do not try and discretionary trade or you will lose your money. You may get lucky for awhile, but time and pressure will beat you.
Your thought #3 is a good place to start, as long as more experience means finding a strategy that makes money. This will take time, but once you find one...it seems they get easier to find. Try to automate them, this will lesson human error.
Thanks Woodyfox for sharing your experience!
Great suggestions there, also interesting the swing trading I guess there are so many ways that one can do trading.
Hi everyone . You Remind me of Myself when I started out, so wanna tell you about how I got to profitable trading. I didnt look for systems or indicators, I wanted a profitable trading room. There are 1000 or more online but very few of them made any profits and any decent ones wanted big outlays for teaching their system.
After years of actual searching, I was lucky enough to find my grail so to speak. I trade wirh them everyday and make profit everyday. I use Ninja Trader and I scalp intra-day on 1 min chart. No scaling up of contracts or any of that stupidity. 1 st rule of any professional trader(those making living from trading ) entirely is MONEY MANAGEMENT. Even wirth ATM in Ninja Trader we manually manage every trade as markets are unpredictable and volatility can destroy profits quickly.
Learn price action reading in real time, and test your system(s) in real life, no backtesting.
I trade naked 1min chart, strict atm orders and no changing of anything, as success rate is phenomunal anyways. For me it took ,3 years to find my room and another year to learn to read the set ups and manage the atm orders.
08/06/2020 Results
1st trade Es. long. +8ticks
2nd trade.ES long, +16 ticks.
3rd trade.NQ, short,+ 24 ticks
4th trade.NQ break-even(loss if commissions are taken into account) for transparency
5th Trade.NQ, +40 ticks.
Thats my average day for years now.
I am happy to post few trading days but my system is
Price reading, so everyones thinking is different
Nothing else, will be disclosed, except show a trading week and how trades are managed
Hopefully you become profitable.
Ive been working on my "system" as well. Sounds kinda like what I've been trying to do. Posting your chart would be helpful I think anyway as I can pu alot of things on a chart that are hard to describe in detail. Not only that I might see and gain something from it you never considered or doesnt fit with your style.
Whet412, it would be great if you can post some of your charts. I guess you trade on ES mini (not micro and of course all the others you showed). Would you guys recommend to start with the micro or ES mini directly?
- Scalping is very, very hard. It seems like it wouldn't be, but the majority of traders on futures.io who have traded as scalpers have lost pretty heavily over the years. This is probably because the short timeframe and the short, quick moves increase the psychological stress on the trader, which interferes with their decision-making. You have to be very, very accurate in your timing, which is not easy.
- Targeting 4 ticks is going to be extremely hard. You are basically trading the random twitches of the market, the noise or near-noise. Again, it may seem otherwise, but no matter how it may seem or what you may read, actual traders don't generally do well with these tiny moves.
- Trading the micros, with an account that is deliberately larger than the minimum allowed margin, is a good idea, simply because you will lose less with micros, and it will take longer to lose it. You will pay disproportionately more in commissions, as you noted. If you consider the micro account as simply a learning vehicle, you can decide to not care about the commissions, nor really about the losses. Realistically, you are going to be losing a lot from trading anyway as you start out. Take the experiences and learn from them. You can eventually turn that around, but losses are going come, and you are never going to be entirely without them.
Yes, to all the above.
There is nothing wrong with scalping, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to trade this way, but it is almost surely going to be more difficult to make it as a scalper, at least as you start out. Your point (1) above is, in fact, the biggest issue for the trader in any timeframe: your mind will play tricks on you, get you into trades you would never consider if you had time to try to be rational about them, trades that you look at in hindsight and say, "What the hell was I thinking of here?" -- and this will happen again and again. Your own trading psychology is at least as important as your trading method -- in fact, much more important.
Also, what someone else thinks (myself included) and what someone else does or has done is not really relevant to you. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, if you look at it that way), your trading is something you will have to learn for yourself, on your own, at least primarily. Others can help you, and will be willing to try, and you can learn from them. But it's still all you, in the end.
If you are willing, I strongly advise starting a trade journal here on futures.io and publicly post and discuss your trades. The prospect may be frightening, but it is one way to bring yourself to objectively look at what you do each day and come to grips with what is going well, and what is not.
Good luck. This stuff isn't easy. But it's not impossible either.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
Hi Hugoab
you hit the nail on the head with the first point you make
"1) My mind is sometimes playing tricks on me by seeing good setups that are really not there."
you bring into the great debate ..TA versus Quantum random distribution camps..
Many people fall into the trap..."this looks like a pattern i can make a living off " we have all been there...in the end the pattern alone was not a workable tradeable method...
very tricky game this trading...the snake changes skin too..
like the journey of the self, keep looking , testing, keep open mind, be scientific and stats based... many so called "patterns" dont appear until other things have been built.. to help one "see"
I think this particular question can
a) Become a source of unrealistic expectations and frustration.
b) Obscure more subtle signs of progress.
Here's why:
I personally don't think you should equate your potential as a trader to how quickly you can say you became profitable. There are different levels of profitability, different personal quirks, and different trading schools of thought may have deeper learning curves than others but lead to better results for your particular psyche in the longer-term.
One of the best quotes I've read wasn't from a trader but from an entrepreneur who said something along the lines of "the first five years of owning your own business are a sh!t-show!". I like the mentality of treating trading as your business, and I especially like the mentality of designing the course of your path around longevity. Preservation of capital and risk-management will keep you in the game to give you time to find the answers to all these questions you are seeking.
There's a milestone I've experienced which is a sense of control over your survival, you're not quite profitable but you also feel that its within your power to not self-destruct. You've learned enough to have the discipline to survive and figure out the next segment of your path. I use this as a new baseline to latch onto and you kind of find the next foothold from there.
would love to hear your opinion/suggestions.... cheers
