I'm not the best to ask, as I am always trading around some delta position, but each setup has a scale out target on (stat) vol or best case on my op-vol (peak PNL stress).
Indirectly related but nonetheless... Why is it most successful traders of financial markets have no desire to pass on their knowledge to anyone - be it family / friends / colleagues / whomever? Greed? Selfishness? Tried but patrons were pain in the ass and wanted a quick fix? Just curious honestly. Skilled traders obviously make good money. Seems a waste to let the knowledge simply die with them. Why not help / teach someone else and pay it forward? Then again - humans can be disgusting creatures. Just always wondered. Thanks for the thread and knowledge in any case.
"Day-swing" (as opposed to scalping). If you observe Price TA, style is the same regardless of time frame. "Buy support, sell resistance, chase breakouts..." Time frame per se isn't a factor. Holding period isn't pre-determined. Just go with what the charts are saying. On a day-swing play on a futures contract, you might hold one position for most of the day... and depending upon your luck with counters you might hold it all day and even overnight. A swing play on an ETF might last several days/weeks or more.... again with the counters and how you guess 'em.
Of course you want to TRY to "let your winners run".. but the market makes that difficult because of "counters"... moves against your position and/moves against the trend. You always have to cope with counters... all of which start out small. Some are small and return to trend quickly, others get much bigger of course. The choices with counters are "ride 'em out" or "trade out and trade back in when indicated". Of the two, I prefer the latter.
Teaching takes a lot of time and there is no financial upside unless you can do it in a big way. "Trading schools" try to do that with having a large following and each student paying a significant fee for the privilege. Usually not worth it as we already know.
As an old timer, and particularly relating to index futures, do you feel price action/behaviour intraday have changed since you started trading? If yes - how so? I seem to recall Marty Schwartz who was very successful day trading e-mini S&P 500 futures say in a newer interview that he no longer could day trade ES futures successfully in present date or something to that effect.
I think it's still the same except moves are more volatile and faster. I really don't like that, but what can we do? Traders have a "comfort zone" for "all whatevers" going on. When the market movement gets outside that zone, traders tend to do less well... me included. We now live in the age of the "interventionist market". I liked it better years back... but unfortunately, we ain't goin' back to Kansas. Observe what happens after a Fed announcement or economic number. The futures usually THRASH back and forth several times.. 20 points or more in a minute or two.... and occasionally a lot bigger. I look at that and wonder, "how can I trade that"? The answer is that I probably can't, so I don't bother to try.
Maybe it's a definition thing. I think of scalping as "risking 2 tics trying to make 4". On a day swing you might hold the trade for 3 hours and make 30 points... sell out.. then buy back in later and hopefully make some more points. There are two kinds of proper "sells" on a long position. 1, you're trying to sell into exhaustion to secure max profit... which is what you'd do at significant resistance. 2, you sell defensively. That is it looks like the up-action is finished and is now in a counter. Your guess is to not ride this one out, so you sell and hope it goes down enough so that you can buy back at a better price.
Can you speak of any resources/teachers that helped you with developing this style of trading? Thanks!