Day trading

Day trading from my experience:

1.Close positions when profit is sizeable. Waiting for higher profits doesn't work most of the time (short time span)

2. Close  'losing' trades.

3. Made huge bets but failed.

4. Getting the timing right is the most important. Unfortunately, I do not do this full time and can't wait longer to enter a trade. 

5.Knowing the momentum of a trend might be helpful in determining when to enter a trade.

6.Don't go long when markets are bad (Only do this when you are 70% sure that it is the lowest point ) Eg- Gold/Silver/Oil Last week's scenario. 

7.Some instruments have a 'fixed/regular' pattern. Use it to your advantage. When it goes down, changes direction and up again. Simple.

8. Volatility is good if you are fast enough.

9. Turning 10,000 into 20,000 was no walk in the park. It was like 10,000 →6000 →12,000 →12,300 →12,400 →13500 →14687 →24,000 →22,000 →21,500 →20,000 →19,500 →17,800 →18,600 →19100. Now the real challenge is consistent performance. I hope to make it 30,000 someday. I suspect it is going to be more difficult. The last few days: I wasn't doing much, jut holding and testing some ideas/concepts. I didn't invest 100% of funds, maybe 10% most of the time, sometimes 50%. 


I don't know why, but I had quite good trades last month. ( From just a selection of Gold, Silver, Oil, EUR/USD, etc,...) My strategy then was: buying and selling very frequently and I rarely held position for more than 2 days. Of course, there was no danger of your positions turning bad overnight because I closed most positions, unless they were intentionally left open.

Unfortunately No. 1 always happens to me. The position always becomes more negative.


Some 'mistakes':

I bought 1500 of TSCO at 1.9045 about 2 week ago, before the sharp drop. Ok the figure looked bad: -500+ Now, it's -92. 

As for stocks like GS,AAPL, MCD, same thing happened. They were negative for a while before becoming profitable now. I also picked up in the last few days EUSTOX50 which was doing well. 
I bought Gold and Silver at the worst timing possible. It's now -1100 in total.
Just when I thought Oil 20Jan 2015 couldn't go further, it did. -1412 there. I'm confident that it will rebound by 20 Jan. ' Hopefully'

I shorted EUR/RUB, at that time where it was about 80. Quite good.



Whatever trading style suits you. The professionals advise retail traders not to use too much leverage. 100:1 is too high, maybe 10 max. Well, if you like the leverage, go for it. I don't think any trading style is better, as long as you have consistent returns.  


At my highest equity figure, it was about 24,000. Now it's about 19000, owing to the various mistakes ( on impulse) along the way. 22400 was the figure that was realised-mainly due to making a huge bet on oil that week where there was a sudden surge. I thought I was going to empty the account within 5 days, but it didn't happen. (All this done on Trading 212 mobile app-no fancy technical analysis) I admit, you do feel the gain, even though it is just a practice account. It is also rather (unnecessarily)worrying if you lose.

You might think, if  can  get good returns on 10,000 invested, I should be able to do the same if I had a much higher capital like 200,000....theoretically. The only problem is the leverage when it goes wrong. Start your own fund and get a decent return of 30% per annum- not too bad. People are not expecting quintuple returns in a single year. For example, industry average: 25% Your fund: 500%.