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Strategies & Market Trends : DAYTRADING Fundamentals -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jon Tara who wrote (7045)	2/27/2000 10:31:00 PM
From: Robert Graham	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18137

I agree with you 100%. I consider for myself trading anything over five round trips for the SPOO e-mini to be overtrading for me. And some of my best days so far have been with with three or four round trip trades. I agree that a good part of the trading day is not tradable. I think the reason many continue to trade through the day is either that they are just there for the "action", which is separate from being there to actually make money, or they have not been able distinguish congestion market trading from other types of markets that are more conducive to the making of profits. I find the understanding and identification of congested markets to be difficult for many traders to understand, including professional traders. So when the price action changes on them to resemble congestion prone to short moves and whipsaws related to the setups they do trade, they still continue to trade as though nothing had happened. Then you see them end up with a predictable series of losses from positions they were whipsawed out of wondering what happened to them. Some of the more frustrated types that need to be in the action then start to trade the price wiggles further putting themselves into trouble that can spiral down their account. Add to this scenario a psychologically addictive personality type, and then watch the person go to ruin in short order. The most significant improvement I have made to my trading is not trading setups that encourage scalping on the psychologically attractive smaller time frames. Besides avoiding to overtrade, I also found knowing when to quite a market that is degenerating into congestion is a very good way to not give my profits back to the market. Now here I must add that there are probably those traders that can successfully scalp and make a profit on 50 round trips a day. But I do believe these people make up a very small minority of successful traders in the market. Bob Graham