[Kirkrrr]

Had a really great weekend in Mexico but now I'm back. Okay, some quick thoughts in reponse:

You make some good points and I take back what I said wrt you having no clue. You just have no clue exactly what "trading" involves, which is a different but a more forgivable sin.

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Anyway that is irrelevant. My point was that for the past 5 years the market has been benign for day trading, it has been very predictable, so predictable that then need for selective bias is all most unnecessary to show a profit and a blind monkey throwing darts at a board could do it. (Where is this dealt with in this tread, swerved more like.)

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Intra-day action is very different from end-of-day results. You can look at the S&P going up a couple points every day and it would seem that the market is "benign" but intra-day the market is very volatile nevertheless. It doesn't steadily go up, it fluctuates pretty violently. Do this quick exercise: pull up an intra-day chart and scroll all the way to the left, to the beginning of the day. Then slowly start going right and seeing the day unfold. It's a cool picture.

Once you throw in some basic support and resistance levels, fibonacci retracements, and look at all of it in terms of volume as it's coming in and coming out (those are usually called "setups") you can in fact anticipate short-term price movements. As you pull out and look at the bigger picture you can anticipate and predict with a fair amount of accuracy longer-term trends as well. Bear in mind that the best traders have an efficacy rate of about 67%, ie the difference between being insanely rich and broke is not much greater than a coinflip, and yet it literally makes all the difference in the world. There are good reasons for that.

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Obviously a blind monkey is less likely to make as much profit as someone with good selection bias but they would show a profit non the less.

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That's just plain retarded, and it's comments like this that make you look dumb. Avoid hyperboles, they rarely help your case in any situation.

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Yes markets drop twice as fast as when they rise. But when those drastic drops occur historically they have allways caught the market by surprise, a few market players made some big bucks but the vast majority got burnt. You miss the pertinent fact about Bear markets, they are much more unpredictable than Bull markets, it is not the down trend that clears out investors, it is the unpredictability.

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It's the unpredictability in general that clears out investors, in both bull and bear markets. To provide a concrete example, see if you can sit down and figure out what the market will do by next month. You can't. In fact, no one can, traders or investors alike. And it is, in fact, the downtrend that clears out investors and traders love bear markets just as much as bull, if not more. It's a well known fact that traders thrive on markets that move, in either direction.

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In a bull market, the shorts stand out against the calls in clear distinction

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...huh? You're somehow managing to mix being short stocks with some sort of options lingo which doesn't make much sense, at least to me. A lot of traders make a lot of money trading pure volatility (such as options) and that's done in any market. The average retail buy-hold-and-pray investor obviously does worse as vol increases.

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Day traders are so out and behind of the information loop that it becomes very difficult for them to show profits in a bear market. This has been borne out many times and if you dispute the above point you are merely deluding your self.

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As always, you're confusing fundamental investing with technical trading. The inherent problem with fundamental investing is relying on unreliable information (ie Enron). With technical investing it's all there for you to see. Being able to correctly interpret it, however, is what separates the winners from the losers.

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This is a total guesstimate admittedly but I would guess that for every 1000 would be self taught day traders 1 in 1000 has the intelligence, knowledge and skills to succeed in a true bear market.

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The figure I got from traders with decades of trading experience is 7.5% success rate, which would put the figure in your example at 75.

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1: It is restricted by time

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Nah, not really. Yes, most traders like to end the day with no inventory, but if there's a good trend in place nothing would stop you from carrying it into the next day/week/month. We're not morons, y'know.

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2: It is restricted by asset class

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You really need to let all the futures/options/commodities traders know that they can't be doing what they're doing. Just be aware that you will ruin careers, lives, and probably make whole firms go under in a day... on second thought, don't say anything.

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Because I am not ignorant.

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You definitely have potential, once you become of an age where you stop blindly believing in what you know now - which please trust me isn't much and i'm not saying that out of malice - and start getting into the mindset that there's much to learn.

Bueno suerte,
Kirk

Edited for a little brevity's sake.