Day Trader - money potential vs prep time compared to poker

[mrbaseball]

Lots of trading software has autotrading (ie computer places order) built in. You just have to define the parameters you want it to trade.

[Moseley]

[ QUOTE ]
If you look at a daily graph of almost any liguid equity future you will find that the distance between the absolute high and the absolute low of any six month period is less that 10% of the sum of the days' ranges.

More to the point for a day trader you will find that the sum of the intra-session volatility is almost always 2-5 times the daily range.

What that means is that if over a six month period you are skilled enough to capture only 2-5% of daily volatility (1/20th) then you will do better than a longer term trader who does the impossible by capturing 100% of 6 months' range.

Now with very effective and inexpensive software packages and commissions of only a few < $5 dollars per round turn per contract available to the public and half of that to those whose volume warrants leasing a seat almost anybody can enter this world.

At TradeStation for example you can open a futures trading account for $5k, the software is $99 per month and free if you make only 10 round turns in a month.

To Day trade the emini S&P which is the most widely traded equity derivative on the planet requires a day margin of $1K per contract with retail commission of around $2.40 per trade per contract. (I have no affiliation w/TradeStation except as a satisfied customer for over 2 decades)

The daily range in this contract ranges between 12-20 Points. Intra-session swings total 30-70 points. One point is equal to $50.

If you can learn enough to capture only 2 net points of the 30-70 points available daily, then you will earn $100 per day per contract and that doubles required trading margin every 10 trading days. The market is liquid enough to support trade of 500-1,000 contracts per trade on an inter-session basis.

If you can learn to trade 1 contract successfully then you can trade 100 or more buy just increasing your order.

All orders can be placed electonically without talking to anyone. Executions, stop losses and cancel replaces are instaneous.

The are many successful ways to day-trade these markets and many, many more that are not successful. Probably the ratio of successful traders is about the same as long-term successful poker players, about 5-8%.

One thing for sure is that NO poker player has ever or will every earn as much as 10% of what the most successful derivative traders earn and many feel that it is easier to learn trading than NLHE.

At the very worst with a little effort and $5K you can get a great exposure and a lot of practice in what is truely the Big Game.

No matter how good you are or who you are there is only so much to be made playing poker. No matter what that amount is, it is but a fraction of what can be made if you can capture 1/10th of the daily volatility in the equity and other derivative markets.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree! It's as easy as beating Pacman (once you know the pattern) just that it is a little more complicated pattern.

Come on in! The water's warm!

[UrmaBlume]

Even sites like E-Trade offer auto-executions. The problem is that the paramaters for execution are from a very short list of very old and innefective indicators.

The ability to set speed and other parameters for such indicators as MAs', RSI, Stochastic aren't of much use since the indicators themselves are not of much use and therefore have little chance of producing profitable signals.

There are however some packages like TradeStation that allow you to write your own code and even import/export/process data from either inside or outside of the TradeStation data streams and then use that super-processed data as a signal that is activated automatically.

[UrmaBlume]

Phone or PM, sent # via PM

[Uglyowl]

[ QUOTE ]
Lots of trading software has autotrading (ie computer places order) built in. You just have to define the parameters you want it to trade.

[/ QUOTE ]

There's bots in the stock market too [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

[WiltOnTilt]

This might be kind of a dumb question but i don't care [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Are there accessible master logs of all trades mapped back to each person who makes the trade? In other words, could you somehow "datamine" a particular swing trader and then try to study his trading habits in an effort to "reverse engineer" his methodology?

KoW