By Cliff Clark
How often do you hear someone ask, “How long will it take me to start making money”? I'm afraid that is a question that has no answer. Everybody is different. Not everybody will put in the same level of effort. Not everyone will get the same level of education. If you think you'll come into trading and be rolling in dough after a year or two you are probably a dreamer. There will be a select few that do but they are the exception not the rule. Why is that?
It's pretty simple really. How long does it take someone to be a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer? Many, many years in all cases. I was a software engineer. When I started my first job there was so much to learn. The first year I wrote about 1000 lines of code. Can you believe that? I had to learn new operating systems, new programming languages, the products I was writing code for and countless processes and procedures. It took me somewhere between 2 and 3 years to become a productive member of the team. FYI, when I retired 30+ years later I could write a 1000 lines of code in a week. Big difference don't you think? What was the difference? 30+ years of experience. We accumulate knowledge over time and hopefully improve with each new experience.
To relate this to trading. Even when you have completed PTS and think you have memorized the whole course you won't become a millionaire overnight. The reason being you don't have the experience. Most of the charts in the manual are perfect setups. They have to be for you to get an understanding of what each setup is and how they work. But once you are in the real world the perfect setups are few and far between. This is where experience comes in.
You'll have to learn to play imperfect setups, figuring out which of these setups will work best for you takes time. You'll have to look at 100's of thousands of charts to get good at it. I've probably looked at over a million charts since I started day trading in 2008. No exaggeration. I have scanned 1200-1500 charts just about every weekend since I started in 2008. I am scanning, looking for swing and core trades that might setup the following week. Combine that with the live charts I watch day trading during the week and you can see I have easily viewed over a million charts. In scanning those charts on the weekend and watching live charts during the week you will learn a lot of nuances about how stocks move, you gain experience.
Review every trade you take, figure out what you did wrong if it failed. Note what you did right if it was successful. If you can figure out why a trade failed ask a friend or mentor to take a look. If you don't figure out why a trade failed you'll likely be making the same mistakes over and over. You need to learn from your experiences.
You won't get that experience by opening your platform 15 minutes before the market opens or closing it 15 minutes after the market closes. You will get it by putting in your time, having a trading plan and pre-trade checklist. You will get there through determination and persistence! If you want to make 200R, 250R a year you won't get there by taking a moderator's trades in a trading room, you get there by gaining some experience and taking your own.
Good luck on the journey!
2 trades for me today with +1.5R total
1st Trade QCOM +2R
148.39/149.97 exit 143.25
12% gap down under pivot support and 50ma after a strong daily double top rejection,. I took it on a congestion breakdown with a fairly wide stop, leaving my 2R target 50c over its ATR, slow but consistent move down with great RW, hit my target on the penny before it bounced.
2nd Trade AQB -0.5R
9.40/9.70 exit 9.56
I rarely trade stocks under $10 and even more rarely short them. I liked this daily chart as it broke its uptrend channel and stayed under a strong 9.50 support line enough room to its daily 50ma. I entered after a pullback with a fairly wide stop but only 1/3 of its ATR used at the time. It failed to break down with the strong market open and stayed in a narrow range.
I actually broke my plan with this trade as I lowered my stop to a pivot where price made a big bounce earlier at 11am with a large seller sitting there. My thought was that if it breaks that level again then it will likely...
1 trade for (-1R)
I took a BD on QCOM. I was worried about the target being close to the daily range, so I took a tighter stop on the 2 min chart. I am looking through PTS right now, most of the examples have 2 options for where to put your stop. It looks to me like one of the stops would be at the bottom of the main consolidation area, and the other at the bottom of where there has been a shakeout or turnaround bar (if there has been one). Due to the daily range I took the tighter one on this. In hindsight it seems obvious to take the wider stop, but in the moment it looked ok.
I was then looking at the 15 min 3BP on QCOM, but the reason I used a tighter stop in the first place was because of the range. The 15 min 3BP would have needed to have gone even further than the wider stop on the 2 min BD, so I didn't take it.
