OsbourneCox

I would add Art of the Trade. More biographical than technical but I think it has the single most valuable "big picture" concept in it for traders. (Takes a while to get to it, but it's an enjoyable read along the way.)

What are people's thoughts about this article? http://wallstcheatsheet.com/trading/heres-the-proof-day-trading-is-dead/?p=20096/

I have found I kept missing out on taking small gains trying to get the larger moves of 50-100 cents in a ~100 stock. So I'm wondering if the key is to aim for smaller gains while keeping an eye on possible larger moves. This would lead to more trades per day but might be better for the bottom line in the end. Given that, I'm curious: How many trades do you put on in a day? What's your ideal target that you're aiming for? (Described as percent of stock move or percent of position gained or just plain cents moved / dollars made.) What's your average holding time?

As far as the video on motivation goes, this is a much better version: [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc]YouTube - RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us[/ame]

I like that list, especially 2 and 3. When I started out, I would often just focus on the individual stock. It took me a while to understand that a great short setup when the market is strongly bullish is worthless.

For me, I just feel like when I'm in a winning trade, I'm able to be fully open to the information that the market is giving me. And I can just feel the price action and know when it's bottoming/topping. When I'm looking to enter a trade, there's the urgency of doing something and the fear of missing a move. Also, since I don't trade a single instrument like the e-minis but instead trade individual stocks, my attention is fragmented. It also doesn't help that I trade over the shoulder of working at real job at home. (The ideal way to learn to day trade, though, so I have every incentive to make it work.) I will tell you one thing that has helped my patience enormously in the past two weeks: I use TOS and discovered the ability to pull current prices into Excel via DDE. So I have a list of potential trades with stops and targets and I can watch as the risk goes up or down for a score of possible positions. I use conditional coloring to highlight the important info so I just need to glance at the spreadsheet to get an idea of the state of my trade ideas. Personally, alerts never did it for me. Watchlists require you to go through each entry one by one and I find I rarely do that during the day. And I'm not keen on just setting a stop entry at a low risk entry point because I want to evaluate a possible trade one last time before pulling the trigger. If the price action starts to really go opposite of the direction you want it to go, it will nail your entry stop and go straight on through to your exit stop. That's just wasted money. It might work for some people but that's not my style. So now I'm focused on entering trades with low risk and all sense of impatience and urgency is gone. Completely. I just calmly look at a list of trades and until I start seeing some green in the Risk column, I don't care. And my results these past two weeks have been stellar. No overtrading and the best gains in 2010. I can do my homework at night, come up with a list of potential trades, put them into my spreadsheet and be ready the next day. It's funny how such a small change can make a huge difference.

I do similar things, but it's not because I'm "someone else". I just make the tactical mistake of managing a swing trade as a day trade. That causes me to ignore the multi day picture and hyper focus on the 5min chart. If you're going to swing trade, swing trade. Put on the trade, set your swing stop and stop paying attention to it. Just make sure your position size and stop combine to a loss that you can stomach. By definition, a swing trade will take one or more days to hit your target. And by definition, the stock will both move for you and against you. There's no reason to watch that movement if it's going to stress you out. At the very least it's going to be a waste of time that can be used to look for additional setups. It's funny, though, I'm AWESOME exiting trades. I can nail the extreme of a movement when I'm in a winning trade. It's my entries that suck. I'd be more than happy to manage your trade exits. :-D

I would be interested.

I don't trade futures, just straight equities, so I have no opinion on the comments on the ES market. As for the TraderFeed example, if you're looking to track sector performance, just track the sector ETFs. No need to bother with a basket of stocks as the ETFs are the basket of stocks. (And more than you'd want to put into a spreadsheet.) Personally, I have a watchlist for each of the sector ETFs with each component stock so I can quickly review all of the charts.

I read a lot about people talking about having an edge and using setups but everyone is incredibly tight lipped about their actual setups for fear that describing the setup will eliminate the setup's success. So coming up with one's own setups seems a bit daunting. How do people here come up with their setups? Do you find them in a book? Are they coming from some system you bought? Did you deduce your setup(s) from watching the market and backtesting it? Do you find them in a forum? I've been trading on the side these past 15 months (I work from home) and I have learned a lot in that time. But my trading remains to a large part discretionary, i.e. - Not based on specific quantifiable setups. So this is my next area of improvement: Decide on, develop and implement trading strategies on specific setups. As a start, I've started reading Street Smarts by Linda Raschke which details specific setups. (The only book that I've found that does so.) It's a start but I'm hoping for some suggestions to move the process along. So how did you come up with your setups? Examples are always helpful, even if they are made specifically vague to hide the specifics of the actual setup.

Hi HighStakes, I'll ignore the question of trading the /ES and get back to your original question about markets to track. I think it's worth making a distinction between intraday tracking and after hours tracking because some of the things you really want to monitor when you're placing trades and other things are fine being reviewed when you're preparing for the next day just to get a sense of the overall market. I also think it's worth making a distinction between markets and indicators. Your list includes both. First of all, you make a lot of comments about mid-term/long-term time frames. So this isn't a market, this is your perspective of the market you're trading. And I'm a big fan of watching multiple time frames. Alexander Elder's book "Come Into My Trading Room" has an excellent writeup about using triple time frames. Check it out and definitely investigate creating a setup screen to view all the time periods simultaneously. It works much better than flipping between windows. As for what to watch intraday, everyone is spot on with warning against including too much and suffering from analysis paralysis. (It will also affect computer processing power.) Only add things you know you will use and do it incrementally. Remove what you don't use. In regards to indicators, my screen includes A/D lines, A/D Volume lines and TICK, one set of each for the NYSE and Nasdaq. I take all of these into account when planning trades and rank them high on the list of things to watch. As for markets that I keep open on my screen, I watch the SPY, QQQQ, IWM and XLF. I also watch the VIX, US Dollar futures, and TLT (30 year treasuries). These aren't the markets I trade, they are simply the markets I watch. I keep things like gold, oil and other currencies in a "Market Overview" watchlist and will review them from time to time, sometimes during the day, many times not. I guess this is where a lot of the "after hour" candidates can find a home. Things like sector performance, currencies and foreign markets fall into this category. I have found constantly monitoring specific sectors during the day is definitely information overload with very little value added. Also keep in mind: The auxiliary markets that you track can and should change over time as they become more or less important. For example, a few months ago, the SPX had a very close correlation to the USD. If the dollar fell, the market went up. Eventually that correlation disappeared (basically when the USD started to rise) but while the correlation existed, it was worth watching closely. But in the end, trading is about finding your style, your edge and what works for you. So take people's suggestions (or criticisms) into consideration but in the end, there's no single best way to trade.