I agree, forex long-term trades can be a tedious style.
But its not necessary to trade many many times per month in order to make decent money - it just doesn’t happen quickly. Twenty trades a month with a 55% win rate will get you financial security.
Have you considered commodities such as oil, or stock indices like SP500, US30, DAX, etc?
These move fast and far, trade well technically, and on most days will give at least one opportunity for a good move.
I migrated over to these instruments from forex some years back and now, being a day trader, I don’t have the patience to trade forex. Obviously, there are also good moves in forex but there are also many periods of slow, directionless motion.
But be careful, instruments that can offer hundreds of pips very quickly can also rip into your equity just as quickly…
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ve thought about commodities (futures) as a nice change up. I started in stocks as a long term strategy.
My broker (Schwab) gave me a thorough screening just to be able to trade options. I’d imagine they might deny my application to trade futures seeing as I don’t have enough experience trading futures (ironically).
I’ll call them Monday after submitting a request and ask them.
As for trading the S&P 500, are you saying you are trading the index as a whole? Would that be more advantageous to day traders such as yourself? Seeing as I can’t capitalize on lower timeframe trading
I started in oil stocks, and the price movement plus dividends was nice while I was in college. I always felt that trading the index was more of a buy and hold thing.
What is the cause of this difficulty? Trading short timeframes does not suit everyone but it does have some benefits, too. Have you found this too difficult to do profitably or does it just not suit your circumstances?
Rather than just plodding through lots of screens for all the various currency combinations, I think a lot of traders seek some kind of strong/weak analysis to select the pairs most likely to be trending against each other.
As an example there is a very long-running active thread on this site doing just that, you might like to take a look at it:
Buying options should not be a problem as the risk is defined and limited to the premium paid (as you know, of course) but I can imagine brokers being vigilant about clients just selling options in order to gain from time decay. But there are many sophisticated structures with options which can utilise short and long option combinations with different strike prices and expiry dates, etc to tailor exposure risk and profit potential. I am sure you have already explored this avenue?
Futures are a high risk instrument and I can understand the due diligence requirement in vetting clients.
Are you based in the US? If so, I don’t think you can trade CFD’s there, which I would guess most of us Europeans use. They are clean, cheap and easy to use for both long and short term trading. They are ideal for intraday trading with both short and long positions. I guess there are alternatives in the US but I am not familiar with them. So I suspect that futures would be the core instrument for trading commodities and indices in this way.
Many people think that and I think they are wrong, at least from a trading perspective. It is a belief based on the idea that in the long term the global economies just grow and grow and share prices with it. And I guess that has been the case if you measure change over decades. But from a trading perspective there are often periods of deep reversals in stock prices that provide excellent speculative opportunities from short positions rather than just sitting and waiting a few years for values to return to their earlier levels before moving higher. Take a look at this weekly chart for SP500:
From a long term investment point of view, such as a pension fund, a buy and hold is understandable, but those areas (years!) in the rectangles, show there are many big opportunities in both directions for the retail trader.
Even a look at the daily movements over the last 6 months shows the opportunities from the sell side:
You are already a happy person if you have found something you feel and understand in the market. You just don’t need to compare yourself so insistently to other traders. Some earn through the number of trades, some emphasise quality, maybe you just want more momentum - but there are many ways to develop this.
