Oddbean

15 contracts in the $150k account. Which is a fucking lot actually. 10 points of movement in the S&P500 means you make or lose $500 per contract. Even trading just 4 contracts at a time you can blow your account pretty quickly. Once you've built up a profit cushion you have more room to play but when you're starting at zero you can only lose $4500 of their money in the $150k account before they cut you off. Sometimes the market can swing 10 points in like five minutes so if you're slinging 4 contracts around you can lose $2k that fast. I always ended up losing money in the long run. Sometimes I'd get lucky for a while but it never lasted.

I've tried a few things. They all work in certain conditions. Range bound days are easy to print money if you can identify support/resistance levels early enough in the day, but those levels tend to be squishy so you can't use too tight of a stop loss, and can't be too specific with your entries. Trend days are my favorite. Just attack every little pullback and ride the trend. Those days don't happen often enough though. I tend not to have enough patience to stare at a screen and do nothing for days and days until I get the market conditions that I want. Most days are choppy with shifting market conditions where by the time you define your levels the next swing invalidates them. It can be very frustrating. I don't do a lot of TA. It's a craps shoot. Except for wedges. When price action started narrowing down into a tighter and tighter wedge it's usually going to break out and run soon. But a lot of that TA nonsense is just hoodoo voodoo. Astrology for men.