I've been casually buying stocks for about 5 years. I started with $500 and slowly worked my way up to $25,000. Very, very slowly.
I didn't actually start regularly day trading until a couple of years ago, but it was still a fairly casual enterprise.
Last year, I took my tools for automating the news and scraping data, looking for corruption, and applied them to the stockmarket, building my own trading algorithm via a "Red Light, Green Light" system. The automation drastically improved my returns because of high frequency, low risk trading. However, the principles are the same as if one were to do it manually.
I've no education or training in finance. I do not work with anyone. I taught myself. My brother in law is a hedge fund employee and he disagrees with everything I say, but my portfolio far outperforms his. Mainly, because he actually takes time to read technicals and fundamentals and I just use scripts to read them for me and weight them accordingly.
Prior to last year, I made a few dozen trades. Last year, I made thousands of trades and only Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have screwed me, so far. That's two trades of thousands and they pay a dividend, so it is not exactly a losing bet.
Institutional investors are operating on bad information nearly all of the time. They are molded to think a certain way, like lawyers or doctors or any other very educated professionals. Their mindset is such that they get pissed and annoyed at the success of laymen.
Forex is great, though my algo for forex shoots for very small gains... currently set at .25% to trigger.
I'm like you. I'm frugal. I seek only small gains... just very rapidly. I have a family and I view our money as ours and I don't make unnecessary risks.
I'm always cautious of the market being crashed intentionally, so I do branch out into crypto and precious metals to hedge against a crashed dollar.
If you are trading manually, price action indicators + sentiment indicators are pretty darn good for staying in the money.
My recommendation is that you learn all the different ways to trade. Everyone has a different personality and different trading styles appeal to different personalities. Exploring all of your options helps you do what you are doing, already, better, and will also help you hedge across more venues.
Personally, I find selling credit spreads to my liking. One, because I can look at a chart and visualize the spread very easily, compared to everyone I know. Two, because, after experimenting with it, I kept making more money selling the credit spreads than I was on the equities.
I generally try to hold an equity long term... at least one year... and will play with options to steer my profits the way I want, if it isn't going the way I had hoped. Manually, I find I get a bit lazy, which is why I use automation to set my prices and quantities. I try to sell everything at once, manually, where an algo will space out the sales temporally.
Oh... and watch out for shit like this...
https://i.redd.it/q3jxwu7ns1h61.png
See how he wants you to think $3? Maybe... but the chart is a bit of a trick. I see more like $1.85. Never try to outguess the moving average.
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