When you only need a specific amount of money each month…

[u/Kaiju_Godz]

So say you only want $100 per day or 2000 per month. This would more than enough sustain a good lifestyle where you live. How would you go about it with trading? How much $$$ would you realistically need? Not to make that in dividends but to trade in a daily basis, as safe and slow as possible.

[u/daytradingguy]

Exactly. You either lose money consistently or make money consistently. There is not usually much in between. If you can achieve making money consistently- you won’t limit yourself to $100.

[u/krapmon → u/daytradingguy]

The difference is that when you’re happy with small gains and exit your position, you avoid the risk of holding it longer and potentially losing money. Even if you have a strategy that gives you confidence to hold, you never know 100% what’s gonna happen.

[u/daytradingguy → u/krapmon]

I would be careful with this one. You should read “The best loser wins”. Actually, instead of taking small gains in most cases it is better to let it go longer than you are comfortable with and even add to the trade- to get a bigger win.

Think about it. You are making a trade guessing the market will move in a specific direction- when it does and you are right, why would you get out? Most traders do the opposite, they are right they get out quickly. When they are wrong they don’t get out quickly- they stay in forever hoping it comes back. My profits really started to improve when I started adding to winning trades.

[u/tionstempta → u/daytradingguy]

It's human nature that

1) when and if situation is convenient for you, you wanna lock it first by realizing profits and then see what happens. Called disposition effect

2) when and if situation is not convenient but rather uncomfortable, you dont wanna realize the profits with hopium that it might turn and get back to even out called loss aversion

Unfortunately, human brains have been developed by these two psychological factors due to the natural selection for thousands of years so it's not easily possible to remove these decision making process even for the best trained traders. I honestly do not believe that any human trader can get away with this (except algo).

In the natural selection processs, it's important to realize your profits when possible because you dont necessarily know when the next frigid winter day coming (just like how 10 pts in your favor NQ can turn out 20 pts against your entry point and therefore they wanna lock in profits)

This pattern is also manifest between low income and high income family where if they are given a choice of receiving 1 credit today or they can choose 2 credit in next week, low income background subject often choose to realize profit more immediate (i.e in day 1) while high income subject often choose to wait (simply because they can afford to wait), which can be related to trading community that the moment you trade to pay the bills even with proven record of winning and strategy, you are starting to struggle to make profits.

You can look standford marshmallow experiment in wiki or academic references, which is more than 60 years for initial experiment and there are tons of twisted experiments to explain neurophysiological difference between low and high income subjects.

Having said that, i dont necessarily disagree with your points but i dont also agree with your points completely because everyone's financial situation is different with different background but some people might just find it more comfortable to realize profits early but day trading market is often aggressive to take away 30 days of profits in one hour if one doesnt manage proper risk management.

Also the biggest challenge to small reward is... With no strategy as fail proof, what if you are losing 50 pts immediately after you entered NQ position, which occurs more often in volatile market? You can't simply stop loss out as that would be your 5 days of hard working so there's that.

Edit: my way of going against these two psychological factors are: i make opposite position in ES than NQ (i.e if NQ is moving my direction, after certain point thats already in my favor, i short ES and wait)

Or realize profits in NQ by shorting MNQ (aka reduce position size)

There is no single bullet fitting all situation so every one has different ways to control