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A couple of hours (including webinars, backtesting and stuff like that). I'm a 100% mechanical trader, and my only daily need is to doublecheck that the strategies work correctly throughout the US cash session.
Same here except trade in the morning before work watching the US opens. Out sick today and there is a lot of research about other markets I would like to do but alas no time. Need to just stick with CL until its figured out, then I can branch out.
Trade from 8:00 - 11:30, 4 markets. After that my brain turns to mush. Sometimes catch the cash close of CL or close of ES. Spend about an hour at nite getting prepped for next day. Took a while to find that balance.
I trade for 8hrs and take on an avg 2-3 trades per day. That's it! So in between those 8hours, i try to meditate for few minutes to regain my concentration. Another 1 to 1:30hr for my journaling which includes video journal, spreadsheets and my Mental Trading Account(idea taken from van tharp's teaching)
My losing trades lasts no more then 10min as i keep scaling out and when the market moves in my favour, i see to it that i ride it to maximum extent. So winning trades lasts for 1-2 hrs approx. Sometimes i hold for more then 6hrs. Depends on strength of the trend.
I am not a day trader so I am at the computer from 8am est to 5pm M-F. Maybe 4-5 hours on the weekend.
Gathering data for spreadsheets, balancing accounts with statements, researching, lots of researching. I am a fundamental trader so research is very important.
well, if you include prep time as part of the whole of trading (which I do - in my view execution is the absolute last step of the trading process), I would guesstimate around 7-8hrs, like any other job. Lunch is either eaten after the close, or over 10 minutes during a lull, no breaks for the vigilant few!
Initially to get my algo model up and running it was 12 hour days for 5 months then once it went live it's basically 1 hour a day to monitor at certain time and then pull the historic data and run the P&L. Sadly, the hours never really decrease as you continue research and monitoring, testing.
Theoretically I would hope the best reason to build an Algo it to reduce the hours and screen time....