My goal this year is to turn the $5500 I put into Roth IRA into $6000, doing short term trades, then just leave the entire cash balance in money market account for remainder of year to earn another 2.25%+.
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I just want the best ETF which follows oil price in my set of ETF tickers, which I monitor and choose from each day, to buy/sell. I'll hedge two or three of the 10 or so in the list, and sell the ones which are currently giving me desired gains. I will never sell any ETF at a loss, will just hold until I make at least 1-2% on the ETF. Hoping to gain about 10% in 2019 on my $5500 -- sooner than later so I can stop having to do this because it's stressful watching the market each day.
It sounds like you are describing an investment philosophy that is related to the gambler's ruin concept. As with the gambler's ruin, the thing to understand is that "Persistently taking
even beneficial chances is never beneficial at the end."
Each trade you make starts out with an expected value that is positive (if extremely small if we're talking days or weeks rather than years or decades) for stocks, and zero for commodities and a big dispersion of outcomes, so we might as well approximate each transactions as a 50/50 chance of winning or losing money. Your goal is to keep playing the game until you've won a fixed amount.
Since the amount of money you want to win is relatively small relative to your overall bankroll ($550 vs $5500), the odds that your final outcome is "I made my 10%" are significantly higher 50%. However, the way you achieve that majority of scenarios outcome of gaining 10% is a willingness to continue playing the game even as you lose more and more money, so the majority outcome a 10% gain is balanced out by a non-trivial chance that you end up going to $0.
You could establish a higher threshold of "if I lose this much money I stop playing" which would limit your potential losses, but doing so would decrease your odds of finishing up 10% and increase your odds of finishing at
a loss even as it decreased the potential size of that loss. Actually that may be what you're doing by not being willing to sell one of your investments for a loss. It would be interesting to try to model the relative odds of success and the maximum potential losses of this strategy computationally, but the key thing to remember is that with extremely short term stock trading and all commodity trading the expected value is zero.
There are lots of expected value zero strategies where the
median outcome is that you make money, sometimes significant amounts of money, but the way those strategies achieve that outcome is by knowingly or unknowingly accepting a smaller probability of much larger losses.
Now that said, I spent my first year or two of trying to serious save for FIRE actively investing. (I steered clear of commodities thankfully.) You feel like a genius for a few months or a year (I did), and then sooner or later you take a bath that your portfolio doesn't quickly bounce back from. If nothing I or anyone else has convinced you, much better than you find this out for yourself now than later when you've got six or seven figures on the line.