Intra-day traders are just looking for price movement one way or the other. They'd just as soon go short as long. The long term trend of the market doesn't mean anything, as they are always flat at the end of the day.
The real question to ask is how they got their initial bankroll. All these internet trading wizards act as though the money fell out of the sky.
It's one thing to make a little money trading. It's a whole different animal to make enough to pull out your living expenses while still growing your bankroll.
The way most regular people become wealthy in the stock market is by feeding money into their brokerage account from other income sources and using that money to accumulate larger and larger positions. Doing this for 20-30 years, combined with a bit of luck, one can develop a nice net worth.
Of course, someone looking to get rich quick doesn't want to hear this story.
Exactly. Day trading is a grind.
The S&P500 futures will go up 10 points, down 15 points, up 5 points, often ending up exactly where it started. It has a 'personality' and that can change periodically as the level of liquidity changes.
This sort of behavior a lot of the time is indicative of most trading being short term speculation on most days. That in itself helps you figure out how to play it.
Some days, there will be longer term positioning going on and then the market goes one way for most of the day.
So you have the way a market works, then you have the chance on a day to day basis that it will be heavily directional, then you have periods where the interest dies out (August, December).
So you know how it moves, then you have to recognize when the amount of participation is changing. It takes a lot of days experience to start to recognize the subleties of these changes.
Then you have to have an approach for the various types of days that are playing out plus recognizing that can change intra-day depending on either scheduled or unplanned announcements.
When the PIGS debt issues were at the forefront, I was in a trade on the Bund on Eurex and Angela Merkel opened her mouth and said something off the hip about Germany withdrawing support. My stop was 12 ticks (price move units) below the current market price and it shot through that and filled me 23 ticks below that stop. So I lost 230 Euros per contract more than my 'worst case' scenarion because some Gobby Bull Dyke opened her mouth.
Similarly with the Ukraine/Russia thing the markets got spooked a long time and you immediately had to change your game plan.
None of this is really fundamental or technical analysis.
Even when you know what to watch for, you will still get sideswiped.