Why I stopped trying to day trade Hang Seng

Staring at the screen during lunch break

I remember back when I was really into checking the Hang Seng index during my lunch hour. It felt like a solid plan at the time. I would pull up the charts on my phone right around 11:00 AM or 12:00 PM, trying to see if I could catch a quick swing before the afternoon session went sideways. The reality was that it usually just made my digestion worse. I’d be sitting there eating a mediocre sandwich, squinting at the flickering numbers while the index would jump 0.3% up and then slide 0.5% down within minutes. It felt like I was trying to predict the weather by looking at a broken thermometer.

The RSI indicator trap

I spent way too much time obsessing over the RSI indicator. I thought if I just found the perfect oversold point, I could time my entry and walk away with a small profit. I even started comparing it to my experience with domestic stocks like KODEX 200, thinking the logic would carry over. It never really did. Every time the RSI told me it was ‘safe’ to buy, the market would just ignore it and keep dipping further. I had this notebook where I tried to track my trades, but looking back, it just looks like a list of times I lost twenty or thirty dollars to fees. The commissions for overseas futures are no joke, and they eat through those tiny gains faster than I could have imagined when I first started.

Missing the US market simplicity

Sometimes I look at the fees I pay for US stock trading and wonder why I keep bothering with Hong Kong stocks. It’s not just the fees; it’s the timing. Trying to sync my life with the Hong Kong market hours while living in Korea just felt like an unnecessary chore after a while. I remember one specific week when I was so stressed about the index fluctuating that I barely looked at my actual job work. I was constantly refreshing news about Nvidia earnings or tech sector movements, hoping for some sort of signal that never actually helped me trade better. It wasn’t even about the money as much as it was about the distraction.

Dealing with the quiet annoyance of small losses

There’s something particularly draining about losing money on a trade that you’ve been ‘researching’ all morning. It’s not a huge, life-changing loss, but it’s just enough to make you feel stupid for the rest of the day. I tried to convince myself that I was learning the patterns of the market, but really, I was just spinning my wheels. I don’t think I ever actually learned how to trade the Hang Seng effectively. I just learned that I get impatient when I’m staring at a screen for too long. My friend once told me to just buy and hold, but that didn’t feel like ‘trading’ enough for me at the time. Now, looking at my app, I honestly don’t even remember why I held those specific positions for so long.

The lingering uncertainty

I still hold a few positions, mostly just because I can’t be bothered to sell them at a loss right now. It feels like I’m stuck in this weird limbo where I know I’m not really good at this, but I’m not quite ready to admit it was a waste of time. Maybe I’ll look into it again when the market stabilizes, or maybe I’ll just transfer the remaining balance out and delete the app entirely. There’s no big lesson here, really. Just a pile of small, annoying memories of watching a red arrow move against me while I was supposed to be finishing my lunch.