Very impressive. Thank you KCalhoun. I like this. This gives a trader a repeatable work flow process daily to follow AND practice. Basically be in the front of the computer each day 1.5 hour before the bell. Very strategic and systematic process. I am learning its about the daily process as well and preparation, not just chart reading. What are you thoughts : 1. Should a trader stop trading after daily profit goal? Of course their is a daily max limit, but often times I do not know my daily goal or if I should have one.
Sure; here's my other one: Www.trademastery.com/flowchart.pdf The only goal number I use is to stop trading if I'm down $500 on a day, I set no profit goal since that would limit my upside. In general though if I'm up $800+ on a day I get much more selective, smaller size to protect profits
I've been doing client work since 2008. Been trading since 1994. In the pits, commercial desk, hedge fund desk, proprietary firms, my own account. Started electronically with Globex and Project A in 1996, and was in the first wave of Chicago traders on the Deutsche Termina Borse (now Eurex) in 1998. I have had about 200 clients from ET who are all experienced traders before they hired me. I despise generalizations when it comes to trading, however there is one thing that I can share with you that I learned from my client experiences - and that is that intraday trading manually with a mouse and order book DOM is an incredibly difficult endeavor made next to impossible by the myriad of bots and algos that dominate the price action. Personally I can't think of a poorer risk vs reward strategy at present. That is a controversial statement and it is my opinion based on feedback from a couple hundred clients. But IMO mixing it up with very well capitalized bots and algos is really stacking the deck against yourself. My sincere, heartfelt advice would be to trade smaller size and to hang on to positions longer. You need to get away from the bot/algo turbulence and swing trading smaller size would be a wise consideration. Learn to swing trade. We do it with spreads, but you can do it with micro futures or small lots of equity shares. It's a hell of a lot cheaper in terms of commissions and fees as well. I wish you good fortune ! YMMV, just my two cents.
Why are spreads immune from bot/algo turbulence? Aren't spreads the perfect vehicle for quantitative based trading? I would assume that the more liquid the trading vehicle, the more likelihood that some serious money algos come in and rule (manipulate) it. In other words, spreads trading should be very efficient - hence lack edge (assuming tendency to mean revert is not an edge). I know close to zero on this, so would appreciate your point of view. Thanks.
Nope. The higher the correlation between products the lower the volatility. Arbitrage between highly correlated products keeps the short term volatility down but longer term trend movements persist.
I was referring to days - but even hours would be better than scalping the damned thing. I would say even if you could take only 2 or 3 really well set up trades per day - that would be a better risk vs reward skew than scalping. (Unless you have automation and a very expensive ECN. But even then, is your ECN better than DRW/DE Shaw/Jump/etc. etc. ?)
Hello bone, Yes, thanks for the response and sharing your expereinced and advice with us. I would definetly agree with you about the scalping stuff. It is just too difficult for the one person brain. The brain go back and foward and my brain get dizzy trying to scalp ass around. Taking 1-2 trades of a swing per day for RR >2 is better I have been noticing with some of my trades with CL. I have been considering swing trading over days SPY and UCO using the day chart as trade off for swing trading ES and CL because then I can buy small amount of shares for cheap until I prove I can trade consistenty for about 2 year stratight. Even betting $10 per trade until I am consistent is good for me before scaling up. I keep my risk down, save my capital, until I earn the right to scale/risk higher.
In my experience equities are a lot easier to trade and be consistent at than CL. Unless you have some type of edge or particular reason you trade CL. Someone else can jump in and correct me if this isn't their experience as well, but out of all the traders I know only one was really successful with CL and even he moved away from that in favor of equities.
You are definitely on the path to enlightenment. Trading is very difficult and extremely competitive. I know that what I am saying will be controversial, but I think it has to be said: why try and compete with automated trading firms that spend many millions of dollars per year on ECN speed and programming ? And we know that many of these automated trading programs are designed to deceive and to trick - just look at the rash of spoofing cases that have been brought by the CME the past few years. And that's just the surface of it. What fools think is "order flow" is flipping, order crossing, DOM stacking, and spoofing on an industrial automated scale. It's a mirage. Just read the CFTC complaints - "order flow" and the DOM is a lie. And according to the CFTC complaints the automated bots are designed expressly to create deception and squeeze.