fifty2aces

How often does TICK update for you? It's difficult to tell from a 1t chart, but yours appears to be updating more than mine (which only gives a new value every 5 seconds).

Unless you take a lot of trades every day, it might be better to set your goals over a longer timeframe (e.g. a week or a month). If you only take a couple trades a day, you'll probably have regular days where you miss your target, purely due to small sample size/bad luck. Aiming to be profitable over a larger number of trades will hopefully prevent you getting too attached to short term results which are heavily influenced by variance.

I found this post on "Exits and Scale-outs" interesting and have nominated it accordingly for "Topic Of The Month November, 2008"

0.25% transaction cost would kill the markets. Let's say ES is trading at 1200: value of one contract would be $50 * 1200, so $60000. Every time you buy 1 ES contract you'd pay 0.25%, or 60000/400 = $150 in tax! And if you had to pay the tax on closing trades as well, that would be $300 in total, per trade, meaning you'd need to make 6 points to break even.

Like everyone else has said, 40 trades is too many - commissions are probably crushing you. Example - assuming commissions are $4.50 roundturn (guessing - not sure exactly what IB charge), you'd be paying $180 a day. That's equal to the value of 36 ticks on NQ, so you need to take 36 ticks a day on average just to break even. My advice would be to try to trade less, and try to come up with a more concrete plan - might be a good start to look for areas of major support and resistance, and only trade around them.

No issues for me - FF3 + Vista

That doesn't really answer the question though, does it? Bert, one reason EMAs could vary would be if they are calculated by close values, since these are dependant on where the bar starts. Both data feeds could be perfectly accurate, but since close values are merely price sampled at fixed intervals (whether time, tick, or volume based), they can vary depending where the sampling starts. Similarly, the EMAs may be based off different values - one may be calculated using close valuesof each bar, the other might be (High+Low)/2 or (High+Low+Close)/3. Another potential reason could be that there is more than one way of calcualting an EMA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_moving_average#Exponential_moving_average Also, make sure that your data actually goes back enough bars - trying to calculate a 200EMA with only 100 bars in the chart will obviously not work properly.

I think you're getting a bit confused - ultimately YM and ES can do what they want - there is nothing forcing them to move in line with the underlying indices except people trading the futures (whether in the pit or electronically). The reason that the futures move in line with the stocks is that if they move too far out of line, arbitrageurs will start buying/selling the underlying and futures to bring them back into line. So really, YM traders can not only move the YM, they can move the underlying stocks. For example, if traders start buying YM, driving the price up, arbitrageurs will start selling YM and buying the underlying stocks. If the original traders continue buying YM, this is likely to drive up the prices of the stocks to match the new higher prices of the futures. Think of the cash and futures markets as being connected by an elastic band - they can move apart a bit (initiative activity by traders), but eventually they will be pulled back together (arbitrage). And either market can lead the other.

I reckon there were a lot of people who quit their jobs and called themselves daytraders, but if a position was in the red, they'd just leave it overnight (or longer) until it was profitable. Basically no risk management, which might work temporarily in the middle of a raging bull market, but will kill you when it ends.

Pretty sure $147 is the price - it may have risen. For what it's worth, I think it's decent value - don't expect a holy grail, but there are some interesting perspectives on market profile. It is very discretionary in nature though, so may not suit everyone. If you're doubting whether it's worth signing up for, there's a blog at http://my.wallst.net/referral/fbutera101/Blogs which is free, as well as a couple of free lessons on the site.

What do you mean by hedge? Are you wanting to use index options to limit exposure on your futures positions?

My opinion would be that it depends on the style of trading - the stop loss should be at the point where it becomes apparent that the reasoning behind the trade is no longer valid.

Generally I prefer price action (HHs + HLs or LLs + LHs), but I think trying to come up with an indicator approach is interesting, especially if you're looking to automate. The charts posted look pretty nice, but you've picked trending conditions, and the hardest thing about making a trend indicator is staying out of the chop, which yours doesn't really account for. Even in the charts posted, there are areas where it would make more sense to say the trend is sideways, rather than switching between up and down every couple of bars. I think this is the key to making a trend indicator - it shouldn't be binary (up or down), it should have three outputs (up, down, or sideways).

Same name, same avatar - was going to pretend to be mp or socrates, but clearly that's already been beaten into the ground!

No, the operating system is what leaves you vulnerable to viruses - unfortunately since most people use Windows, most virus creators make viruses for windows. I'd get ESET nod32, as I mentioned before - it's seriously fast, and rated very highly. The modern macs running windows are basically just (expensive) branded PCs - same parts inside, same operating system, shiny packaging. For what it's worth, I've been running Vista for a few months now without any problems, although I understand that people may feel safer on XP, so might be worth sticking with that for peace of mind. Most of the complaints about Vista seem to be either people who hate change (everyone hated XP when it came out), or people who try to install it on old computers which aren't powerful enough to run it properly. Also, the 2 hard drives for vista thing is rubbish - you can run it on a single hard drive without a problem - either the HP guys are giving you a hard sell, or don't know what they're talking about (most likely both. And yeah, Windows ME was awful, wish I'd never experienced that.

That looks more sensible - graphics card will be good enough, without being way over the top. Not sure about 2 hard drives in a laptop, but that's not a problem - looks like a solid computer. By the way, Norton is absolutely useless, and will slow the computer down - I'd uninstall it immediately, and get ESET nod32 as a virus scanner.

forsearch - most modern video cards can support two monitors, either dual dvi, or one dvi + one vga, so if you want 4 monitors, you could run 2 mainstream dual dvi cards, provided you got a motherboard that can take 2 graphics cards. If you want more than 4 monitors, you're looking at something more specialised - either two computers, or specific multi monitor cards - I don't know a huge amount about these, but googling "matrox" would be a good start. Sledge - pretty much all PCs these days are capable of running two monitors straight out the box - most graphics cards have 2 connectors - either 2x DVI, or 1x DVI and 1xVGA.

I wouldn't bother with RAID - more trouble than it's worth, and not really relevant to trading anyway, since you aren't likely to be doing anything which requires heavy disk usage. As for graphics, while you need at least a decent card, trading isn't graphics intensive compared to gaming (high-end graphics are designed for 3D performance, rather than a bunch of charts). SLI is considered excessive by many gamers, so is definitely unnecessary - it will only help for multithreaded graphics, which won't be an issue for trading. If you downgrade the graphics, and stick to 1 hard disk (no RAID), you'll get a cheaper computer, which will probably have much better battery life, without impacting performance. You could even look to get a faster processor, which will be far more useful than SLI or RAID. Edit: Also, custom trading computers are pretty unnecessary - generally the ones I have seen use standard parts, but market towards insecure traders who are afraid that their computer might hold them back from getting that extra tick. The only time a custom job might be useful would be if you needed more than 2 monitors, in which case motherboard and graphics card selection is important, and most off the shelf computers won't do the job.

FW - glad to see you here, it's unfortunate that T2W is getting "noisier", but I always enjoyed your posts there, and look forward to seeing more over here. I do follow fundamentals, although only for 2 reasons: 1) I find them interesting, so it makes for some good reading after the close 2) To ensure there are no major economic releases that I need to watch for - example would be NFP or interest rate announcements - while I don't use them to make trading decisions, it's good to know not to put on a trade with a tight stop just before a load of volatility.