MightyMouse

Steve, Like I said, I am trying to learn. I am not sure where my comment was ass backwards wrong. Your 2 am chart showed that I should sell high and buy low. isn't that the idea? And I do not mind the public lashing provided that I learn something in the mix. Trading is tough and as an average or below average person, I seek wisdom from the non-hesitant certified, skilled, institutional professionals and do hope that I in no way hinder your desire to pontificate. And thanks for taking your valuable time away from the institutional trading desk to respond to my incorrigible response. MM and I do appreciate you taking the time from your institutional trading des

Thank you for providing insight to the average. it is helpful since the average and below average have difficulty looking at a chart and seeing where they should have gone short or should have gone long. Make no mistake. I am a student and eager to increase my averages. In the past I have struggled with grasping whether I should have sold at prices that were higher than the current price or bought at prices that are lower than the current. Thankfully, I am beginning to get a hang for the buy low and sell high thing. The level of your commentary does in fact certify you. And I think we can all learn that to become or remain professional/institutional, we need to remain post facto otherwise our commentary will look, well, rather average and that would make it difficult to toot our horns on a thread about coaching and mentoring.

Steve, An overwhelming theme in your posts seem to be a distinction between retail/amateur and institutional/professional. It seems pretty clear that you self-certify as an institutional/professional. As an institutional/professional, I am sure you are aware that there are great contrarian indicators of market bias when institutional/professionals are in agreement. For that I will specifically thank you for participating in a group whose folly the rest of the plebeian traders can profit from. I am a self-certified fledgling/amateur/retail trader. I hope to one day cease to refer to myself as fledgling and become fully retail/amateur. I do not trade ES, but I do wonder as a fledgling/amateur/retail trader when oh when I will be able to see the short opportunity in a range based upwardly biased market like ES has been since late Friday. Personally, I wouldn't touch a long until we reached 1300, at the moment, and would go short if we did reach the 1286 area. I do not trade range based chop, so maybe that is the source of my myopic view and inability to see the institutional/professional short opportunity. As a precaution, I will warn you that in addition to my self-certified status of fledgling/retail/amateur trader, I am wrong more than I am right and as such consider my trade wrong until it is right. Perhaps you could enlighten us on how to be right until you are wrong. MM

Equities brokers in the USA are required to profile investors to assess whether they can handle the risk of trading or not. They are supposed to approve the type of vehicles an investor or trader can make. These are FINRA requirements. If you are not experienced at trading, say, options, then your account will not be approved to trade options. A broker who approves an account to trade options for an individual who is not an experienced option trader can be held liable for the losses on the account and fined or worse by FINRA. Its not only experience that matters, it is also capital. If you do not have enough net worth and liquid net worth, your account will not be approved for more speculative trading. I cannot speak for futures or forex brokers, but I assume that futures brokers in the usa have similar standards. So, though not a license, there are prudent standards that help weed out the innocent. If you are not an accredited investor and lied about it on your account application, you get what you bargained for.

It is perfectly natural. As long as you are not breaking rules, then there is nothing wrong with it, since if you are not breaking the rules, you are playing by them. Is it morally right? Is it morally right for you to lose money in the market to someone who knows how to take it from you? So, is it wrong if you take money from others that are less skilled at trading than you? In nature you do not see a cheetah stalking the largest, meatiest animal; instead, it stalks the youngest and weakest. MM

I think the "evil" that happens to us that makes us poor traders is that we are taught to share and be kind. These "evils" are the things that make us fit for society. If we saw a child being fleeced of his lunch money by an adult, we would be horrified by the sight because we have learned that to be wrong. But, figuratively, that type of predatory activity occurs all the time in the market. I do suppose that we can be genetically predisposed to certain things. I doubt that there is a trading gene and if there is we probably all have it rather than not have it since trading was a natural way of surviving for early humans and the very fact that you are here means that someone along your lineage was able to survive and pass it along. Unless, you are of the first to walk erect and, therefore, somewhat behind the rest of us. Not being able to trade because of fear or what have you I think is a function of a fat and happy bourgeois existence. MM

Tradewinds, If price is surging, why do you want to get out, and worse, why do you want to take a short?

I don't think we are naturally pre-programmed to fail at trading at all. I think we are slowly taught to have the ingredients of failure, but are born as naturally capable traders. I think you can blame your family, schooling, religion, society, but I truly doubt your genes have anything to do with it. We are born with no instincts and are taught everything. except for maybe the sucking motion a baby seems to instinctively know how to do. Not sure that you can use that in the market. Also, the often quoted 95% failure rate is an illusion. I say this because I believe that most traders give up rather than fail. The reasons they give up are that they realize that it is difficult to make the money they were hoping to make, they do not have enough capital, etc. Think about it. It is just as hard to consistently make money as it is to consistently lose money if you do not consider commissions. Consistently profitable traders exist, because disenchanted traders give up. MM

Dave, If your family is insurable, then do not procrastinate, dump the cobra after you secure individual coverage. If you are not insurable, you may be screwed after cobra runs out. A local insurance agent who deals in health insurance can help you. It is a sad that it is such an issue, but do something because no insurance can bankrupt you. MM

Rande, Mistakes also lead to gains. If you stay in a trade longer than you should have and it nets you more money, then that was a mistake. If you enter the market when you were not supposed to and it makes you money, that too was a mistake. On the other hand, if you entered properly and you exited properly and you had a loss, that was a perfect trade. There are only 4 mistakes: 1. You enter when you were not supposed to enter. 2. You do not enter when you were supposed to enter. 3. You get out sooner than you were supposed to exit. 4. You get out later than you were supposed to exit. A trader should be able to identify the 4 if he knows his system in and out and up and down. Whether you made money or not, if you not guilty of one of the above 4, then you had a perfect trade. If you are guilty of one of the above 4, then you made a mistake. I am pretty certain that the distribution of wins and losses when one of the above 4 occurs is equal, just that people tend take credit for the winner and give blame for the loser. And, we go on. MM

The hardest I go is coffee. I prefer my thoughts to be unhindered 100% of the time. Not just with trading. All the time. It does seem to me that a lot of people cannot have fun without drinking which is sad in a way and they are uncomfortable with me being there when I am not drinking.

It seems like a doobie may have been in the vicinity when the "life puzzle" was being unraveled and de-attached. Very enlightening.

A contract like ES is worth +- $65,000. Why do you think you need 100,000 to trade each 65000 ES contract? I am all for being conservative, but I think that amount is a is a little too conservative. On the other hand, if you feel one for one is too risky, then do what makes you feel good.

Sure it takes some time to muddle through the BS and then more time to expunge the BS that you learned. Also, time to figure out how you like to trade, who you want to trade with and against, how to know if there is money to be taken, etc.

If i make money using the indicators in the room, can I pay the site owner more than 25 a month?

Very true. Entertainment is very big. Trading allows people to dream too. Some like to be able to call themselves traders so it also provides an Identity.

Have you found the truth?

Negotiator, that sounds a little like the teachings of Jim Dalton. Forgive me if I am wrong about that. I did a ES study of overnight vs RTH vs buy and hold and found that, in what I would categorically call a bull market or a bear market, the bulk of the move in the direction of the trend occurred in the overnight. Put another way, you could take a position at the the open of the overnight, and close that position at the open of the RTH and be better off than trying to do the same with the RTH. Overnight vs Buy and hold was mixed. It told me that the move frequently occurs in the overnight and profits are taken in the RTH. Basically, the RTH traders end up holding the bag for the overnight traders. It wasn't a rigorous study, but it was enough for me to conclude that Jim Dalton didn't know what he was talking about. Overnight traders tend to be the foreign trading desks of the big names that we know and love. MM

Trading is a wee bit different than theoretical physics. But, I feel pretty confident that your guess at the origin of the universe is as good as Stephen Hawking's.

Your contributions are equally as important as the contributions of another. Equally. Not almost.

To claim that one is better than the other is an admission that you lack the humility needed to succeed as a trader. To feel that you are lesser of a trader than an other indicates that you do not understand yourself well enough yet.

If you are trading an edge then the guy who sold you the pizza is going to wish he kept it. If you do not know what you are doing, you probably got yourself a piece of soggy dough.

So a guy with a harsh opinion is banned and a guy with outrageous claims is allowed to stay? Some of the claims made are incredibly outrageous. If i were a new trader and purchased a service on this site by a vendor, expecting to be better off mentally and thought that it was going to help me trade for a living and i decided to leave my job and take my 401k assets and plunge them into the service and the market and I lose it all, i would sue the individual, the site, the sec, the cftc, finra, the United States Dept.of Anthropology, and everyone who I felt was responsible for allowing a vendor like that to make such outrageous claims and allowing it to go unchecked. In fact, if people came to these sites and got the dope on anything financially related, then we really wouldn't need the sec, the cftc, finra, or the dept of anthropology ti protect investors, traders, and the evolutionary ancestors of traders. The worst part for me would be the fact that the vendor making the outrageous claims, if he is making outrageous claims, is being protected by this site since this site is being compensated by him. I think this site is better off letting vendors know that if they make BS claims that they are going to get dragged through the mud and that getting dragged through the mud now is the best thing for all parties involved. If they don't agree to that, then they can take their BS elsewhere. Or, of course, we can go to another site that is not compensated by him and talk about him there. MM

emg, you have stated a few times that you feel that a trader should have 100k to trade 1 emini s&p contract. Several times through out the thread, you have added to you losing position. Does that mean that you have 100k for every contract you add?

Sounds like you got it right. What we like and don't like doesn't change the facts. Not likely that you are putting someone out of business, but you are taking money from someone when we win. It doesn't come from thin air. Its a matter of perspective. Likewise, we can enjoy a good steak or hamburger without thinking about the fact that an animal was taken and murdered so that we can enjoy ourselves at dinner. Certainly, we wouldn't be the one to kill the animal, but we did pay someone to do it so that we would not have to get our hands dirty or figure out what to do with the rest of the meat until our next meal. So, we can look at it and say that it is meat, or we can look at the meat and understand where it came from. MM