AgeKay

This is shortened post made by namstrader but the original author is someone else. namstrader just received it in an e-mail. I've bolded what I like you to take away from this post.

The secret to day trading is that there is no secret. Smart-ass, huh? Bear with me, I'll explain. A secret means that not a lot of people know about it. When trading, do you want to look at something that only a few people are looking at? So that when you make the decision to enter, it's you against everyone else? Hell no! That makes no sense. Even Paul Rotter, probably the largest individual futures trader, said he wouldn't be able to go against everyone else if the market was going one way. So you want to be on the side of with the most volume. And where does the majority of futures volume goes through? Trading Technologies' (TT) gateways (I remember a quote on their site that said about 70% of all futures volume goes through them). And what do you see on the screen of every professional trader? Columns of red, blue and prices. What is it? MD Trader that is part of TT's X_Trader (or a competing product that looks pretty much the same)! Don't you think professional traders would tell TT if there was something essential missing on MD Trader if this is what they use all the time? What about X_STUDY (TT's charts that are also part of X_Trader). How many chart types does it support? Not many. How many indicators does that have? Not many, and most of them are based on volume. And why don't traders complain about X_STUDY? Maybe they don't look at charts for decision making? So might it be possible that all the information you need can be seen on this small MD Trader window? Is this even possible? Paul Rotter (same guy I mentioned above) says he looks at charts for orientation, but doesn't make decisions based on that. What does he use to make decisions? The MD Trader! (Btw, this is not a commercial for MD Trader, you can use any competing product that shows you the same information). And what does MD Trader show you with just 5 columns? • All Bids • All Offers • Last Trade (Price and Size) • Volume by Price (a.k.a. Volume at Price, Market Profile, etc) • Your Orders inkl. your estimated position in queue (shown as EPIQ) Why is this relevant? Because this is a market, not some magic world. Bids and Offers make a market and the last trade shows transactions that took place in that market. See, this is simple. This is just a market, no magic. Think of it as a bazar. No one uses charts or indicators on a bazar to make the decision to buy or sell something. Same with the trading pit. And traders in the trading pit also use something else: noise. Noise meant momentum. How can you see momentum in the MD Trader? It's how quickly bids and offers change and how much is how quickly traded. So momentum is another important information that you can't put in numbers, but you can feel looking at the order book. What about Volume by Price? It allows you to find out how much has traded at a price when the last trade information is changing too quickly. It also summarizes the entire day's trading. You don't know whether the volume that you see there are still open positions or whether they have been already closed. But some of them are likely to be open. And those traders care where price is right now. You don't know when the traders that are on the losing side are going to puke, but you know that they are going to puke at some point. And that point comes closer the more the market moves against them. And they don't care whether there was an S/R on the chart or there is some indicator telling you to buy or sell, when they want out, they get out and this will affect the market. What about EPIQ? It shows you how likely it is that your limit order is going to get filled. Do you really need this? No, but it's good to know. No reason to enter at market, if your EPIQ is 10 and you expect a few more trades at that price. I hope I've given you something to think about. And please don't flame me in this thread, it won't change anything. That's like saying Newton's law of gravity does not apply to the part of the world that you live in. It is what it is. I'll post a few snippets of my favorite posts made by other traders from this forum to illustrate what I mean by all this.

So you're saying that you haven't programmed for 10 years and you think you can comment on what technologies someone should use? OOP always makes sense when you need to model something. You need to use the right tools for the right job. You also still need to know data structures like linked lists to decide which data structure is the best in terms of performance / memory for what you need to do. Btw, memory management still matters, it's just a lot easier nowadays. The real shame is that you have no idea what you're talking about. Academia is always many years behind current technology. Concurrency is important today but what is the point of studying its algorithms? Microsoft and other companies have already solved the problem and you bet you they do it better than a professor could teach at a college. You just have to know how and when to use them - not how they work, this applies to pretty much any technology nowadays, including data structures. You confuse programmers with mathematicians.

You're making a lot more assumptions than I do. My visualization is based on the order matching principles of the exchange. The data just didn't add up. I then asked data providers and they confirmed it. like you knew anything about my visualization. A direct connection with the exchange would be 10k, not more. The problem with other feeds that provide the same data is not that they don't get it, but their APIs do not support what I wanted to do. did you read that in a chat room too? Reasonable latency does not matter as long as you get the complete data in the right order. The human eye/brain takes much longer to process the data than any expected latency. Making a comment like that and the earlier comment just shows how little research you have done yourself and how little knowledge and experience you have with the order book and order matching algorithms. Please refrain from posting your useless comments unless your ideas are original or YOU have made the experience yourself (i.e. not other sources).

I should have mentioned that I used it in Europe from three different countries. You might not have any issues trading Eurex from the US, but you'll see a lag in Europe.

DTN's problem has nothing to do with the location of the data center (and no they don't have a data center in Europe). That would have added at most 200ms. Their data just lags. They don't even know why. I had no issues with Zen-Fire. It's an excellent feed.

Eurex data from DTN lags by about 1 second. Sometimes even more.

I agree. I've never learning anything from winning trades, it was always the losing trades that taught me a lesson.

Same here. I thought about why that is and I came to the conclusion that it's probably because we are a lot more focused/concentrated when already in a trade because our money is on the line. Every little change counts. Entries are different because we are not in a position yet so we seem to have less focus.

I agree. But this is not a successful trader that wants to help you out, this is a broker who charges higher commissions for his "full service". You'd better off finding a cheap no frills broker and a real trader. Traders don't run retail brokerages on the side...

It's not a garbage website. It's an eBook + Videos and I've read/watched it several times and I like it. And I was not promoting it, I only pointed out where the OP can find more information on this topic because I don't know of any other one that is not completely bullshit and I've literally read everything. BlowFish has also read it and he can probably confirm that it's different from the usual crap out there.

Here is the thing. If they really knew what they were doing than they would be trading options on their own account and not "advising" other people how to do it. Think about that.

I hate Wild Wild West movies and games, but this looks absolute amazing and now I've got a great gift for my dad who loves Wild Wild West movies.

It's certainly possible. I can trade without a chart. You can learn how to do it if you search for "". Seems to me that you are just waiting for some one to ask you who that guy is so you can promote his services. If that's what your after, then be aware that you'll be banned quickly.

NEVER average down. You only learn this the hard way.

Btw, here are all known C# constructs: Kirill Osenkov : Updated C# all-in-one file

Win Forms were introduced with .NET 1.1 and only updated in .NET 2.0. It's been WPF since .NET 3.0 (before .NET 4.0 there was also a .NET 3.5 release) so you can't expect much support for Win Forms in the future. Silverlight is also basically just a cut down version of WPF so it pays off to know it. WPF is initially harder to understand because it does a lot of "magic". You should know that you don't even need to use XAML to use WPF. XAML is just transformed to code during compilation anyway. I am not a big fan of books when it comes to technology (because they get outdated so quickly) but you should definitely read "Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed" by Adam Nathan if you want to use WPF, it's the only software development book I still own. I didn't really "get" WPF and how it does its "magic" until I read that book and it's the best software development book I've read in years.

I don't mind you hijacking my thread. I've put this one hold as it seems that CQG doesn't meet one of my requirements after talking to them. I have to work on my own trading as that has been going downhill lately. .NET is massive and there is no one who knows everything about it, just many experts for one or two domains. I've been programming exclusively in .NET since its introduction (7-8 years ago) and I am still having problems catching up with all the new stuff they keep introducing (I am still using .NET 3.5/ C# 3 / VS 2008 and haven't had a chance too look much at the .NET 4 / C# 4 / VS 2010 stuff). Learning the C# language is the easy part as it's basically like any other OO languages plus very cool features that it stole and improved upon from other languages. The only thing that might take some time to wrap your head around is generics when there are multiple nested type parameters involved, but the concept is similar to templates in C++, just much better. The framework itself includes so much that it's unlikely that you'll learn (or even need) more than 10% of it. Just stick with the newest technologies for each domain. E.g. use WPF instead of Windows Forms, ASP.NET MVC2 instead of ASP.NET Web Controls, etc. Also, get Resharper, I would refuse to develop software without it. Some people find CodeRush also very useful, but I've never really tried it.

Same here. I think it's important to know what kind of strategy you can trade. I have the same psychological issues you have and knowing that keeps me from unsuccessfully trading other long-term profitable strategies. I think you hit it on the nail. I've done all of these things and this was always responsible for my losses. Based on my own trading, I've come to believe that long-term successful trading requires emotional stability and being aware of one's psychology. I've been in a (psychological) slump lately where I would watch the market and be right (to the tick) about 90% of the time but as soon as I start trading emotions kick in and I seem to lose 80% of trades because I start taking trades that I normally wouldn't have. Just this morning I was stopped out to the tick (it literally didn't trade one tick lower) twice after which the market proceeded to move up to my target and I would have been filled each time. So instead of making 20 ticks, I lost 4. This is a 24 tick difference in my balance because of one damn tick. I noticed how that upset me and I had to tell myself "all right, it happens, stay calm, next trade will be a winner and you'll make it back" a few times before I was emotionally stable enough to take the next trade which was indeed a winner which made it all back and more. I reached my daily target a couple of trades later.

Watching the market in the morning to "warm up" and thinking this would be a great entry and this would be my exit and fucking nailing the top and bottom to the tick of every move like 5 times in a row and then I tell myself "Ok, now I am going to start trading to make some money" and the next few trades are losers and I have to trade the noon to make it back and the afternoon to make some profit. It's hard not to start hating oneself at times. I am very good at picking tops and bottoms but I miss most moves due to hesitation and I then somehow manage to trade those few times that I am wrong. I wish I had something attached to my head that would recognize thoughts like "looks like a good entry/exit" and then just execute automatically for me.

I would like to say "it's about time" but that would sound just cynical. Truth is all major governments have accumulated so much debt that they will NEVER EVER be able to pay back all the while accumulating more debt and having to pay more interest on it. There will come a point (just a matter of time) that countries won't be able to pay the interest on that debt, whenever that will be. But what usually happens is that people stop being in denial about it due to some catalyst e.g. financial crisis, Greece more than 10% new debt to GDP ratio, etc.... [continued below]. ...and then all of the sudden the media starts talking about it (as if they had just found out that these countries had massive debts that they could never pay back) and then the common people (read: ignorant people) wake up and complain about it. Now politicians have to react to it and initiate measures that are somehow supposed to fix it (because quick-fixes always work, right?) but they usually make it worse (like lending Greece more money instead of kicking them out of the Eurozone). When everyone finally realises that there is no way to fix this, everyone starts to accept reality and something huge is going to happen. My initial thought was hyperinflation but that can only happen locally. Probably the world governments just decide to reset all debts, who knows, the world has never been so interconnected... All I am sure of is that in the end the speculators, "greedy" bankers and "rich" people will be blamed. I love how the Euro recently went up after going down and in the news they said "short speculators got raped today" and all the common people got their "revenge" as if speculators were the only one's shorting the Euro and not allowed to buy it back until it came all the way back up.

I find multi-threading one of the hardest things to do. Debugging a threading problem is nightmare but VS 2010 supposedly makes it much easier (still using VS 2008). The best tutorial of threading in C# is this. Try to keep it simple. Most of the time, all you need to do is to prevent a piece of code from being entered by two threads at the same time to ensure data you access is the same it was when you entered that piece of code. You can use the 'lock' keyword on any instance of a reference type to do that. All the other times, I just use a 'ConsumerThread' class I developed that consumes data on another thread. This can only happen if they raise events on different threads. If they always raise events on the same thread, then no race condition. Best to just ask them.

Just use a credit card. If they charge you after you've cancelled then your bank will just refund it. Try that with PayPal...I love credit cards.

gooni, thanks again for your concern. For the kind of analysis I want to do I actually do need a "perfect" feed with all order book updates that can be enumerated in the order they were received. I've done lots of research for this already and unfortunately haven't found anything cheap that meets my requirements. I am not surprised though considering that this is pretty high-end analysis that I want to do (think what algos do). I actually just got confirmation from CQG that they do meet my requirements and they cost about as much as X_Trader and their API is cheaper than TT's API. I've already implemented the order book visualization which would show me "interesting" behaviour in the order book, unfortunately it wasn't as helpful even though it was connected to feeds that are considered "good" for trading because I was missing lots of data (I could actually see that things were not adding up). If I get the feed I am looking for, then I am literally not going to miss anything going on in the order book, which would enable me to see things that guys like UrmaBlume are looking for.

Thank you for your detailed response gooni. Zen-Fire is a very fast feed which is excellent for execution but based on Fulcrum's investigations its data not always complete. Thank you also for the heads up for not blocking the API. I don't do that anyway and always queue all events to be processed on another thread. The reason for this being a requirement is to make sure that the API does not miss any data during fast markets because even if you immediately pull the data and queue it, you can miss data if the API does not queue unprocessed data. At least that was my experience with the X_Trader API because their feed is also optimized for execution like Zen-Fire. On the other hand, I never miss any data from IQFeed sockets API but it's not connected to the data feeds I mentioned above (it's connected to CEF Core from Deutsche Börse that delivers netted order book data).