diablo272

You two really need to grow up. Otherwise welcome to ET version 2. If you really need to have these arguments, please take advantage of the PM function, as I don't think the forum itself is meant for the resolution of personal vendettas and the public display of immaturity. If you realize how stupid it is what you two are doing, it would probably benefit your trading in a big way. I really do appreciate the real contributions you two make here, but it should be obvious why posts like the ones above do not belong on this forum.

It depends heavily on your style. In my experience, TOS does not cater to futures traders.

To be honest, I'm not sure if you can have OCO over different instruments, and I didn't really think about that since I've never traded two instruments simultaneously.

I agree. If you really are set on the idea of a contest, though, why not join a firm and see if you can "out trade" your fellow traders?

Care to explain WHY?

If you are a futures trader, a breach of your trading account could drive you into massive debt. What steps have you taken to prevent such a breach? Thanks.

I found this post on "The Acid Tests" interesting and have nominated it accordingly for "Topic Of The Month April, 2009"

Yes you can, but an ETF is an equity, like a stock (can be bought and sold short like a stock, same leverage), and eminis are futures. And the unit size is 1 share, not 1 contract as with futures.

http://research.investopedia.com/news/IA/2008/Worried_About_The_Economy_Use_Short_ETFs.aspx?ad=IA_RSS_252008&partner=fincon-rss

Regarding the buying power, I don't know of any broker which would allow your open orders to exceed your buying power. Regarding the stop orders though, what you would want is a "one cancels other" ("OCO") order. Ask your broker if they support this kind of order.

Best of luck, though it doesn't look like you'll need it.

Thanks, I'll have to get a data feed that shows Nikkei then to look at charts etc...I believe IB and e-signal carry the OSE nikkei contract.

Thank you James, re those screenshots: I've never used CQG, so I have a couple questions. First, is that 19:00 New York time (Nikkei open)? And on the DOM, are the numbers to the right of price market depth? If so that is much more size than the YM during New York open, especially the mini Nikkei.

On a related subject, is anyone aware of a contract with the same or similar tick size to the YM, but with more volume? I know of the mini Nikkei on the OSE, and it looks like it's more liquid than the YM, but I'm wondering if there's something closer to the liquidity of the ES. There is nothing like this to my knowledge, but I'm just checking. Also just to be sure that I have this right, the OSE website lists the mini Nikkei 225 average daily volume in 2/2009 as ~368k, is that more or less accurate? I have no way of watching this market, otherwise I'd look for myself.

daedalus, if you don't mind me asking, what kind of volume are you doing to get $2.4/rt on the E-minis?

Unless you're trading a VERY fast timeframe such as 1 second, you should be able to backfill your charts for at least a few days' tick data with Ninja/Zen.

Just about any music will do for me--I don't find that I have better results while listening to certain genres of music (though honestly I haven't done any testing in this area to correlate music to profit). However, I mostly listen to various styles of metal, such as Carcass, Megadeth, Overkill, Evergrey, Cacophony, etc, because that is typically my favorite genre.

Spend time watching markets, and you might eventually find some kind of answer to that question.

If you'd like that kind of functionality, I recommend that you open a brokerage account somewhere so you can use their software for charting. I recommend Think or Swim, because their platform is quite good considering that it's free, and you can download it immediately after you sign up with them, meaning that you don't have to make a deposit into the account. And yes, on these charts, the Y axis is price, and the X axis is usually time. The X axis can also represent other values such as volume or ticks, but most of the time the X axis will be time in literally any interval, such as months, weeks, days, minutes, or seconds.

http://stockcharts.com/ is decent if you're just trying to get a handle on how to read charts. Also, might as well check out this part of their site while you're there: http://stockcharts.com/school/doku.php?id=chart_school

If you look at a bar or candlestick chart of the stock in question, you'll be able to see the daily high, low, open, and close of said stock.

What is important here is that Steve and others on this forum are NOT vendors. They aren't selling anything--what they are providing is a FREE service, so to demand proof that what they espouse can be profitable is to display a tremendous lack of respect to someone who spends a lot of time and energy to share their ideas (free of charge!) with anonymous people on the internet. REGARDLESS of whether these ideas are profitable or not, it's about sharing ideas, not about trying to find the "holy grail". And keep in mind that this thread is titled "Ideas for struggling traders," not "Steve's winning system".

Disregarding the comment about indicators, Ninja vs Optionvue is heavily dependent on your intentions for each as they are very very different from one another.

Congratulations, but what is the value of this thread? I don't mean to offend you, but two days of profitability doesn't mean anything.

Traders don't like drama. If you can control your emotions in the market, you can control your emotions on a message board.