diablo272

It depends on you and your strategy. http://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/06/ScalingUp.asp

I figured it would be better to resurrect this thread than make a new one. I don't know much about prop firms, and the information I do have is a little confusing. What I know so far is that to trade for a prop firm, you usually need to have a series 7 or series 3. You deposit money with them, and in return you get to trade with their capital, and you have access to whatever platform they use and lower commissions that might be possible otherwise. You might be able to keep all of your profits, or the firm may take a %. So my questions are: What is the point of trading for a prop firm exactly? Do you have a salary? I realize that you would have access to the firms capital, so you can trade larger size, but with e-minis for example, it's pretty easy to increase leverage simply by adding more contracts, and with many brokers offering $500/contract intraday margin, no one should be under-leveraged (in fact it's very easy to become OVER-leveraged, as I discovered when I first started with futures). And on the subject of leverage, I often read that these prop firms employ newbie traders. If the benefit of trading for a prop firm is the increased leverage, wouldn't this be a terrible move for a new trader to make? Is there something I'm missing? Let's say you deposit $20,000 into the firms account and gain access to $1M of their trading capital. If you take a series of trades and lose $100,000, would you then owe the firm $80,000 (like what would happen in a retail margin account), or would they somehow absorb the loss? Thanks to anyone who can answer some of these questions.

I am not an expert on VSA, but I think that some kind of volume analysis would be useful in this situation, more so than any indicator that I know of.

Why are you here if you're not willing to learn?

This is completely dependent on what you want to use the indicators for. Each indicator needs to serve a purpose--what do you want the indicator to tell you? How will each indicator improve your strategy? Edit: I should add that indicators are not a REQUIREMENT. It is perfectly possible to have a profitable strategy that doesn't use any indicators at all, so keep that in mind, and only use an indicator if you really think it would help you in a way that pure price action can't do directly. Sometimes I think of indicators as "visual aids". They can make something apparent in a single glance which might take longer to see clearly if you were just looking at bars on a chart.

I believe that would be called luck, unless those people had systems with a 100% winrate.

I agree, there is only so much the government can do at this point. It will be interesting and probably unpleasant to see how this unfolds.

I agree, please close it.

I've been with Mirus for almost six months now and I have no complaints. I've never had any problems so I can't comment on their customer service or trade desk, but so far I'm quite content with Mirus.

That's like asking how anyone could make a mechanical system when the market is never exactly the same day to day.

I would start in whichever market you ultimately want to trade, and then switch if you need to. No market is going to be significantly "easier" than any other if you're just starting out and don't have a specific reason for trading the YM instead of a given currency pair. You're better off getting more experience in the market you're really interested in.

I don't think this is exactly what you had in mind, but since you mentioned omega 3s...I take these vitamins called "Thera Tears Nutrition", which I think are just a combination of fish and flaxseed oil. They're made for people who have dry eyes, and I have to say they really do make my eyes less dry, and I've also noticed an improvement in the way my skin looks since I started taking them. I would imagine you could get similar results by simply taking a fish oil supplement and a flaxseed oil supplement, but I haven't really done a controlled test like that, so I'm not sure. http://www.theratears.com/nutrition.aspx Another way of getting omega 3s is to buy flaxseed oil (in oil form, not capsule form) and pour it over or mix it into whatever you're eating. It has a light, nutty taste which goes well with a lot of different foods, though you may not even taste it if you mix it in with something that has a strong enough flavor. I recommend trying it with some kind of grain, like cereal in the morning, or rice at dinner. Also, I've always put it on AFTER everything is cooked...I don't know what would happen if you cooked with it. On your original subject, try doing a google search for "cognitive function supplements". I also searched on the GNC website and found these, though I have no idea what they would do exactly: http://www.gnc.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2133428&cp=2167069.2108498.2166422 http://www.gnc.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2134257 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylethanolamine also: http://www.lookcut.com/tools/nutritional-supplements/category/cognitive-function.html quote from the above site: And I believe those ALA, EPA, and DHA are found in omega 3s.

The purpose of scalping is to make many small wins instead of one big one. A scalping system is DESIGNED to take small profits, and if you find yourself regretting following your system, you will probably have trouble regardless of your timeframe. I have a few other counterpoints to make regarding scalping. First, you say that by scalping, you miss out on profits. Well if you swing trade, you also miss out on profits, like when a market is consolidating for example. You also mention that lower trade frequency means lower risk, but this is not necessarily true and is completely dependent on the two systems you're comparing (what is the expectancy for the swing system and what is the expectancy for the scalp system?). Finally, you mention that scalping is not good for "risk-averse types", but again this is very ambiguous. While you may be more comfortable keeping a trade open for hours or days on end, it is more comfortable for others to only keep trades open for seconds or minutes at most, but to have a higher trade frequency. It sounds to me like scalping may not suit you, but that you are in no place to be telling others that scalping is "BS".

I realize this may be different for everyone, but in my experience there is a big difference between sim and live, at least in the beginning. It's easy to tell yourself there is no difference, because it makes sense that there is no fundamental difference--you're trading the same market with the same strategy afterall. But there is a big psychological difference that you will most likely experience if you haven't gone live already. It's the difference between being the Terminator: and being John Connor

I have no idea, but I would guess that if it's targeted toward institutions, it's probably very expensive (like over $1000/month), like the Bloomberg terminal.

I've never taken a trading course, but in my experience, trading is something that you have to do yourself. It seems to me that taking a simple 7 day course won't help you much because trading is just like any other profession--it takes a lot of time and dedication to learn how to succeed. You don't become a doctor without several years of education, right? If you're completely new to trading, a profitable trader could tell you their strategy and everything they know, but you would most likely still lose money in the beginning. This is hard to explain, but knowing someone's strategy and knowing how to make money are two completely different things, and knowing how to make money only comes after you've spent many, many months watching your market every day for as long as you can afford to. Once you feel that you have some kind of grasp over what happens on the screen you're watching, start trading live. Some people will tell you to sim trade, and sim trading is very valuable, but you won't really know a HUGE part of trading until you're traded live, using real money. When your own money is on the line, all the rules you've made for yourself and all of the knowledge you accumulated take a back seat until you learn to trust yourself and the strategy you've created. If you don't have a strategy, you will probably lose money. I could go on and on, but instead I'll give you these links that will probably be much more helpful than any course you might pay for. I advise that you read all of these articles, browse this forum, and watch your selected market as much as you can. It's very important that you take this as seriously as possible--make it your LIFE--and you will have a great advantage over the majority of people who try to trade. Links: http://www.trading-naked.com/Articles_and_Reprints.htm (make sure you read the articles on risk management) http://www.trading-naked.com/library/Prologue.pdf (this "Trading as a Business" series is pretty good, I recommend that you read all of them) http://www.traderscalm.com I should add that I discovered those three links on this forum after I had already learned much of what is contained in those links the hard way--that is, through experience, trial and error, and a lot of reading. So I give credit to those who originally posted those websites here. One final piece of advice is that you throw your ego out the window and never look back. If you're new to trading, you have no idea what you're getting into. You might think you have some idea, at least the smallest idea, of what this is all about. You don't. You don't know what you're in for, but prepare yourself for the worst, NEVER even THINK about giving up, and you will probably have a decent chance of "making" it. Keep in mind that I only have a little less than two years of trading experience, so I have a lot to learn myself, I'm sure.

I would call Tradestation and ask them how that is handled, ie is the stop order placed on Globex as soon as your position is opened, or is the stop order only placed when certain criteria are met in your strategy. If it turns out that the stop order isn't placed as soon as your position is opened, the only safeties that I know of if your connection goes out are to call the order in or to have a backup connection ready, and you'd be much better off having a second connection in that situation than you would be calling it in. A second connection is useful anyway, for the days when you start up your platform only to find that your connection is completely out, and this doesn't have to happen very often for the connection to pay for itself. I should add that with my platform, Ninja, your stop order is placed on the exchange as soon as your position is opened, so even if you got disconnected, your stop order would remain open. So it's certainly possible to do, at least.

I've heard good things about DTN IQ, though I have no experience with it, and I THINK it would suit your java needs as well (it mentions java in this PDF: http://www.dtn.com/files/DTN_IQ.pdf). It's $100/month, though.

This is slightly off topic, but you mentioned Monte Carlo here, and I'm curious as to how you would apply Monte Carlo to this situation. I'm very new to this kind of risk modeling, so this is probably a stupid question, but if his friend has a stop of 20 ticks and a target of 6 ticks (assuming these are hard stops and targets), where would Monte Carlo come in? Would you use it to calculate something like max drawdown? It seems to me there would need to be another variable in there, because the stop and target are both absolute. Again, I'm completely new to Monte Carlo and all but the most basic risk modeling, so bear with me. EDIT: I should also mention that I'm terrible at math, so something that may seem obvious to someone who is proficient in math will probably be obscure to me.

I agree with BF, though the simulation in Ninja is very conservative and generally realistic in terms of its fills, especially when trading live data. Though if you can make $1000-$2000/contract consistently trading 2 hours per day, I'd say that's very impressive.

My max is 2%, and I think most people believe that 1-2% is about right.

I've heard good things about DTN IQ Feed, but I have no experience with it. http://www.dtniq.com/

I'm guessing you know what you're doing, but in case you don't: http://mdc.mo.gov/nathis/mushrooms/mushroom/ Wild mushrooms can be deadly, so be careful.

On my first day trading the ES, I lost about 1/3rd of my capital. I knew almost nothing about risk management, and I overtraded--I went from making 1 trade per day on SPY to over 40 trades in my first day on the ES. The only thing that saved me from completely blowing out is that I kept my position size small (at least I thought it was small at the time). My risk/money management really improved after that though, and that day showed me that I wasn't nearly as emotionally neutral as I thought I was at that point. It was quite a wake-up call. I'm actually glad that it happened, because at that point, I was profitable trading SPY, which increased my confidence. If I hadn't taken such a big loss right when I moved to ES, my confidence probably would have grown to the point that I would have severely over-leveraged myself and eventually taken a crippling loss.

What does "without trade-risk" mean? If it means that there is no risk associated with the trade, what makes it risk free?