Tradewinds

You are right. He does talk about those things. I failed to make the connection between the basis for his trades, and what was actually going on during the trading. So part of the issue is probably my failure of not being able to make the connection between what he explained as the basis for his trades, and the actual trading. Did he show the chart patterns of the overnight market rhythm? Did he show the range bound market or the series of tails? The market rhythm and the range is probably intuitive to a large degree. I'm not familiar with what a "series of tails" is.

It's good not to be distracted by the P/L. While trading, it's fairly easy to get an idea of whether money is being made or lost overall. It's better to focus on trading. Where does that lead? Usually when someone is intentionally trying to generate interest there is a motive involved. What's the motive? For someone who doesn't know much about trading, it does show some basic things. For example, that you can configure your screens with multiple windows in such a way to have all that information right in front of you. Good point. I didn't realize that. In very short term trading, stops are just confusing, difficult to manage, and take too much time away from watching what you need to watch. My opinion. That's partially a good strategy in my opinion. But I would not wait for a retracement to limit my losses under some situations. I had no idea what he was talking about when he was using the words "wholesale" and "retail". The implication is that he is buying low and selling high. It is an interesting and beneficial way of looking at things. Basically, that is the role of a trader, as an short term intermediary who is willing to take on short term risk. That is what I'm interested in. I did see that he was using the $TICK.

It is possible to see what moves the market is making. You can use "market internals", volume, and of course we can see the real price with no delay. So in that sense, trading is very close to a perfect information game. However, I think that we also need to talk about the speed at which we get that information. The market moves much faster than a chess game. (Played by humans) We also would need to talk about whether everyone knows how to obtain information, and whether they know it's available. But the question is about whether there is transparency in the market and whether we can see all the moves that the other players are making. I think that for the most part we can. In chess, a perfect information game, we can't read the other person's mind, or know if their strategy or rational is correct or not. A big institutional trader can enter a big order, but that doesn't mean it was a good decision, or that they will ultimately make any money.

If I were going to sell a trading system, or have someone pay me for a trading course, I would make them a guarantee. I would guarantee that they will make money in simulated trading within a certain time period, or I will give them 110% of their money back. That is the way I would do business. And I wouldn't charge them much up front. If I could teach someone to make money trading, then they would have plenty of money to pay me later. If I can't teach someone to make money trading, then I shouldn't be getting anything.

I watched the video, and I got absolutely nothing from it. The trading platform I use has many ways to show every trade that was made, entry and exit prices, PL, and Cash balance. I really did not see the detail that I would have liked to see in that video. He does a lot of talking, but I did not see him pointing out what the basis for his trading was. If I didn't "get it", and other people did, then I guess I'm missing something. But personally, that video did absolutely nothing for me.

I also wanted to mention, that on 3-18-11, even though the es went down all day, it still closed higher than the previous days close. So speculation happened overnight, the es went up overnight, then drifted down all day, BUT it was still higher than the day before. It seems that investors were willing to hold on to an even higher price going into the weekend. My impression is, that speculators will "sell the news" no matter what the news is, even if the speculation was correct. It's all relative. With all that Up Volume, is seems like investors were pumping money into the SP 500 on Friday for some reason. So the price falling on the es all day Friday, doesn't necessarily mean that the market is headed down. That's my opinion. I really don't care about trying to forecast what the market is going to do. For what I'm doing, that is almost meaningless to me. I just trade what is. But, I like knowing what is going on and why. I'm not saying that I know why. I'm just saying, I'm constantly trying to figure out why the market did what it did.

When the es emini SP gaps overnight, I've noticed something interesting about the UVOL/DVOL ratio. There is often huge differences between the Up Volume and Down Volume at the market open after an overnight gap in price. Take a look at the es emini SP on Friday 3-18-11 for example. The NYSE 500 opened with Up Volume that was 65 times more than Down Volume! A 65 to 1 ratio of up volume to down volume. On a day when the es doesn't gap overnight, the ratio of one volume to the other is normally around 1 to 3 either way. So a ratio of 65 to 1 compared to a ratio of 2 to 1 is a huge difference. It only took 3 minutes for that ratio to drop to 30 to 1 at 9:33 am. And it was 11 to 1 by 9:48 am. Those are still very big differences of Up Volume to Down Volume. The interesting thing is, that the es emini dropped in price all day. So the huge Up Volume compared to Down Volume did not make the es go up. The ratio of Up Volume to Down volume was dropping all day, and the es emini went down all day. The es didn't bottom until that ratio got back to a fairly normal range of about 2 to 1, at 3:13 pm.

I've decided on a new plan. I will try to be as impulsive as possible, entering trades while reading email, and posting on Trader's Laboratory. I will intentionally try to enter bad trades. I will have a goal of loosing money. I will set stop losses at 3x profit target. I will practice revenge trading, and have absolutely no patience at all. I will have daily loss goals, but try to loose even more. I will only trade during news announcements, lunch time, and in the afternoon when the price is not trending. I figure that if I try to adhere to this plan, I will fail, and probably make money. :rofl:

I won't ever give a detailed explanation of my trading edge. But my owner agreement gives written guarantees against a certain degree of loss, and defines how the company will handle drawdowns, or how much loss the company will take before stopping trading operations.

What if you fellow man is a scum bag? How are you going to tell the difference? Will you take money from anyone, or do you have guidelines?

How do you go about that? Advertise in the classifieds for investment opportunities? Word of mouth amongst your rich friends? Go to exclusive parties with movie stars? Ask family and friends to invest?

Here is a definition of an IB: Introducing Broker (IB) Definition

I'm not interested in having clients in my trading company. The company would have members, and they would realize a gain/loss from trading operations. So there is a difference between clients and members of the company. Both members and clients realize gains/losses from trading operations, but the members are part owner of the company. Clients are not owners in the company. So having part owners, avoids the client problem. My trading company would have nothing to do with retirement accounts. It's purely a business operation. However, owners could take income from the trading company, and put it into a retirement account with a broker if they wanted to.

I found the TickQuest website and quickly looked around. For what I need, I don't think I'd need special software. My broker's platform provides TICK and Advance/Decline data. Although it seems a little slow, but it's actually all I need. If I had an automated system making split second decisions, I'd probably go with some heavy duty, specialized stuff.

Start other businesses, and put people to work. I have an idea about how to use the ocean's tides for power generation. There are already tidal power plants, but my idea is different than what I've seen out there. I also have an idea for a new kind of framing for homes. Then I'd write novels as a non-profit venture. I would not try to sell them in bookstores. They would be free, and distributed by word of mouth, and person to person. I'd probably take donations to cover printing costs, and/or distribute them electronically. And if people liked them, hopefully volunteers would translate them into other languages.

In the U.S. you can set up a company as a Limited Liability Company, LLC. The company must have at least two members. One member can be a 1% owner. The LLC can have employees. The LLC is not taxed directly, each member (owner) is taxed on their share of the company's profit. Each LLC member is responsible for filing taxes on their own.

Is there any situation that you would call price manipulation? Because I get the impression, that you are saying there is never such a thing as price manipulation. That price manipulation is totally non-existent. Are you implying that there is no such thing as price manipulation? Actually, I could technically agree to that, depending upon how "price manipulation" is defined. Now we are getting deeper into the details and meaning "price manipulation", predator mentality, and what should be allowed or not allowed. And it's not just about trading. I guess what you are saying, is that the deciding factor, is a person's freedom to make the choice or not. If someone held a gun to my head, and said, "You WILL pay $10,000 dollars for this car that is not worth more than $5,000, or I will shoot you in the head." then would it be price manipulation? The person handing over the money, had a severely overwhelming influence to make a decision a certain way. However, even with a gun to your head, and the threat of death, technically, the person paying the $10,000 for the $5,000 car was still making a decision of their own free will. They just might die for their decision. So even in that case, you could say it's not price manipulation, because they could choose to die. I just want to make it very clear to people reading this, that what I just described is not my perspective or mentality towards the situation. I'm trying to point out a possible view point as a way to define, and compare and contrast different perspectives. It's the age old question of "where do you draw the line?". Where I draw the line is: "If it promotes long term, sustainable and constructive behavior, then it's good." The intentions and desires of selling a $5,000 car for $10,000 does not promote long term constructive behavior. There is a high probability that it will cause hardship, difficulty, anger, feelings of injustice, feelings of revenge, hatred and conflict. So far, situations like selling a $5,000 car for $10,000 haven't stopped the world from turning, or caused the human race to go into decline, or disappear. The case could actually be made, that predation and excessive gains at another person's expense, is actually good for the long term survival of the human race. Kill off and suppress some of the population for the greater good. Unfortunately, things like predation, usury, exploitation, manipulation and abuse don't seem to be forecasting a very good end to the human race. Ultimately, it's not going to end well.

Well, I think we would need to make a distinction between what is manipulation, and what is just people trying to get the price they want. Here is an analogy: If I were selling an automobile, and the book value was $5,000 but I convinced someone to pay $10,000 for it, I would call that manipulation. My daughter bought a car a few months ago for $4,000. It ran for 2 weeks. The mechanic put $2,000 dollars worth of parts and labor into it. It still wouldn't run. So $6,000 was spent on a car that is worthless. That's price manipulation. It's all about fair value vs. what is paid. Day traders don't calculate fair value. (Maybe some traders do have a way to calculate fair value. I don't know. I don't.) If you are a trader, and your trend line tells you the trend is going up, it doesn't tell you that this security might be worthless. So unless you are a long term value investor who really knows the company and the management, there is a lot of speculation about what the future value is going to be. It's a very murky situation. In the case of the $5,000 car sold for $10,000, the price markup was 200% percent. The bid and ask orders you are talking about probably don't have a markup anywhere near that. So, on the surface, I wouldn't call it manipulation. If it's done, knowing that there are unsuspecting traders who don't know what the real value is, and it is intentionally done as a deceptive act, then it's mild price manipulation. I'm not sure how something like that would be regulated or stopped. Besides, there might be big buyers and sellers who are not worried about the same price ranges that a day trader is looking at. They might be looking at longer term holdings, and are not that concerned with the price movement caused by level two orders over the course of a few minutes.

You can't send someone a personal email? You wouldn't be directing them to another website. Your blog would be part of Trader's Laboratory. Unless you are trying to sell somebody something. But I thought you wanted to create a free resource. Even if your website is separate from this website, and you can't promote it, you can still put a link to your website on your profile page. You are not actively promoting it, but if someone happens to look at your profile, they can see a link to your site.

This thread is for the subject of a trading company. What it is, it's benefits, it's detriments, how it would be run, how you would find people to be a part of it, and what it's mission would be. If anyone has experience working in a trading company, or starting a trading company, that would be great. Or if you have no experience or knowledge, but like the idea, or dream of having your own trading company, please share your vision and ideas.

My opinion is, that the biggest problem would be getting your blog site to come up in a web search. If you search, "trader education", your blog would probably be 999,999 in a list of 1,000,000. Nobody would ever find it. There is already a "Beginners Forum" in this group. When a new person makes a post in that forum, send them a personal email, and tell them you have a blog on this site that you have dedicated to informing new traders of what they are up against.

I take profit when the market decides to stop moving in my favor. It has nothing to do with whether I'm trying to make low gain or high gain. The market decides what to give me. The market decides when I'm going to take profit or not. I take what the market gives me. I don't try to tell the market how much profit I want, or where I think it should go.

I think that it is possible to predict price action. If traders are not predicting price action, then what are they doing? Just entering orders at random? No. Unless a trader is truly entering an order absolutely, totally randomly, then they are making a prediction. There isn't any real difference between prediction and anticipation.

I would never trade a low accuracy strategy. And my gains are low. My strategy accuracy is good. It is getting better all the time.

In order for some traders to unfairly profit from other traders, there would need to be a way to manipulate the market. The market reacts to news and earnings reports. Those two influences on the market can't really be manipulated unless there is insider knowledge. I'm not saying that insider trading might not happen, but it would need to be happening on a large scale. I doubt that is the case. So my point is, in order for "predation" to occur, the markets would need to be manipulated. If the market is an unbiased entity, that always returns to a fair valuation, then it's kind of difficult to manipulate it in the longer term. Day to day, and minute to minute trading is a little different I think.