Nick1984

I'm not full time yet but this might help anyhow. Im only 22 so still a youg'un and still at University (albeight in my last semester!). The way I see myself becoming full time is by bucking the trend of most graduates and not going for a regular full time job. I've worked full time while studying and the experience I've had working under someone else has left me kind of jaded so to make money what did I do? I started my own business! Now I work under my own steam, when I want, and with whomever I want while I study. I haven't been able to sit down and trade since this semester began so the next 11 weeks or so will be no trading at all which sucks but during my holidays I traded furiously every night (trading the YM takes place during my night time) keeping a journal (Thanks Brown ) and learning as much as possible. Once I graduate I'll continue working under my own business and diverting excess funds into my trading account. I will end up trading 3 days a week during my night time and then sleeping until around 1-2pm before waking up and running my business from home. Eventually once I work out all the kinks in my system and can successfully make 20 YM points a day per contract on a consistent basis then I'll spend more and more time trading until eventually it becomes full time. It'll be pretty hard for a long time but it's a price worth paying I think. If I can get a job in a prop trading firm I'd do that though!

hehe James yea get back into a gym its fantastic. In the off season when I'm as big as I'm gonna be for a year its a big confidence boost walking through a crowd and seeing that I'm the biggest guy there. When I'm in the gym and I see a lil guy trying to bench my ego sometimes gets the best of me and the Arnold voice comes in my head and I laugh at the "girly man" trying to lift the bar hehe. I'm about to start my boxing training in a couple of weeks. Can't wait to hop back into a ring and spar. Boxing is a fantastic sport if you don't have a lot of time to spend in a gym. Jump the rope, slug the heavy bag, do some speed work on the speed bag, and then do some polymetric exercises to develop your strength and speed and you'll be fit in no time!

James don't ever ever use it on your lap! If you wanna be a daddy one day keep your boys cool. A warm laptop can reak havoc on your gonads faster than the wrong position on a trending day.

Hey Tin nice chart, just one question. In the 2nd last major paragraph you mention that after the guys who bought in on that reversal candle with the long wick see price stalling they suddenly dumped it? Did the price break below the 200 EMA again and keep on going lower? I haven't been able to watch the markets for a while now cause of Uni commitments so am a bit clueless as to whats happening apart from the daily news reports.

Never walking away from an intra day position is good advice. My first hard lesson which taught me to always have a stop in at all times happened when I used a mental stop. I was long in a position and was going to use a mental stop. I'd drunk around 2 litres of water over the past hour so I was really busitng to go to the loo so I got up and had a marathon slash. By the time I came back to my screen my +8 position was suddenly -11! OMG. Stopped out and then some! Get in the habit of using hard stops!

Im a gym junkie myself. I workout at the gym 3-4 times a week cause I just love to push weights and I love lifting more and more. When I break past a plateau I've been on for a long time it's a fantastic feeling. As I type this I've just come back from a big squatting session and my legs feel like jelly but it's great. I love to discipline of bodybuilding. It's a very vain sport and it's very taxing on a person both physically and mentally. You've got to love yourself but hate yourself at the same time by constantly finding faults in your physique that you need to iron out. It's winter here atm so I've just come through my "bulking" phase where I've stacked on around 9kgs over the past 5 months of training. I'm 6'4 and in pounds I weigh in at around 220 or so but I'm not sure if thats a good conversion (102kgs). Now it's time to start transitioning off for summer and to loose the excess fat I've put on with a slow gruelling process of cutting up. Year in year out, same thing all cause I'm vain and I always think I can do better, push harder, train more intensely. Its a great stress relief pushing some weights, and when you cut up you can do other things like boxing. Have you ever tried hitting the heavy bag for 6 rounds of 3 minutes....thats some intesnse stuff! Mens sana in corpore sana!

Yea Walter, I wouldn't mind jumping on the Tokyo bandwagon cause it'll be healtheir for me in the long run as no late nights!

Up until now I only though candlesticks were pretty little pictures, now that I've learned about candlesticks I can be profitable again! I'm bein sarcastic there, I just thought it sounded like someone who'se plugging a new haemorrohoid cream with the old "I can ride a bike again" type line. Apply this thread to you troubled spot once a day and watch your troubles melt away.

I've looked at the ags a cpl time only cause I frankly am kinda bored by those markets but if i were to ever trade them I'd only really trade them on news announcements. I reckon that if you're new (like me) then in current conditions you'd be better off to step back and only take positions that have a high success rate. Paper trade the rest and learn to trade these conditions, Contrats to Brown and others who have sufficient experience to make a killing in these conditions. With only 5 trades a day your making 30 points on the ES! Thats a whopping $375 a contract lol. If I ever make it to the US soon you can shout me a beer or twenty!

In the gym I need to have really loud aggressive music on helps me lift more! Even when I trade I need kinda aggressive music on.

I don't think scalping FX is the way to go personally. I'd rather daytrade or swing trade FX markets cause some of the spreads those bucket shops charge are ridiculous where you end up trading more against the house than the market itself! Walter, if you have a system which is netting you 50-60 a day per contract x 30-50 contracts on the YM why don't you just transport that over to the ES and up your stakes to 100+ contracts with the same profit targets? That can make your millions. Aiming for 1 ES point per day after commissions with 100 lots down is 25k per week aggregating to an average of 1.3 million a year. It would be a much easier transition from YM to ES than from YM to spot FX, but then again I'm not you hehe. Edit: I'm an idiot, didn't read the last bit of your OP Walter, you already said that! Sowwi.

Mate I reckon that your broker is gonna love you. Its good that you've started paper trading, but to be brutally honest you haven't paid much attention to one of the biggest criticisms we've given you in the past which is that you're over trading. If you're going for reversals then try to time it better. On the down move early on we move back to test the S1 pivot and then price is rejected. Ok you're new (heck I'm new too) and you missed the short at the rejection. There is a green candle that goes up to test towards the S1 pivot again but never quite reaches it. That should be a great signal for you, if you're aggressive you could of shorted right at the close of that candle, or if more conservative shorted at the close of the next candle and gone for a ride down the slippery slope. Also notice how the volume spikes on the down candles compared to the green ones telling you that demand is drying up at these price levels so the bears are taking a swipe at price and driving it further down.

Blu you read my mind with that post!

Assuming that your going in for a small surgical strike as you put it, how many different markets do you watch to make sure that one of your setups appears at least once or twice a day? I've been daytrading only recently and have been playing with 233t charts and 5 min charts of the "main" market im trading and I trade the longer term intraday movements with a 55t chart to time entries with a daily target of between 10-20 points (YM points) or equivalent. Taking 5-7 points at a time scalping with a daily target of 10+ points over 2-3 trades is somewhere I want to end up in the future once I build my account up slowly. Walter, did you start out scalping or did you ease your way into it? Reason being is that if I went for my daily target atm by scalping my way there, then the commissions paid on 3-4 in/out trades per day would eat away a lot of my account.

On the point of volatilty, I'm not market statistics whiz but I would assume that when you're modelling price that the volatilty would statistically be left out of the model as isnt the volatility simply the equivalent of the squared sum of errors in a statistical model which = 0 under standard statistical theory? Reason I say this is that it depends on how you define volatility. If you take something like Black-Scholes or the CAPM and figure out the "true" value of an options or futures contract, then the distribution of all other prices around this are simply the errors around the true population mean. These errors then become unexplainable and statistically insignificant. The volatility of price around the population mean would be due to factors such as human emotions and psychology that drive markets in the first place and this cannot be quatified unless you have a telepathic link to every single market participant and a brain capable of disecting all that info! Once the "errors" are factored out of the model, then you have to then decide on what variable actually effect price. So far we can gague that yes volume does have an effect of price (no i haven't proven this statistically but just going by observation) by way of adding "momentum" to the markets. I also believe that time effects price as well but I can't prove this and I don't work as a statistician to be able to try and test this on my own. Man i feel like I'm ranting now lol. I should go sleep!

Hey guys. Basically what I'm thinking of here with using regression with time as a variable is to see if its possible to get an idea of how price as the dependent variable moves in relation to volume and time i.e: for a one unit increase in time (being measured in whatever scale you prefer, 1 min, 5 min etc...) we may expect price to move between two points with 90% confindence (i'm thinking of a standard statistical 90% confidence interval here). This is obviously going to be dependent on volume as well. If we have sufficient data to test how significant time as a variable is then we might be able to use time in a model to help get more precise entry points earlier on in the day. My logic here is that over an average period of time data, price will tend to behave differently in various intervals over a trading time i.e: more active in the morning session compared to lunch session. Then again I have no idea how to represent this graphically, and perhaps its impossible, but if you can somehow get the data to stream into some sort of logarith which computes price as a function of volume and time you can get a constantly changing estimated price based on the market stats being generated in real time. Price = Beta0 + B1(Volume) + B2(Time) would be the statistical equation used i guess with your null hypotheses H0: B2 = 0 i.e time has no effect on price. Once you've tested to see if the model is free from any statistical multi-colinearity etc, then you could use your estimated price based on your equation to gague whether the current market price is at "fair value". I'm really sorry if that sounds very conveluted but its kind of late here and I've been up all day. If you have any questions ask and I'll try to clarify my thinking further. I have no idea how to code stuff, and I'm hopeless with computers, so if anyone does understand what I'm on about and thinks its possible let me know and we can try to test it.

omg noooo my stops! lol Thats it I'm using a phone broker now! hehe. Thats very true Cooter. Despite all the most fancy firewalls we can still be tracked! :o I should go delete my history before my missus finds me! jk heheh

I like the strategy that you use but the only thing that I seem to find a bit wrong with it is that you seem to really need to wait a long time for the volume distribution function to develop i.e: you have to wait a long time in the trading day to actually do anything. Can you add in another factor into your analysis, specifically time? Question being, if you factor in time then you can do a regression analysis based on price, volume, and time so that you can get a probability distribution (90% confidence intervals) to help time trades early on in the trading session. I might be wrong but it's just an idea

This is off topic don't want to hijack the thread but: Cooter your avatar is starting to freak me out! lol That damn smiling penguin is stalking my IP!

If you're using the pivots to scalp as a test of the strength of of the move to the pivot, have you found yourself taking a longer term position after you exit your scalp trade?

hehe nice, then at least you're still coming out with a 5.74 profit on those trades.

One quick question: you said that you were taking only 2 point trades in/out so what commissions are you paying for a round trip cause you're taking only $10 per contract on those trades?

Have you seen the pics of the new M3? That is one fully sick car (sorry regional lingo there). It will be sporting a V8 engine good for 308kW at perliminary estimations, and will weigh only slightly more than the outgoing M3CSL. It has a carbon fibre roof panel! Not as fast as the M5 but much more sexy. If thats not a pussy magnet I don't know what is.

Here in Australia a lot of people start in back office positions such as being a dealers assistant. Most places require you to be licenced to give advise on financial products however. Your role generally revolves around placing ordres, making sure they are executed, and reconciling client accounts at the end of the day. Some roles require you to delve into the business development side of things as well so be prepared to bullsh*t on the phone a lot to clients. After 1-2 years of this if you have shown aptitude and a solid understnading of the markets they may move you to a front office position as a trader however you will still be junior and will not be allowed to trade any of the company's own funds. You'll be in a "broker" role for a while and your job will revolve around alaysing the markets or particular stocks for the senior broker who then makes the sales. If you have been successfull as a private trader with a proven track record or 3+ years you can bypass a lot of that and land a job as a trader straight away but you need to be pretty good and like I said, have a proven track record.

I personally reckon that before you get started reading about techincal stuff you should sit down and read the basics of growing wealth through investment. Money management etc... Hope you guys don't laugh but I personally think that Robert Kiyosaki's book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" should be a good starting point to help train you brain to think along the lines of using your buying power to help create more wealth.