Nick1984

I initially joined this forum with a limited knowledge of trading derived from jumping into the stock markets. I only just started trading futures and its a different experience and I'm only keeping my head afloat at the moment while I iron out kinks in my strategy. I believe that the majority of people which join the forum and don't contribute by way of posting just use the posts here as an educational tool. I don't have any problem with someone else wanting to learn, and by teaching someone else I believe that you not only have to be objective about your own learning but that you will learn more as well at the same time. While there is always going to be a disparity in the levels of experience that traders here have, the one thing that binds the forum together is that everyone no matter how well they are doing wants to keep on learning. I asked myself often: Why would James put up his videos showing his entry and exit techniques; why would he offer this forum as a learning tool to so many people? The answer that I came up with was that, James is putting his own cards down on the table so to speak and he is holding himself accountable to thousands of people he's never even met who can critisise him for his techniques, so therefore he is receiving back not just giving. I might not have been as technical in all of my posts as some of the other experienced traders here, but when I have posted something serious, I try to be as helpfull as possible. As to the doc's question: I think a speculator is simply someone who takes a position in a market with no underlying interst beforehand based upon a set of supposed facts which they believe will arrive at a pre-determied outcome which they aim to profit off.

Good question TinGull, exactly what I was thinking. Its a very interesting topic, and I'm glad someone put this up in such a coherent manner. Question: If your jumping in and out that often to chase your 5-8 ticks over a few different trades, doesn't that small number of ticks get eaten up by commissions?

Hey Tony, Yes I think you'll find that many YM traders on this forum use MP but then again its up to everyone's individual styles. Check out the MP forum itself and the video section for some of Soultraders fantastic videos on MP. Enjoy your stay.

For index traders, commodity prices have a huge bearing on the index (well here in Aus anyway). Keeping a track of rises and falls in metals such as: Gold, Silver, Nickel, and Copper are really imporant imho. Economic indicators apart from CPI are: AWOTE (Average Weekly Ordinary Time Earnings) indication of real wages, Interest rates, Current Account deficit/surplus (most western countries run deficits cause we're all big spenders so basically how much larger is the deficit getting!) Retail Spending (These numbers I dont trust cause the boom times of Christmas and Mothers Day which all coincide with the release of economic data is misleading i reckon). Employment Rates (We love low employment!) Building Approvals etc..

Thanks for that James Got my exams coming up now so trading has gone on the back foot for the next few weeks while I try to study. Will have to put in some market studying time once things settle down. Only still in my first month on the YM so it'll take a while to start spotting its little habits!

Psychology isnt really that suited to learning at tertiary level unless you do enough of it to do an honours dissertation because for the most part you'll be doing basic undergrad things which wont really apply to trading. Once you get to honours then you can conduct research in a field you choose and then you can specialise in investment phsychology i guess. But don't take my word on that, different universities have different subject offerings.

Nice video as always. Currently I can't get TICK data so I can't use the hooks etc as confirmations of reversals and subsequently I'm having a hard time actually picking the bottoms. That example you gave early on where lots of people who got in on the red candle to get stopped out before the reversal describes me very well! Do you have any other tips on how to spot the reversal without the TICK crutch? ATM all I really do is just use the volume, but recently the volume on the YM has been acting a big sporadic and hard to predict.

I nominate NihabaAshi/Mark for an award for having consistently the most detailed responses ever. I think every single post made has always been very very detailed!

I can't speak directly about the US because your tax laws differ from ours in Australia but I know don't use H&R Block they suck the big one. I've paid them $150 bucks for a basic tax time deduction number crunch and they came up with $30 bucks of deductions once..... go figure. In the USA if you conduct 30 round trip trader within a year do you get classified as a professional trader? Here in Aus if you do, then you get your tax rate capped at 30% and no medicare levy. Also your losses become tax deductible which is a bonus. If there is a similar system in the US, then you can use your favourable taxation position to siphon off your excess profits and direct them into long term investments such as managed funds or shares which can produce tax effective income streams as well to further help reduce the overall volatilty of your income.

I did a finance major and a economics minor. I can say that out of the two economics is the most useful one. Finance is good only if you really want to go into the corporate finance sector working in M&A etc, or become an insurance underwriter. Not much on trading! The most usefull subject I did in my finance major was one on Options and Futures which taught us the basics of Black Scholes etc so that we could spot fair price for options and arbitrage oppertunities. Employers love that subject when looking at an academic transcript because by definition it is a very hard subject to do. Economics I have found to be more practical and applicable to every day situations. Economics I beleive also hones your analytical abilities more than any other subject apart from perhaps philosophy, because to really understand economics you need to think of an issue from many different perspectives. Cooter, In terms of MBA's etc, in this day and age they are pretty useless IMHO. These are all pretty wanky pieces of paper you only need if you want to play to corporate finance game and in that case you're almost as secure with a CPA accreditation. Corporations dont care so much about financial theory I.e: Present value calculations, they care more about accounting profits which dont represent inflation etc. Brownsfan, i agree with you a bit as well, computer programming skills are good to have when trading but not necessary, because no matter how good I was, i'd still more likely purchase an indicator because of the opportunity cost associated with making it yourself...i.e: Time. It takes a while to make and test them which could otherwise be spent trading anyway! (See I love economics haha).

Apparently Mozart makes you smarter! That may be an idea hehe.

When I'm trading I like to have music on. I've always been like that. I need something which is pretty lively or aggressive so I put on things such as: Rage against the machine Nine Inch Nails Soulfly David Bowie Tomahawk If I've made my target for the day I relax and put on something soothing such as: Air St Germaine Sergio Mendes Depeche Mode (ok not very relaxing but I love em) Grandmaster Flash (legend) So what do you listen to when you trade?

What are the advantages of these firms then in having such a liberal hiring policy? I read a couple of sites from Prop firms and they all talk about taking you on for a probationary period where you trade mostly simulated markets and they give you intensive training etc... The reason I liked the idea was cause I thought this might be a way to get trade mentorship for pretty cheap!

I was thinking of the ones where you trade but off the firms own account. Edit: yea in the long run i dont think being surrounded by a bunch of other people would be very pleasant when trading. I love to have my music on when I trade, and they'd probabbly frown upon me lol.

What i read at the beginning of the post when that little formula was put up was that a trader should aim for a reasonable point target (+10) and trade more contracts to make the $ profit. For me this sounds like a recipe for suicide! An inexperienced trader which runs a 10 point stop loss (very popular) to aim for a 10 point gain is running a 1:1 RR. A noobie trader will have very few defined setups as well and will be just trading on a whim, so they are most likely going to blow up an account really fast by trading more contracts. If you're chasing only +10 you'd use a -5 stop and spend more time getting your entry technique right so that you have over 50% chance of making your 10 so you can in the long run make your profits. I read a post in another thread where someone said that you should only add in 1 extra contract for every minimum account size balance that you add to your own. I.E: if you have 5k trade 1 contract, then at 10k trade 2 contracts, at 15k trade 3 contracts etc... I like this idea very much, because by the time you build up 5k from trading only 1 contract at a time (if your taking 10 every day with no losses at all then this would take you almost 6 months on the YM), you'll learn how to identify your setups over time and develop your system. Rushing in with the express idea of making fast bucks is a recipe for disaster.

I've seen heaps of prop trading firms advertise on the net for "new blood' so to speak and have always been interested to know exactly what goes on in there. They dont really exist here in Aus so its a foreign concept for me. What I do know is however that you are employed to trade the firms on equity on the markets and you get a cut of the profits you make. Question: If you are working for a prop firm and making money on a regular basis, why would you continue to stay there when you could easily use your same strategy to trade individually from home? Another question: Because they are trading their own equity in the firm, wouldn't the firm require you to follow a pre-set strategy? i.e: wouldn't your own personal trading style become cramped in there? Just a little curious cause next year I wanted to go to the US for a while and thought it might be fun to apply for a position when I'm there!

WOW great to see my lil suggestion was taken so well! Go to sleep for a night and come back with a lot of posts to read hehe. Sounds all very exciting

Quick entry note: Personally, I had almost the exact same trade as you James, except I went long at the point where you have a TICK hook at the 0. You can see however that after the small price rally the volume does stay very low and it was making me very nervous so I pulled out relatively early and then waited for the pivot and was lucky enough to go short and catch part of that first move down.

The pattern looks nice on that particular chart but could you provide an example of that over a different timeframe? Reason I ask is because it looks like its only reasonably doable if there has been a relatively significant retracement.

Just a quick question cause I don't have access to the data for some of those sectors: Whats the Banking Sector and Institution Holding sector specifically measure?

Something similar to what you're talking about brownsfan is on Bodybuilding.com - The Future Of Bodybuilding! Huge Bodybuilding Site. where they have a "BodySpace" section where users can input their photos etc but as well as that there is a section where they put in their stats over different periods, and graphs etc of a persons weight, body fat, and lifts come up so they can see (and others can see obviously) how someone is progressing. When you have a graphical representation of how you're doing which is public as well it really does put you on your toes because you're open to criticism!

The thing about oil, is that there is relatively little left. There are large areas of unexplored oil territory but a lot of that is in very inhospitible territory which makes it un-drillable i.e: deep deep deep ocean. Also the Green movement is campaigning heavily against fossil fuels. Here where I live in Victoria, Australia we have vast amounts of coal which we could use to power our plants for well over another hundred years but every day in the paper we hear people complaining about how much it pollutes. On the other hand they don't want nuclear power here either...!?! Crazy greenies they can't make up their mind on anything, i guess maybe they would perfer us to go back to the dark ages lol. Anyhow, nuclear fuel is a viable source of energy which produces relatively little waste (16 container crates full is the total nuclear waste produced world wide since the world went nuclear). Hydrogen fuel is another option but so far the technolog is not so well developed like nuclear is. For these reasons I can't help but see the U market keep on going up and up.

Here are some youtube links to some clips for the concert: This is the song Capital G from the new album "Year Zero" played live: This one is of "The Good Solider" from the same album:

Doesnt the ADX indicator show the strength of a trend?

I just came back home now from the opening night of NIN in Melbourne and I can say that I was dissapointed with Trent. The show started out brilliantly with a whole host of different songs which pleased the crowd in the intimate venue where about 1200 fans were packed into a relatively small area. There was a technical difficulty with some of the equipment so the band wasn't able to play a few intended songs. Then towards the end of the show Trent rolls out the keyboard and starts to play Hurt. Everyone is singing along to the song in high spirits, and there are a few cries of "We love you Trent" and all was well. One guy shouted out "What are you doing after the show Trent" then Trent completely shut down. He calls out "Am I supposed to pretend I can't hear some asshole calling out to me..?....Ok lets move on then" and he threw his microphone away the band came out they played one last song "The Hand That Feeds" then walked off the stage without a word. The crowd was pretty stunned and were waiting around for the band to come out but they never did. Very unprofessional in my oppinion. If you're there paying your money to a professional who has played hundreds of times, they should be able to take the good and the bad. It's not like the call that made Trent rage quit was said in a mean manner. The crowd were singing along and showing their appreciation. He could of just asked them to quieten down and kept on going. After 10 minutes of waiting around with no sign of the band and the bus boys coming out to clean the stage, chants of "Trent is a #@$%head" were thrown out (gotta love us Aussies for our chanting skills...Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi oi) and a few "#@$% you Trents" which didn't help the situation either. Lots of disenfranchised fans after that concert.