calsprdr

The Nadex exchange has been set up to create a regulated market for these options. In the past there have been websites set up to trade them, but they were actually thinly disguised gambling sites set up in foreign countries. Not always scams, but sometimes it was hard to get your money out. They work like forex brokers: they make money from the bid/ask spread, which they dictate. I don't trade them, but I believe Nadex to be completely legitimate.

The godfather of candlesticks, Steve Nison, says over and over: Do NOT use candlesticks without confirmation from other indicators.

Once in a great while special opportunities arise. I am speaking now of the limit up day corn had on Thursday August 11. The WASDE report came out Thursday morning and every corn trader should have known what it would say. Previous reports had highly overestimated corn yields given current terrible weather conditions, and one could expect this report would revise expectations downward -- extremely bullish for corn prices. You would have had to be in the market before the previous session close at 8:15 EST (the report was issued at 8:30 EST). The market reopened at 10:30 EST. Does anyone not think this is a day trade? So I'm in the 99% camp

Some notes: 1) In spite of the "black swan" nature of the *cascade* of global events that are causing the volatility in world markets, our own stock market's woes do not seem to mirror the magnitude of what's happening. Shouldn't the market be down a lot more?? 2) Financial companies started our government intervention problems. Do you think investors are "punishing" them? 3) "Fundamentally stocks are NOT undervalued..." did you mean technically? All the fund managers I have heard say companies are the strongest they have been in years (cash on books, M&A positioning). Yes, technically everything is very weak. 5) Japan is indeed an interesting outlier. Its economy is weak but the repatriation of funds inside the country after all the disasters seems to have at least temporarily shored things up. The Yen has been beating up on the Dollar for four months. 7) The price action in gold has me baffled... shoots straight up then crashes. Wat up wi dat??

Oh no zdo, now you sound like Tams

No, I'm not Tradewinds, just some guy who butted in

I'm not trying to dis you here, but what about Gann's methods are "rubbish"? Time analysis is very big in the Fibonacci trading methodologies, which are hardly considered out of date. If you want to reject a person's ideas please explain *where* you think he is wrong.

I would expect it to test a support/resistance level first, say 112.25 (see prices on 7/20 and 7/24). After the August drop it did that (to the 110.50 area) and after the 8/4 jump it's testing the S/R level from 7/28. 114 just seems too optimistic to me, particularly since it spent little time there.

It's true I'm talking about longer time frames, but even on short time frames prices tend to oscillate around a mean. When prices don't move through the mean but bounce off in a rejection pattern, that is usually a pretty good signal to trade in the direction of the bounce. The traders "out there" watch various moving averages very carefully and so when prices get near them you might want to be deciding if any crowd-induced price action is occurring.

My two cents... The is no particular evidence that prices revert to the mean... look at Apple. However from a statistical standpoint there *is* evidence that *volatility* reverts to the mean. Volatility can really only be taken advantage of in the world of options. When volatility reverts to the mean then options are becoming more overvalued or undervalued depending on whether implied volatility is above or below that mean. Then option traders switch from selling premium to buying premium or vice versa.

I use IB and have done a little programming against its java API...not perfect, but could be worse. Let me warn you, don't use Tradestation Futures edition. It plain sucks. The regular Tradestation 8 for equities is OK. By the way, I use ninja for charting, it gets its data feed from IB with no problem except IB doesn't send tick data

Sorry Tams, but as a professional programmer with 35 years experience, I can unequivocally say that your statement just is not true. Of course many systems can be automated. But the problem lies with systems where the signals are not generated by "when X is 2 cents below Y." There are traders I have worked with who can tell me exactly what they are doing and I can program an approximation, but the backtesting blows up because I can *never* find a Z% away from W that adequately captures their "artistic" entries. I like programming systems but I have never got one to work that adequately approximates how *I* trade. Now that's frustrating! :crap:

I day trade futures; but I also day trade stock options sometimes. Shorting shares can sometimes be impossible but you can always buy a put Depending on the time of day, futures volumes might not offer you a decent trade. I can then move over to equities for as SIUYA says, "a bigger universe".

How is LinkedIn going to make money? Their valuation is made up by Goldman or whoever is underwriting the IPO. Social networking is great, but it's been proven with other similar enterprises that the users won't pay; that leaves advertisers... yawn...

Hey Flex, do you ever trade or do you just backtest systems until your old computers give out??