sweet n´sour

Unfortunately it is true! I started out with a ThinkOrSwim account, with margin and everything. Then TOS was sold to TDAmeritrade and for some time everything was fine. But suddenly they changed their policy and I lost my margin status and with it the ability to trade futures, forex and option strategies. I still can buy stocks, call and put options. But that´s it. No spreads, no futures and no forex. It is a shame! :crap: As alternative to the good option platform you could try Tradestation (with option station), or try InteractiveBrokers together with the new Esignal Option Analytics platform. That´s expensive compared with free TOS, but it´s a solution.

This simply sounds like you are not enough capitalized for your trading system! Your system like any other system has losers and drawdowns. Now to trade the system effectively you have to have enough capital to backup the losers and drawdowns. If you have enough capital than there should be no mental edge problems. If you have not enough capital then trading your system becomes a gamble, because the normal losers and drawdowns have a good chance to blow up the account. And you know that. So you try to make your system better as you go with trying to skip the loosing trades. But this does not work by definition !! So the actual mental problem is: why are you trying to trade a system, that needs (!) more background capital than you have?

I would suggest to focus on a limited number of stocks. Perhaps take 2 or 3 stocks from each sector representing this particular sector and stay with them. You should carefully pick these stocks monitoring their movement in comparison to their corresponding sector. Look at the charts and get a feel for the behavior of the single stock, when the sector is going up, down or sideways. Than you do the same for the behavior of the whole sector in comparison to the market itself (SPX, SPY). You should have a clear picture of what the sector usually does in comparison to the market at a given time and you should have a clear picture of what the stock does in comparison to the sector. Backtest the trading ideas you get from this monitoring. Look for price action patterns in the single stocks that could give you an edge. Always look for entries and targets and probability of success and risk/reward. Always look at all of these together. Backtest the ideas you get from this. :missy::hmmmm::idea: Use the market and the sector for general trend direction (as a filter) and trade the price pattern setups that have been profitable in the backtesting. Don´t be greedy and expect more profit than your backtests suggested. Expect much less profit instead (perhaps 60%-70% of the backtest results.) Don´t rush anything because you are running out of time. Try to prepare for part time trading (while working on the regular job) instead. Once trading makes you enough money you can come back to full time trading again. With kind regards, sweet n´sour

In my opinion Carter is probably legit and lame ! Think about. You have mastered trading to a degree that you are a bit profitable. Just a bit. You have winners and losers and because you make no big mistakes (psychological or other), you are making a little bit money over time. But just a tiny little bit better than break-even. So now you can call yourself a profitable trader. If you have enough money you can even make a living out of that. But ...that is not what people are expecting, when they are looking for a good trading education. Because if you have not lot´s of money to begin with, this approach is simply not good enough. Being a little bit better than break-even makes perhaps a profitable trader (90% are said to be loosers in trading anyhow) but that is not the same as a good or great trader. So but now you can sell your image as a "profitable trading guru" with a good show and some teaching about the basics (discipline, option greeks ....etc.etc.), selling some nice indicators and so on. And with this you can make a lot of money. And now you can trade bigger size if you invest part of your educator profits and even your minimal edge gets you more money now. The only problem with all that is, that people get a wrong idea. If the Guru tells: "Ok listen, I can teach you some ground rules and stuff but my trading edge is actually really really tiny" than nobody would buy his courses. So he will not tell this and pretend somehow that his edge is actually quite substantial. (If he can trade big size, he can pretend this very easily.) And the people start to trade his methods with wrong expectations ! And ...they loose! Why ? Because their psychology is not in sync with the true expectations this methods have to offer. And than they are told their psychology is the problem, but that is just not the whole truth. You can even play this game if you are not profitable in your trading at all! You have only to make lots of winners. (And of course your method should not be loosing to much in the long run, but it still can be a little worse than break-even.) There was for some time a guy in Carters and Huberts team, who made winners most of the time (averaging down...etc) for nearly a year ! But than lost all this profit in one day (break-even for the year)!!! However the money his students paid for this year he kept ! And the best was: one week after the disaster he held a webinar on psychology "how to deal with big losses as a trader" !:crap: Ok this guy had to leave TTM (for obvious reasons I assume). But he continues to run a trading room elsewhere to this day and perhaps the story repeats itself.

You lucky one ! :applaud: In fact to find a good way to mangage trades to increase the edge instead of decreasing it is for me by far the most difficult thing in trading. Are there any threads that deal in a general and informative way with that topic. (So that I do not have to pay Pristine for that.. (sorry Paul ) I have for ex. a couple of setups that have a an edge, but I would like to increase that by managing the trades. However in the longer run I always decrease or even destroy that edge, while managing. One of many reasons for this could be that the most profitable trades seem to happen, when TA sort of fails. The stops of trapped traders etc. push the markets in the opposite direction. So when I decide to get out of the trade or not to take it, because it looks like it will not work, right at that moment it works great and I miss a big profit. Until now I could not find a solution. It seems that these setups are not manageable. This reminds me of a story from another very well known vendor / trader who said that he financed his college time with gap trading. And that when he traded full time and managed the gap trades he started to loose money with them. My question is: are there certain criteria to decide if a setup is manageable or not. For example if you have a very big target and / or a very big stop you could manage much more successful, because there is time and space for chart formations...etc. to guide the way. But if you have tight stops and or tight targets it´s very hard because you have much fewer clues. Also how is the manageability influenced by the instrument. Single Stocks move different than forex and different than index futures and different than oil....etc. at least intraday. Or for example the above mentioned gap trades. You find these trades because a high percentage of gaps in the index futures close the same day. But you never know when and on which path they close. So when you start to manage it gets very tricky...:crap: As far as I have heard from paid for instructors (gurus) all information on this was crap. If someone here finds it easy to manage trades, please give some general hints on how to other than pull up the stop und the latest low. I also would like to know how much more profit is a realistic goal? Is the management crucial for the profitability or is it just good for some little optimization? If it is absolutely crucial than this would explain why so many traders fail despite of all the information that is out there (paid or free).

Successful trading besides a day job is definitely possible. I would recommend to trade Forex on the 4 charts. You can do this by looking at the charts twice a day for 15 -30 minutes (for ex. after breakfast and before dinner). You can put in orders for entry and exist of new positions and manage open trades (adjusting trailing stops etc.). If you trade wisely multiple pairs simultaneously you have a certain degree of diversification and you make up for missing some opportunities because you cannot watch the whole day. If you are day trading (scalping) you can focus just on one or two instruments but with a 4 hour time frame you can overlook and manage many different currency pairs (+ Spot Gold depending on the broker). Depending on your capital you choose to trade with micro lots, which makes it easy to adjust the risk very carefully, so that you are not over leveraged even with many different open positions. However, you should find a style or system, that trades mainly on and off certain price levels rather than on indicators or moving averages alone, because price levels are fixed and therefore need no permanent attention like constantly changing indicators. You should look into gartly patterns, measured moves (AB = CD) etc.

Can you explain a bit more why you think looking at printouts is better than looking at the computerscreen. Also I realized that even successful traders (or at least some who I believe to be successful) are not in agreement, on why the market does what it does. For example I have listened for some time to 2 different trading gurus, who run trading rooms, who I both believe not to be scam artist, but successful traders. Yet the one is sure to make his money, because he knows were the newbies (the dumb money) are making their mistakes. And in general he believes that the professionals take the money from the amateurs. His whole trading plan / setups are build on that scenario. The other one is quite the opposite. He believes that in the markets the professionals take the money from the other professionals. The amateurs in his thinking are not rich enough to be cared about. They have not enough money for the pros to be of real interest. (Perhaps only as a "side dish" so to speak). His trading is build around a different theory about the markets. But he is also successful. So perhaps the ultimate reason for success in trading is not in understanding "why" the market moves, but simply "how it normaly moves". I am not sure...

Perhaps it is not so much intuition, but that different methods for entries and exits are the key to successful trading. For example: an exhaustion candle (with big volume after a climatic uptrend etc.) could be a very good price action sign to get out of a trade very near the top. On the other hand it is not necessarily a good price action sign to go short, because before the trend reverses prices could go a little bit higher still, and / or consolidate for a long time. So for an exit of a profitable trade this would be very good, but for starting a new one it could stop you out, whipsaw you or need a very big SL leaving you with poor risk/reward ratios. Using more lagging information (indicators... etc) for entries into a reliable new trend makes perfect sense to me.

In fact you can do this with an european based CFD account. I think you can trade 1€ per ES point CFD contracts. But be aware that you are trading against the house, because you are trading not the real future contracts, but a broker made substitute (the CFD). You trade with fixed spreads (and most of the time without commissions) just as in Forex, but the broker can change the spread at certain times of special volatilty and / or day time. So for swing trading this may be suitable, but for daytrading / scalping it is not very useful. On top of that you have to pay interest to the broker for overnight holding of positions. So for longer term swings this is also not very good. :doh:

What are the concepts behind the PBF calculations? I only understood that it is completely different from the TTM Squeeze concept (Bollinger and Keltner etc.) But I did not find how in the contrary the PBF- Squeeze is calculated? Any information on that? regards Sweet n´Sour