Dinerotrader

The more time I spend with crude the harder it is for me to trade other futures. That breakdown gave a number of big indications it was going to occur...volume, S/R, trendline break, "123". I unfortunately, quit my SIM trading for the day before it occured so I couldn't take it. Nice trade Jon.

Open ECry. Why: - Only $25 per month to SIM trade which includes data feed and charting. And no $25 fee at all if you trade live, just commissions are charged. - I was able to download it and use it on my corporate work computer which I haven't been able to do with any other broker. - Lots of good Q&A threads about using their platform here at TL (thanks to Brownsfan and others)

I used to subscribe to both forex and futures on OEC but closed my forex account many months back. I think they are just working through some bugs with the weekend update they performed. You'll probably get futures data as usual once they fix this.

SIM +$750 Good day especially considering the tight ranges of all the swings on oil. I was taking a quick look at GNG and noticed it was setting up to be a great breakdown but by the time I was getting my trade entry setup, it already started breaking so I only got a small piece. Missed the first 45 minutes of trading today because something was wrong with my platform's futures feed. I'm okay with 15 trades especially on such a choppy day.

I was on the phone with Derek (tech support) trying to figure out why I wasn't getting any futures data this morning for 45 minutes. They did an update over the weekend and he still isn't sure what the problem is. He got me set up on the older DEMO version to trade from in the mean while and gave me some free DEMO months for the inconvenience. I'll let you know what I hear when he gets back to me.

Margin for oil and natural gas is about $3,000 a piece on OEC. I only trade 1 lot at a time but I want to make sure I am okay with margin if I end up needing a trade on natural gas and oil at the same time with other possible order sitting on the DOM. I am not sure if OEC requires you to have double the margin if you have 2 orders on the DOM, like a buy stop and sell stop on either side of a channel. I'll have to find this out.

This is an important part of my planning. My wife is very used to the semi monthly bank deposit from the steady job which provides a warm blanket of security to her daily living. Finding a way to transition to income that fluctuates without that taking away her security blanket will be tricky unless I am just making money hand over fist. A monthly income report or something like that would probably be best. Or maybe I'll just tell her how much I made only on the days I make money sort of as a fluffing of the security blanket to make sure she knows its there. I'm curious how others have dealt with this issue if they have significant others. Maybe I'll have to start another thread for this issue.

Thanks for post Thales. Its always nice to get your take on things. Last week I decided to only trade the CL with occasionally looking at Nat Gas to see if anything great is going on there. I am sticking to that so no worries about trading too many markets. Daily profits..... I don't have a daily profit goal. Right now I am more focused on trying to quit trading for the day at the right time if I am up or down. I do have a goal to average $600 per day because I need to be averaging that in order to justify leaving my job and trusty paycheck. I am only trading 1 contract though so if my average is $300 that is okay, I'll just trade 2 contracts. Here is the deal with big swings in profits. I was okay with the idea of having big up days and big down days until I realized 2 things. 1. I will often overtrade in an effort to make sure try to catch the big move of the day. I was so focused on catching the HOD or LOD that I would sometimes have 5-10 trades at the level where I thought that would happen. Today was overtraded so I am going back through to correct that. 2. If I don't trade on a day that has the big moves that make me money I'll not have that offsetting great day to counter the losing days. Which means I will constantly be worried if I don't trade one day that I am missing the big profit day. That would bring a lot of stress to days off from trading which is when I don't want any stress. I want to know I can pull money out of the markets on most days. The idea of trading like your friend who is only catching the big moves on trending days sounded good to me until I realized that he can't miss those days or he his month's income will be in trouble. What if he sick one day, wants to take a vacation or something. He might miss one of the few days he can make money from. Anyway, I don't think I know the answer or that I am right but that's the current argument going on in my head. I'll keep thinking through this though. Trading live I want to make sure I am showing some consistent profits before trading live. How could I ever expect to make money live if I can't on SIM. I have also been refining and changing my trading over the past 6 months as I learn/make mistakes/realize new things so each time I make some changes I start the clock over on proving my profit consistency. Another thing is that I still have too many days in which I make errors in my trading. By error I don't mean losing, I mean click the wrong mouse button or place my stop at where I think is below the swing but is actually at the swing low so I get stopped out too early. I am currently planning on putting $15,000 in my account to trade live. I am still getting used to the method changes I made to my trading strategy on Monday so hopefully next week will be better. I am committed to becoming a full time trader but sometimes I read posts from you, Brownsfan, Bathrobe, Blowfish, Kiwi, etc. and realize that I am a very new player to this game so why should I think I can become profitable so quickly. I work hard but this one of the hardest games to play and win at. I'd like to be live in April before my new son is born but if I have anything it is definitely patience. If more waiting and practicing is required, so be it.

SIM -$94 Week P/L total: +$676 Well, too many trades today. For some reason, setups were 50/50 today. I still need to do some post trading research to figure out what was going on but happy to come out just paying commissions and with a positive week. I am liking focusing on the net profit since that is the reality of the results. My long term S/R level of 78.78 provided a good outlook for trades yesterday and today. 78.21 turned out to be an important level. I try to keep my S/R levels to a minimum on my charts just to give me a roadmap for price and I had decided to leave off 78.21 which was a mistake. It would have certainly given me a better picture of what to expect if I had had it on my chart the past 3 days.

Seeing poverty/less fortunate is different than interacting and helping. I spent a lot of time working with blind children and orphanages in Hungary when I lived there and it added another layer of perspective above observation. Just traveling around and seeing the world is only half the plan. Digging some wells in Africa and such is the other half. Good points though. The idea of going back to school to learn for enjoyment instead of grades does sound fun. It seems like most the finish school come away knowing they love to learn but hate dealing with tests and forced homework. Self inflicted homework is just enjoyable practice.

Maybe I am missing how the symbol lookup works. I am not liking the new one. The old way you could click energy, and then see all the different energy futures. This one shows me absolutely nothing until I start searching with specific names. I am assumming I just don't know how to use it yet.

SIM +$342 After suffering through a 30 tick range on oil for 1.5 hours I am happy with the result. A little emotionally drained from all the back and forth and having hairtrigger exits so I am calling it a day. I have done my fair share of complaining about trend days but this is not what I was hoping for. Here's a chart of today's range for those not trading oil.

Quick look at oil.

SIM -$156 Crappy day. 2 errors in trading which hurt me bad. First error, I clicked the wrong side of my mouse in a trade which exited me at market instead of moved my stop so I got out of a nice early winner. Second error, I was on a different time chart than I thought I was on for 30 minutes and that caused some bad trades. Luckily, once I found that out, I fixed the problem and traded profitably after that. I controled the emotions better even with the errors so that was good. Trading after 12:00 ET is so boring. My overall trading plan is to definitely be done trading by then. That is 10:00 am my time so that would be a great time to be done with my work day. Get to the office, trade from 7:00 to 10:00, review the trades for the day, get lunch, hit the gym and then go home. Someday, Brownsfan, I'll be living the dream too.

Ok. Now for the most materialistic, daydreaming thread of all. What will you do when you become rich from trading? I’m not interested in general/vague answers or cliché stuff like “buy a big house.” If you have a specific house already picked out with pictures, post away. I’d be interested in what kinds of interests others have which are only afforded to those with more money than average. It doesn't necessarily have to cost millions. Car posts should go in my other thread, "Cars". Here’s a good example to start things off. I’d love to take my family on a world cruise. I'd like for my kids to see the realities of different parts of the world before they become defiant teenagers. Some kind of picture is a requirement for posting here. It just makes the thread more enjoyable.

You're right. I checked my live trades and I paid a little less than $4 RT so I'll assume an even $4. I'll change that. Thanks.

I bet that is it or maybe he has no idea how to post in a forum in a constructive way. Every comment he makes destroys the learning process and information exchange of the thread. If is very easy to change one's posting style to one that is constructive but he apparently refuses to do so. Its funny how the wisest people you'll ever meet or read about understand and freely admit that they know hardly anything but simply have many postulations about what really is. Enochbenjamin, get some charts up here to get this thread back on track.

I thought I would try to start posting my net profit after commissions to help reinforce my need to keep the trading at a minimum and post my running week total. My emotions got me today. Got out of a short that went straight down after oil coiled up at open and I just started trading wildly after that. Should have put my head down for a few moments and repeated a mantra or something after that missed trade. Plan is to go live trading in mid April if consistent profitability becomes the norm. Why trade live if I can't make money on SIM.

I hope losses don't deter people from posting here. Losses and learning periods are part of the game. No reason not to continue posting even if you have a down period. Nobody's posting here to impress anyone, what would that get you?

SIM +$630 GCL trades: 6 GNG trades: 1 A quick note before my day's notes. These ideas are specific to my style so I realize this isn't necessarily true for other traders. I realized over the weekend, that my overall trading strategy was requiring too large of daily winners to be profitable. This meant that when a big move was brewing, I had to be in it or my day would not be profitable which led to overtrading. I don't want to become a trader that relies upon big moves to survive since those don't always happen, I am not always going to catch them, and I want to be able to take vacations without worrying about missing the big moves. My new philosophy is going to be based around being able to make money day in and day out on swings that always occur. Don't get me wrong, I am not looking to start scapling. Today went well but with my new method, I will have to cut days short if I my first few trades don't have a winner. I am still working on trade filtration so I can up my win rate to match my normal stop size. I'll try to start posting the number of trades I took to keep myself more accountable.

I have been using Open ECry's demo for about 5 months or so now day in and day out and I really like it for my style of trading. You can use OEC's demo for $25/month which includes their charting and data feed. Very good deal for a beginning trader and there are lots of question and answer threads here in the OEC section of the forum which has really helped me when I couldn't figure something out. They just put out a new version of their platform last week which has some nice upgrades. It is hard trying to figure out what to use when you are a beginner because there are a million different opinions out there about each platform. For me, I just wanted to get started on the real work of trading at a low cost while I wasn't earning any income from trading and OEC fit the bill. Good luck.

Its like I am blind sometimes. You change it under the Grid section.

I don't think I explained myself well. The prices on the right axis are black and I want to change those. When I change the candlestick color it doesn't change the price color.

Quick question on scale number color. How do I change their color? I am going to try setting up my charts with a black background for a change to see if I like it better and I can't get the prices to change color. Sometimes I open up my chart in the morning on a 26" monitor and all the white can be a bit much.

SIM +$10 Had to get some tech support in the morning during the big oil move so I didn't even get a chance to trade it. Inventory on both oil and gas was today and they were both pretty slow.