Dinerotrader

Please do post a quick note here when you begin to initiate any longs and why. Do you have specific criteria you use to decide if you are willing to enter new long positions or is it just a general feeling after considering all the market factors you observe? What did you think of my H-L-HL here?

I totally agree that SIM needs to be as close to possible as real. I haven't decided the size I will trade live so I need to work on that. I might just plan on trading 1 live and reduce my expectations for my daily income, and then increase size when I am consistently making that amount. About the margin... say I trade 1 CL contract and allocate $6,000 to that account. That means I have to lose ~$3,000 before I have a problem with a deficit correct? If my stop loss is at most $60 away from my entries and I don't constantly lose, it is going to take a while for me to have any deficit problem correct? The above example is very simple and I mention it because I am worried there is something I am just not understanding/missing about this since bathrobe's broker guy thinks you need 4 times the margin amount in your account to trade at all. Also, is there something that is actually different between a mini and a full size contract besides the mini's having a typically smaller margin amount? I didn't think there was any difference.

I have heard stuff like this before. What is the reason you would need 4 times the margin in your account to trade just 1 contract? I am missing something or maybe this is for people who trade with large potential drawdowns. Not sure.

Good points BF. I was only trading 4 contracts which would only be $12,000 margin for CL but I understand what you mean. I realized that the desire to make more than $500/day was influencing some of my trading decisions when I was just trading one contract and of course I can always just throw some more contracts in the mix and make that it much easier if I have a winning strategy. I know you have a goal to make $500 per contract traded but I think shooting for that was hurting my ability to just maximize my profitability on each trade based on PA. Adding contracts is easy and getting more capital for trading is generally pretty easy if you can show you are consistent at making money. Anyway, I am still thinking through this. I appreciate your advice.

Added a few contracts to my oil trades and went for smaller targets. SIM

Thanks for the post. Nice to here from a happy customer before I go spend some money.

Watch oil next time inventory comes out on Wednesday at 10:30 am ET and see how well a 5 min charts works for you.

I wouldn't be looking for 27 years. More like 5-10 years. I have a fundamental belief that markets do some similar things over time and that you can learn from the past in order to determine what future movements have higher probabilities. I don't have the ability to trade using history but I would like to test some ideas that I have. For example, I would like to look at how oil prices reacted to the weekly oil inventory report going back over the past couple years. To do this I would need tick data since the moves are so fast when inventory comes out.

I was not at work to trade today so I had to deal with kids while trying to keep up with the CL, ZS, 6E, RLM, and the 6E. Not ideal. I'll definitely be getting office space somewhere once I move to full time trading. The G oil contract had more volume today than the F for the first time so I switch over and realized the price was way different ($2) and the got confused whether my S/R levels were still in the right place on the new contract. The ES is so slow that I had to walk away from the computer just to stay in the trade. The ZS had a good move but I wasn't watching it at the right time to catch it.

I figured someone would have already gone through this process and evaluated what is the easiest cheapest path. CQP.com looks like the main google search result so far. I need the CL globex, correct (noted below)?

I trade the Demo everyday and you definitely don't simply get filled if your order is the same as the current price. I miss fills all the time when price quickly hits my order price and reverses.

Your kidding me. I thought for sure I was the first and probably the last. Your a funny guy Tams. I'll look into this.

I haven't. I'll have to see what that feeds you.

So I just call them up and say, "hey there, I am looking for a boat load of oil data, who do I need to haggle with to get a good price on 5 to 10 years of CL data?" or something to that effect. Maybe I just need to find out if some other trader already bought this data and is willing to sell it to me. Thanks for the ideas. Is there a specific charting service that is cheap that I can plug a bunch of expensive data into it and do my analysis?

Not the most informative answer but I appreciate the effort. Just curious, what makes you believe this idea?

Thanks a million BF. Here are some prices they have for varying levels of reminder data. I'll probably get this unless someone knows of something else that is cheaper. This brings up another question. If I want to find out the economic news as fast as possible, where or how do I get it?

Okay. I have been looking into getting historical data in varying amounts but now I am thinking, "doesn't someone just offer all available historical data for each given future?" I just want all the data down to the tick level for a few different futures. I trade oil a lot and say I want to go back to see how price reacted to weekly inventory numbers each week for the past 2 years. I don't want a day, hour, or a 5 minute chart. I want to be able to look at what price did sometimes at the tick level. So my question is who offers this and how much should it cost? I guess it is just a bunch of data with a price and then from there you can just use any ol' charting software to show you charts of whatever time frame you want in whatever scale you want. I get ideas for different trading strategies all the time that I simply cannot even start to evaluate because I don't have nearly enough data. Also, is there a good way to start saving the data I do receive (I use OEC) so that I can keep tick level data even when OEC stops making it available on their service?

Has anyone figured out a way to get economic news events automatically set as reminders on your computer so you don't have to manually set any of them. I'd also be interested in picking and choosing which news events I wanted reminders for. I use outlook for all my reminders right now so my hope is there is a way to get some sort of auto import of those reminders into outlook. I just don't want to spend any time on things that can be automated.

+ $284 Right after oil comes out I seem to do the best. My good "after inventory" trades had to offset my morning overtrading of oil. ZS gave me a picture perfect bounce of my support. I did better not overtrading today but still lots of work to be done on that. I guess I have a bit of a gambler inside me that has to be controlled constantly while watching the charts. SIM

Ever since your update I haven't had any freezing problems and the like.

SCSC Maybe throw some Thales 1-2-3 in here and voila, a nice little reversal. We'll see if it works.

SWSI This one is just interesting. Resistence at one level and Support was just a bit above that in the past. That would me me leary of taking any breakout move on this until we cleared the 2nd hurdle.

MDTH Nice strong move off support after some consolidating action.

CBR Were still in the down trend but we had a good hammer at R couple days ago and some strong upward action today. On the watchlist.

Today was a day of "just missed it" trades.