robertm

Good post DD, newbies should take note. It's also worth mentioning that the same theory should be applied to fixed/technical stops, just replace the ATR volatility number with the points(ticks) you want your fixed stop from entry. Each has it's place and use in a good trading plan.

Nifty site, at least for the tech of nothing else.

As far as I know it's not a residency issue. As always some brokers are finding ways around it, they are creative if nothing else, but they usually aren't the ones I'd trade with :P

One point to not about Sing is the iron fist of law that dominates everything there. The requirements for opening a retail account are much higher than in many countries, simply ruling many people in the region out of participating in the market (they go via Aus or UK etc instead). From a view of regulating large players though, this is somewhat attractive. In an interesting twist the Malaysian central bank shut down the 2nd coming of the FX expo to the country on Friday just as it was due to open (some politics at play though as their is a competing expo player dominating Asia), declaring FX trading a money laundering vehicle lol. I'm not sure what that means for all the expo's scheduled for next year that people are committed to already here, but there were some people that flew a lot of equipment and staff a long way for nothing on the weekend.

If anybody is attending the FX expo in KL over the next few days PM me! The gang will be about and it's always nice to have somebody to kill time and talk crap with between the oh so exciting seminars (or just ogle the FX Open promo girls with us :did I say that?.

Totally agree. Instrument choice is very important and there's simply no reason to expose yourself to uncapped risk (especially if leverage is involved). No such thing as a free or easy $, although the "guru's" would often have us believe otherwise.

One advantage of futures is many give smooth trends without large gaps, which in itself is a form of risk management. Anybody active investor long Equities going into 2008 deserved any hard lessons they learned. Takeovers while short can be nasty if you are exposed, but again instrument choice can get around this somewhat given your time horizon for equity shorts isn't multi year, and I don't have stats but I'd imagine not a lot of takeovers were announced during 2008 other than the extremely volatile banks that were forced into mergers (by which time you should have been well in profit). On the flipside being long a takeover target can be a great experience if a bidding war breaks out, nobody is going to takeover Oil, Copper or the AUD (not even Soros anymore). I doubt many people in this forum would have trouble liquidating assets (as in trades) if the market told us it was time to do so anyway :-) Agreed that the CFD providers certainly make their money from us, but so long as I can find an edge they can make all the money they want . What market maker worth his coat wouldn't operate that way?

Should have read my e-mail before posting. MoneyShow.com: The Traders Expo – New York, Feb. 14-17, 2010

The NYC expo in Feb each year is the best one as it has the most speakers on offer, it's also done by the money show crew. Many of the materials are on their website to view free of charge also. Mentors are great, but you still need to have your eye's open for ideas & what not. It's often a case of 20hrs of droning garbage to find one idea worth looking into though. Always handy to get to know the brokers better as well for industry info/changes. Just leave your CC at home so you don't get tempted into some stupid trading scheme. "Just pay 10K to do our course, and if you get good we'll give you a fund to manage!!"

Love the R distribution graph :-), paints a picture like nothing else. I found that systems I developed on the mini's markets worked much better on FX. Better risk rewards, less slippage as the ticks are smaller etc. The fact there isn't really a "close" to the session so your trades can run out their course is one of the benefits. Nasty time zone if you are US based though & want to grab the EU session which is pretty important.

Dude some days I still wonder what language it's speaking, the day that stops I will probably lose interest :rofl:

Correct, I don't only trade stocks, and I don't only trade futures, and I don't only trade FX, and I don't only trade Commodities. They are all just instruments to utilize. None of them are good to trade all of the time. So trade CFD's (if you can) Unless you are a mega fund though this isn't really an issue, there are plenty of stocks to choose from. For the rest of us there is no logical reason to not employ a low maintenance stock trading system given the rewards available. Again thanks to CFD's I tie up very little of my capital in margin. My CFD broker lets me move currency risk at the click of a button. Why on earth would I hold profits in USD, HKD, GBP, JPY when I can have AUD? I might tolerate EUR ;-) Of course not everybody can trade CFD's & have all those Stock markets sitting with one broker, one account, one margin facility. But if you can it's bloody handy!

Isn't that sort of like pairs trading? (never really looked into it other than a passing webinar & general idea). The correlation isn't so hard to deal with, it's not like stocks crash every 6 months like a cyclical commodity can. Sure they have corrections, that just runs over all the bunnies that were standing too close to the road

So offset the risk. There are tools and methods for doing this, employ them, why take the risk on yourself if you can give it to somebody else.

eSig offer contributor (broker) feeds, or you can opt for the A0 spot feed. I can't find a good link on it anywhere but the contributors that make up the A0 spot feed tend to give higher highs & lows (long wicks) making the data difficult to work with on shorter time frames. These prices don't reflect the prices your broker will give you, thus you use your brokers contributing feed to fine tune/trade a system as that's what will effect your entry, stops, targets etc. The advantage of eSig is your charts will look the same, your indicators will look the same, only the data source has changed if you change brokers for some reason. I don't care what my broker did to the data before it came to me, all I need is consistency between charting and execution :-)

Singapores drawback is it's getting expensive. They are seeking to double the population of an already finite space, it's the only country in the world I encountered having to pay the agent to find you an apartment, everywhere else I have been the landlord pays the agent to find a tenant. Certainly it's infrastructure is great though, second to none for city design and layout, and a steady currency. Malaysia is an interesting crossroad between East & West & Middle East. It's cheap, attracts the Arab money with it's Islamic culture, English speaking, has an active expat attraction program & 10yr tax break to attract biz. Unfortunately Islamic law is restrictive to financial progress (some brokers have told me they aren't even allowed to advertise in country). Malaysia's government is a huge mess though & their attempt at becoming an IT hub was laughable given the state of internet infrastructure, but if you are an IT company based in Sing it's very easy to relocate across the bridge a few hours rather than transplant into a new cultural zone (Dell has taken the Malaysia route for example). If the Gov wasn't so busy infighting and lining their own pockets it could easily steal some of the zing from Singapore, but I don't see any inclination for this to happen. Oh and the Ringit (Malaysian currency) is worthless trash :rofl:

Agreed. A great mentor won't give you a system or strategy at all, they will guide you building your own strategy which may not resemble theirs at all. Without individual thought there is no progress, only evolutionarily stunted clones.

I'd imagine market size, correlation and liquidity has a lot to do with it?

Good points. Much of this depends on an individual traders interpretation or risk. If our stop has moved to break even, do we have any risk on this trade? If so, getting all in on the first signal is always going to give the best bang for buck, as new pyramids will be treated as new risk, or if the open profit is deemed to be part of the overall risk:reward ratio of the trade (as measured as a complete set of pyramids from start-end of trend) then our risk was only ever at the beginning of the trade & from that point it became self funding. Open equity exposure / drawdown becomes the next point in view, again this will depend on how you view what belongs to you, what belongs to the market, and how compounding "locked in" profit across all your instruments/markets/systems will effect your equity curve over a long period of sustained trends.

I use eSignals FX on demand product. It works the same as full blown eSignal but has a limited broker choice, this doesn't worry me as I use it to get around my brokers unstable charting platform & restrictions in how it displays indicators. I execute via my brokers platform still. It's much cheaper than the full version FX feed unless you need to look at more than one source of FX data at a time. The issue with the broad/raw FX feed that eSig delivers is that it has too many outliers and doesn't resemble most brokers actual high/lows. Good for sturdy backtesting though. I've been trading way too long, I automatically capitalise the S in eSignal now

$$ move per tick is merely a function of volatility and position sizing.

This post so required a "thanks for the laugh" button :rofl:

I'm sorry what? I can see why you could think this if you only trade futures. Oil isn't going from $70 up to $1000 over the next 3 years. Somewhere out there though, is a stock that WILL go from $7 to $100. Our risk on each instrument is the same, our potential for reward is MUCH greater if we can pyramid aggressively into an instrument that can have large sustained moves. This isn't to say we should only trade stocks, each market/instrument has it's unique benefits. How your pyramid (if it all) has more to do with the time frame & instrument than anything else. Small targets = no room (but we can opt for profit risk strategies), multi year trends = load it up as much as you can while controlling heat & risk. CFD/spread bet is the ultimate pyramiding tool once you understand it. Without pyramiding it's just an expensive margin loan facility.....

You could keep an eye on WORLD FOREX EXPO , bit of a new kid on the block. Also check out the virtual expo that Futures Mag do (Futures I-Trade show), Al Brooks is always worth catching, good approach to trading even if you don't trade the mini's.

I'm more of a golf metaphor fan, it's just you and that *(@(*#&@&^!^(&(*$^@### ball