robertm

It's been done Trading System Rankings at Collective2

You mean fund manager? I think they publish a book with that info each year.

As far as I know you can't even be involved in a company that derives income from trading CFD's. I had a search for OTC regs on the SEC site but not surprisingly for a gov site it's a huge mess.

mmmmmmmm, you certainly are enthusiastic on spreading the word about them today. guess I'm happy here soaking up the tough love and you know, you're name and style seems so familiar...... probably a co-incidence.

It depends which country you are a resident in, the tax relationships between those countries (your broking account & your residency), how your country of residence treats foreign earned income, you structure, and and and, lots of stuff. Its certainly not a good idea to live in the US and have a Swiss trading account anymore though

Look into spreads before you go down the covered call path & compare the payoff diagrams (or the risk more so) Bull Call Spread: An Alternative to the Covered Call | The Options & Futures Guide

Agreed with what the others said. Check out this link, lots of cheap cool options stuff Trading and Investment Tools by Peter Hoadley The optionsexpress.com website has a great demo platform, they offer it for the CBOE as well as a free tool. Throw on some options & watch the interaction with price/volatility The best value for money options information I've seen anywhere is a guy called Chris Tate out of Aus, save yourself the expense of an Optionetics or TOS & look into his materials at http://www.tradinggame.com.au. His book is dated but still accurate, the charts are mostly Aus but the theory is sound for options in general anywhere. If you want to see some real "instant" feedback on how options interact with changes in the underlying get a demo account with IG Markets / Index and watch their day expiry options on FX, Dow, DAX etc. It gives you an instant feel for how much joy/pain go with a time expiry instrument rather than waiting 3 months for your Jan options to play out. Best advice I ever had on options: You can't trade them unless you can make money trading shares (meaning you must understand how/why the underlying price moves) You can't trade them unless you have time to monitor them actively, although that's pretty easy these days.

Well said. Even the expo's are online these days.

You beat me to it :-D. I was fortunate to be introduced to R values before I ever made my first trade, great way to flatten out all the variables of time/instrument. I was bored one day (and sick of the scams) and blogged about the basics of it here at TL also - Level the playing field: Measuring results using R Multiples - Traders Laboratory - Professional Traders Community

Well I may be wrong but at least I'd still get the popular vote Hang on, I think Bush used that theory............

Then we at least all seem to agree that ONE method of trading involves patterns that replicate over time frames and time horizons So moving on, is anybody game to try and tie range breakouts, Fibs or indicator only driven systems into that :rofl:

A time horizon will influence the time frame you trade though. Most poeple don't pick a multi year weekly hold out of a 144 tick chart (but if you can you are in for a hell of a good trade!)

But beyond Quants & Algo's, do the other 99.99% of traders need a purest definition in order to gain an edge over the markets?

They see what they want to see until they can see otherwise. Only time and experience can accommodate this. Even if you lay out what you do step by step, without seeing things from the same base construct (or POV shall we just say?) they will be unable to interpret the information being presented to them. No idea who Bill Williams, Jack Hershey are though, I tend to find my own judgments

People just love to overcomplicate things :crap: Markets are fractal in so far as we can see the same patterns (setups) repeating regardless of instrument and time frame, allowing for a singular system approach. This is not "perfect" though (nothing is), at too small a time frame it will break down as price cannot move sufficiently to form (ie, when bars are too small). And no one system is the perfect solution for every market at every time. To understand this more look at the harmonics in the market. Have you ever seen the youtube video where they sit a flat surface on a speaker, cover it in sand, and start ramping up the frequency? As the frequency increases the patterns formed will alter to resonate with the new environment. Anybody that was trading tick charts (maybe range bars, don't know as I don't use them) on the ES or similar around this time last year when the market was undergoing rapid expansion, then collapse, of both range and volatility would have seen this happen. The patterns were repeating, and found throughout many instruments and time frames, but the changes in range/volatility changed the frequency of the market, thus changing the patterns emerging at that time Whether or not that is the way you find best to trade is beside the point, people see what they want to see regardless of the information in front of them.

Check out Amibroker. It's cheap, and good data is cheap as well these days. Easy to code also & has a very clean chart display. Stock, Futures and FOREX End of Day Data in MetaStock Data and ASCII Data formats has a good data product with a 30 day demo, check out the "custom folders" as it automatically creates sub folders for you of sectors, S&P etc & keeps them up to date automatically. They have some Amibroker add on for organising sector groups etc, and their service is always awesome

Agree with above. Don't spend any money on setting up entities to avoid tax until you are making enough money to warrant it. If you plan to trade full time you might pay a little exra tax just before you get rid of your job, after that your income will taper off until you ramp up the trading account (unless you can cut your full time hours over time rather than in one hit). As for the number of trades etc, just give your end of month statements to your accountant, or better yet your broker may do an end of year tax statement for you to give to him(or her). No need for any book keeping that way, just focus on your trading :-)

I've never used it but eSignal does interface & let you build custom order entry functions etc. Also keep an eye on their exchange waiver fees eSignal have with some brokers, IB is one of them (although possibly not for HSI). Saves paying for the same data feed twice if your broker charges for a Ninja feed or something.

Agreed, I never asked for or saw a single trade result or statement from anybody I stole ideas from. I'm sure some of them are not profitable at all given how often they change their systems, but they rake in millions from their fees for services rendered. So long as I can make money I don't care if they ever become profitable themselves (beyond their highly profitable marketing skills that is ) Nice call :rofl:

You know while participating in this thread I realised that one of the best parts of the trading journey is when you reach a point where you can have an offer like this to view somebody's system and just think to yourself "that's nice, I hope they do well", without giving it a second thought. Well worth a look for any newbies wondering how a system is structured though, I stole ideas from some of the best I could find over the years

Getting a part time job that lets you trade the hours/market you want is a good first step as well, better then diving right in the deep end :-). Going full time and going through that first drawn down is an interesting experience when there is no pay check arriving next week regardless

Such is the beauty of being "commission only", no work, no pay, but live by your own rules Bull market = 2hrs per week & lots of travel. Now = a few more hours, but I'm sick of the travel anway

Agreed newer (but not total newbie) helps a bit as they are yet to settle into a style of their own. Once you have chosen your baseline due to the mentor you had or view of the world etc it's hard to look at another persons view of the world & be in sync with it. The balance is making them accountable for their own decision to take/leave a setup, using their own risk appetite, being consistent over a long term etc. Breakouts are pretty easy to catch as you can alarm them, the retracements mid trend are the ones that can blindside you while pissing around on google or some trading forum :-D

You can do it without being exact. So long as you are on a similar theme - breakouts, continuations, same instrument/timeframe, then you will be trading the same moves but maybe slightly different techniques :-) I agree on the missed signals being annoying with short term though, spotting the setups when looking across several time frames or symbols is one of my bigger annoyances, and teams of good dedicated like mind traders are hard to setup and keep together (everybody loves the good times, not so patient at sitting out congestion)

Like it, quick and easy to punch out vids these days. There will be lots of "oh wow, never thought he'd sound like that in RL" going on though :rofl: