daveyjones

Thanks Will, that's very sound advice.

Wow. I can picture this guy at the store... "and I'd like 24 of these monitors, please"

All very good points. Thank you!

Thank you so much for your comments. I do understand your point: If you create scarcity, you will simply drive away buyers until the price comes back down to reasonable levels. However, there are many different kinds of buyers with different strategies. Take the following example: Let's say a stock is at $10.00 per share. You buy up a large number of available shares, driving the price up to $10.10. At this price, day traders may not be inclined to buy, but other traders who are looking for long-term investments won't care about such small intraday fluctuations. They are looking for much larger growth over much longer periods of time. So, despite the slight increase in price, they buy anyway. Since there is still demand and smaller supply, the price continues to rise to $10.20. After waiting some time for the price to rise, you sell. This is much less extreme than cornering the entire market and it still seems reasonable to me.

Thanks for the comment. I did look into the Hunt brothers. From what I read, I don't think that their reasoning was flawed. If a man wants to buy up all the silver in the world why shouldn't he be able to, as long as he's willing to pay the market price? Nobody has a right to own silver - only the person willing to make an honest trade. The only reason the Hunt brothers didn't make money on their silver investment is because the federal government directly targeted them and forced them to sell. They didn't anticipate having to sell their silver with a gun to their head. "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." (Gerald Ford) It also didn't help that several COMEX directors had short positions on silver.

Good point. I'm usually disappointed with computer resolution on the larger monitors.

Thanks for your comments. I'm curious, if you had one massive screen that gave you the same real estate as the six smaller screens, would you rather have that?

I was joking! This post was just for fun. I'm interested to hear about other traders' setup. It's all pie in the sky for me at this point, but hopefully a reality in the future.

You can't reinvest everything you make. Eventually, you will need to take money out of your trading accounts and pay bills, take your family on vacation, etc. But how often and how much should you transfer from your trading accounts to your personal accounts? Should you take out a fixed amount each month or a percentage of your earnings? What if your accounts are currently sitting lower than your opening balance? Should you wait until you move above that point before you reward yourself with a salary?

I want to set up my very own trading war room - not because its practical or necessary, but because it will look incredibly cool. The most important aspect of my war room is, of course, an absolutely ridiculous amount of screen space. So would it be better to buy one very large screen or an array of smaller screens? I can see the advantage of both. One large screen might be cheaper than multiple smaller screens and you wouldn't have to worry about mounting an array. On the other hand, it might get annoying having to resize each window individually - it would be much snappier just to drag a window to one of the smaller screens and hit the maximize button. What do you think? Which would you pick?

I think I understand what you mean. There's no such thing as instantaneous; the price will rise as you buy the shares. So is there a strategy that works in which the buyer creates scarcity in one form or another?

You instantly buy up a large number of shares and sit on them. After an hour or so, the decrease in supply drives the price up slightly, at which point you instantly sell all your shares and make a modest profit. It seems like a fairly straightforward strategy to me. I realize that such an action would decrease the liquidity of the stock, but traders with long-term strategies wouldn't care about small intraday fluctuations. I realize it's an elementary idea, which is why I want to get some opinions from more seasoned traders.

At first I thought it was real historical data, but that's not the case. The volatility of some of the securities is through the roof - sometimes a standard deviation of several dollars in a single day. When you review the actual history of the same security, you will find no such fluctuation.

Just stocks for now. The problem is that the algorithm is completely automated and set up to work with IB. I haven't found a broker that offers an API that competes with IB. (If there are legitimate competitors, please enlighten me!)

I've developed an algorithm that I've been testing with IB's demo account. I've done absolutely everything I can with the demo account, but I've come to realize that the simulated data is not very realistic at all. I need to start testing my algorithm with real data. However, the only way to get a paper trading account is to open a real account. Since I don't have $10,000 to open a real account (and I won't for a while), I seem to be a bit stuck. My plan is to have the algorithm tested and ready to go by the time I have the $10,000 saved up to open an account. In the meantime, does anyone know how I could get access to a paper trading account without opening a real account? I know they allow students to get accounts. Is there a legitimate online trading school that doesn't cost too much that would be able to register an account for me?

Thanks for that link. I was aware that IB had a forum, but I assumed it's content would be included in my Google search. They must not allow caching of their forum. Anyways, I'm not actually an IB member yet (I don't have the $10,000 minimum balance), so I couldn't actually post my question, but I did search through the forum and I finally found the solution. It's actually a bug (which hasn't been fixed for several years). For some reason, the value for averageOptionVolumeAbove automatically gets set to Integer.MAX_VALUE. This needs to be set to 0 (or some other reasonable value) in order for the scanner to work. I adjusted my code accordingly and it worked just fine. Here is the working code: EClientSocket client = new EClientSocket(this); client.eConnect("", 7496, 0); ScannerSubscription filter = new ScannerSubscription(); filter.numberOfRows(10); filter.instrument("STK"); filter.locationCode("STK.US"); filter.scanCode("MOST_ACTIVE"); filter.averageOptionVolumeAbove(0); client.reqScannerSubscription(0, filter);

I am looking into other brokers besides Interactive Brokers. I thought it might be nice to compile a fairly comprehensive list. If you know of any (recommended or not), please reply. Thanks!

I receive the following output when calling reqScannerSubscription: Market data farm connection is OK:ibdemo HMDS data farm connection is OK:demohmds Historical Market Data Service query message:no items retrieved It seems the connection is fine, but no items are retrieved. If I perform a scan for the same criteria in the TWS graphical interface, I do get results. Any ideas? Here's my code: EClientSocket client = new EClientSocket(this); client.eConnect("", 7496, 0); ScannerSubscription filter = new ScannerSubscription(); filter.numberOfRows(10); filter.instrument("STK"); filter.locationCode("STK.US"); filter.scanCode("MOST_ACTIVE"); client.reqScannerSubscription(13, filter);