wanr

I got to know nanex through zerohedge but most of the time I don't understand their charts... They have really nice chart with a lot of colours but I have no clue what they represent... Do you know from which software they take their screen prints?

I keep hearing about alledged market manipulations. How do they exactly do that? It is because of the size of the orders that can drive the market up or down? Is this with HFT? Who manipulates the market? Big banks and hedge funds or does it require some kind of cooperation between big players? Where can I know more about that?

Hi gosu, Interesting post. Could you elaborate on the first 2 points? How do you trade? Daily, swing, long term? What time frame? What tools do you use to read the market? Only Technical analysis / Price action?

MightyMouse, Then you can summarize it in only 1 trading mistake: not trading well. But I am not sure it helps. Anyway I understand what you mean. Optimizing these 4 actions would result in a perfect trading. I consider I have to assume that no system is perfect and can make every trade profitable. If my system indicates me to be long and then the market drops, I don't consider it to be a mistake. It was an opportunity that didn't realize. I consider it would have been a mistake not to go long, even if the deal happened to be a loser, because it would mean that I don't take all the opportunities that makes my system statistically work on the long run. For every art/technique involving random phenomenons, a very bad move can turn out good by luck and a masterpiece can turn out awfull by lack of chance. But on the long run, one can see if it was luck or mastery. Anyway, this is pure procrastination. Whatever way you see the market, if it works for you, that is great. I am a just a beginner and far from getting confident in my current skills. This is what I like in trading. You have so many different ways of understanding things and acting. It is still quite puzzling for me but I hope things will get clearer with time.

Well said Mad Market. At the opposite, if making no mistakes means buying at a the bottom and selling at a the top of a trend on every deal, this is just not gonna happen. I guess we are always some kind of too early and too late in entries and exits. There is no way around and this could be considered as a mistakes if it is really to late or early (anticipate a reversal without clear signals or try to make some extra bucks on an hypothetic 4th or 5th leg) Besides physical mistakes (wrong button, etc...), my biggest mistakes happen when I somehow try to feel and anticipate the market moves outside my rules (which are not very well defined so far because I am still experimentating, well I'm just a beginner). On the other hand it is also sometimes when I make my best trades...

Does anybody ever tried to build a consistent losing system using the top ten typical trading mistakes, then to reverse it to see if it can be consistently profitable? All operators on the markets are trying to take money from each other right? Then it is not surprising that the resulting behaviour of a market is an optimized trap for the typical human trading psychology. If we agree with that, it may be cognitively easier to create consistently losing systems than consistently winning ones. The "reverse engineering" of a system might better adapted to human mind and reasonning. Or not...

The funny thing with that stat is that new traders should then be considered as providers of high probability winning strategies. If 90% of new traders are consistently losing money, placing reversed orders of a new trader would be have 90% of chances to be a consistent winning system!

QQQ Definition The Nasdaq 100 Index Tracking Stock. The QQQ is an Exchange Traded Fund which allows investors to essentially invest in all of the stocks that make up the Nasdaq 100 in a single security.

In the Nasdaq. QQQ POWERSHARES QQQ TRUST NASDAQ STOCK QQQ The ticker symbol and Wall Street name for the exchange-traded fund based on the Nasdaq 100 Index. This fund, traded on the American Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange, serves as a proxy for large-cap Nasdaq stocks, including Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, and Intel. Also called cubes.

Hi, I'm getting interested in the QQQ and added as a new instrument in Ninja Trader. I'm not sure I did it right. What is the Tick value for the QQQ? The minimum move is 0.01 point, the minimum amounts seems to be 100 shares and QQQ is directly quoted in USD. Does it mean that if you buy 100 shares and the QQQ move by 0.01 point the P&L is 1 USD? It seems very low but would be great for me as I'm looking for some low risks instruments to play with, with the goal to contimue learning by switching from paper trading to real trading at low risks (ideally limit my loss to 10-20 USD per day is reasonnable for learning with real money). Do you know other instruments that would have low risks (in terms of average possible loss per day in money) and would be suitable to trade for real while learning?

Nanex - Strange Days June 8'th, 2011 - NatGas Algo

About the Flash Crash on the Crude Oil and Natural Gas: http://www.zerohedge.com/article/no-its-not-nat-gas-fractal-also-nanex-discloses-very-ominous-implications-todays-berserk-cru I am not sure to understand all the details but I though you will find it interesting. By the way, there are a lot of amazing charts at the end of the articles, that I've never seen before. Any comments on these events or the charts will be welcome to try to understand more in details what happened.

Very interesting discussion between Maelstrom and Eqsys. 2 opposite way of trading. I am a newbie interested in both... What instruments are you respectively trading? What are your results (I am not sure if it is taboo to talk about results but let's break the ice...)? Ideally I would like be able to have a few systems auto-trading low risk / low return strategies and day trade live a few hours per day with higher risks/returns strategies, that is why I was particularly interested in your discussion. By the way, asking what is profitability in general doesn't make sense and is the same kind of question as asking what does it mean to be rich. Some would say that people earning 10k salary per month can be considered as rich whereas other would say that these are poor people that have to work for a living and cannot rely on their capital. In fact, you don't have to be profitable (earning 1 USD in 1 year would do) you have to reach goals that you have to define by yourself. Trade for a living (you need to ensure a short term profitability which can be expressed in terms of P&L per month, week or even day), sustain the buying power of your capital though years while minimizing the risks, take reasonnable risks to increase your capital (then long time profitability could be measured in ROE or a return/risk)?

I found barchart.com very good.

Hi everybody, I was away for a few days without my password to access the forum. Thanks for all who replied to my thread despite the lame title (I realized just after posting that it was probably one of the worst possible title to try to draw some interest!). I started paper trading for a few weeks with a lot of losses as you can imagine... I also started a few simulation and was surprised to see that even some simple Moving Average reversal strategies could be "theoretically" profitable for a lot of instruments with a nice regularly raising equity curve although generating quite big drawdowns. With good parameters for the slow and fast moving averages for day trading, I had often and for different instruments about 40% winning trades around 1 hour in the market. But the winning trades were generating just a little more profit than the loss generated by the losing ones, so such a strategy would be able to produce very bad days that my small portfolio could not allow. I think I will buy a new computer running all day dedicated to testing strategies (computations can be very time consuming). In the meantime, I will continue evening paper trading (i work during the day) until I can be consistently profitable if ever... I also got intereted in the QQQ which people told me is easier to trade with a nice volume and could be a good instrument to start. While continuing my studies and readings about trading, I got more and more interested. Such complexity and simplicity at the same time is a real beauty. Learning how to trade seems to develop a lot of interesting qualities: patience, stability of emotions, accepting risks, accepting lossese, accepting to be wrong and being able to change your mind quickly to reassess the possible trend of the market, confronting theories to reality with a quick and direct feedback, the ability to summarize the complexity and changes of the market evolution in a simple system, determination, riguor, discipline. And of course a closer insight to economical/financials news. I am getting convinced that the mindset that one has to develop to become a profitable trader can be very usefull in a lot of other areas in life. Do you guys noticed a change in your personnal life or personnality after successfully learning how to trade?