darthtrader

hehe, Baroness von Raschke, I like that. The cbot webinar was really good, i like her idea of going for half or one atr and immediately putting in an offer. I think I found that first video on emule. There is a bunch of her articles in pdf on emule too.

Hey Dogpile, I cant thank you enough for this info. I found a pdf online of it, even just looking at the table of contents I was ready to order when I caught the "tight is right" subject. Scrolling through to find that section I caught the expectancy graph per hand in the book and immediately ordered it. I was shocked how few hands have positive expectancy. It sounds like the whole book is about how to play tight against typical loose/clueless players in low limit. I could never play no limit, no way I can play anything but tight. My goal is to be able to go up to niagara casino thats about 20 min from here and come home with some pocket change on the weekend from small limit for fun. This is perfection.

awesome post james. I wonder if any market profile gurus could comment on that first trade. I still cant see the actual profile, still not done with mind over markets, but i would assume we were out of value around the pivot on the first trade? From that information would you have been biased to playing a break through of that pivot on the short side towards value? James, I hear you on the 10/20 target stop as a newb and getting shaken. The problem though is that you need massive positive expectancy to just break even with that over time. I imagine scaling out and moving the stop takes care of this to a degree but that doesnt work with one contract. Even with that though it just seems there has to be a way to make this more algorithmic than just pulling round numbers out of a hat. anyone have any thoughts on that? that was my main interest with the data mining thread i made. Something like if you knew the range up and down from your setup over the past week you could set your stops/target with better probability than random round numbers. I mean market conditions are not that much different than a week ago, even if market conditions totally changed dramatically tomarrow you would still only be totally off for a week.

tim, I think if you just look at the reasons you posted upside down it will make more sense from a beginner stand point. I believe what you posted is true as a rule of thumb but you would also lose less when your wrong. NQ you can have a tighter stop if your wrong dollar wise. They are close enough though starting out that its not going to make or break you, your strategy will do that. If your totally wrong with your strategy overall NQ though should be able to give you some extra trades on your roll.

thanks guys, Edward Miller's books look like exactly what i was looking for. Thats interesting soultrader you didnt read books, counting the outs though is what I want to learn. Haveing no idea and starting out with an odds calculator it was pretty interesting to see hands i thought would have been really good have a 5% probability. Tilt sounds great, thats why i would like to only learn low limit right now with some idea i know some theory. Should take some tilt out. Suprised there isnt more talk about tilt with trading. I think I have noticed the drunken boxing idea on yahoo already as an extreme example. Everyone is so loose and clueless that half the table calls anything, if you play tight at all you bleed dry. Something else that sounds interesting for a fun read about emotions is the Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King. Story of a billionaire that took on all the top pros who combined their rolls and played him one on one. The pot would go up to 20 million a hand and the pros lost all their edge because the emotions of losing their entire roll was overwhelming.

" If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all." --Michelangelo ???? greatest of all time.

I recently emptied my trading account to buy my first house. I should have financed a bit more and left more in my account but whats done is done. I have been trying to find a second shift job but there is nothing here that interests me. any suggestions on a nice contract to trade after 5pm? Even for down the road i wouldnt mind the trading day basically being the entire day.

I noticed Soultrader posted he use to play pro and I'm just starting to learn. anyone else play? any tips on books or whats the best way to learn? I started playing on yahoo with an odds calculator, its been interesting. I'm not ready to play with real money yet, still "paper trading". On another non finance forum I'm on poker came up and I had got into it with a guy who plays pro online. Something I don't get with online poker is couldnt you easily build a system with 3 players, a networked app where everyone sits at a table, puts their hand into the app and then use text book probability theory/money management to gain a serious edge over everyone else at the table? The guy thought that was absurd but I still don't understand why.

interesting, i missed this one. Soultrader has that volume delta indicator you use replaced this in a way for you? One thing I notice with this vs volume delta is plotting the bars in the opposite direction looks easier to read. wouldn't that improve volume delta?

I think in the past 2 months i've watched all the CBOT webinars and the best thing I got from it was from either Carter or Person, I can't remember who. It was something like that at this point for him trading is like going to work at a factory and operating a machine. To me thats probly the best goal to set as opposed to % gains or money wise and is my long term goal now. I mean really think of how easy trading would be that if when you woke up it was like "looking forward" to going to work at a factory.

cool thread 1. I actually worked in IT at an investment place during the dotcom boom and really had no interest in markets. Then left that job for a hot web design job right as the dotcoms blew up and the place closed 2 months after I started. Got interested in the markets then just to try to figure out what had happened to my job but it was a slow process. Eventually became a gold bug and was convinced we would be in a depression by 2005 . That worked out well though as all the stocks I liked starting off double or tripled in the next 2 years. 2. I don't really consider myself there yet and i'm sure the big mistakes will happen in the next 2 years learning futures. 3. 10 years yes but my goal is to just eventually have a nice roll of t-bills/value invest. Then travel or what not.

hey Doc, can you post the manuscript as a pdf on here? I'm sure a bunch of us would love to read it. This really is one of the most inspirational things i have read, i already have your quote on my wall in front of me. I attached the graphic i made thats in front of me with that quote on it.

blowfish, thats absolutely the type of stuff i'm interested in. I would think it would be interesting for extra confirmation as opposed to trying to use things like that outright in and of itself. you guys ever try trade ideas? I believe thats what Brett Steenbarger uses to do stuff kind of like this, i'm not sure how deep that gets though as far as on more microstructure type stuff. http://www.trade-ideas.com/DOSA/ i would also think this type of stuff would work better if you had a decent measure of volatility and some rough measure if the market is trending or range bound. if you had something like that you could at least make sure your in the ball park for current conditions vs past conditions. candlesticks were really just an example i threw out. i agree with looking at 5 bars or what have you. i soppose the problem there would be how fuzzy the patterns would be and would probly be quite hard to program anything usefull in that area.

awesome article dr. i'm going to print this out and put it on my wall: "The average time and effort required to achieve expertise in trading is 10 years and 10,000-20,000 hours of practice. It takes much falling down, making mistakes, learning, re-learning and getting up again to make an expert trader. Most of all, it takes pure passion and total commitment to the process." what i get from the article is that its paramount to review your trades. i would think if your not reviewing its almost blind luck if you are not only not strengthening the correct connections, but almost certainly strengthening the connections you don't want to be stronger.

good stuff. i guess in some sense though i'm less interested in finding a mechanical system and more so interesting in mining for information around a discretionary setup. Thats where i thought the candle pattern stuff might be interesting, a full setup you would normally trade discretionary(without looking at candles) but then maybe mine to see if if there are any candle patterns that occured better than chance. Not that i would then make that mechanical but just something to look for. Or if volatility is X, mine to see what the average move was or the average loss was from the setup, more things like that. did you guys use any kind of volatility measure in your systems? I've been trying to think what the best measure of volatility would be, implied volatility on the index options?

Interesting responses to think about guys. The time involved with this isn't an issue, i took alot of programming classes in college and i'm finding it so much fun to actually be able to program something that actually does something. I soppose it is something I will not exactly concentrate on but just explore when i have extra time. Figured the probability maps were useless just being i've never found anything that uses them, shame because they do look cool. thanks guys.

really interesting ideas, please don't take this conversation private. sounds like a great way to get the best of all worlds trading wise, i had never really thought of things in this way. dogpile, i take it then that while you will cancel a trade based on the mechanical entry you won't enter without it?

i've really been trying to get into learning easylanguage the past few weeks and had a post all typed up yesterday in the candlestick thread after seeing common candle patterns as reserved words in ez. The post was pretty unclear though so i deleted it. Surfing around then I found the data mining webinar on the tradestation site, which was basically i guess what i was going to ask if tradestation could do. Has anyone ever done any type of data mining with tradestation? I was thinking something along the lines of mining for candle patterns around a setup. I also think it would be interesting to mine for an optimal stop/profit target on a setup. I mean how do you know that a 22 or a 17 point stop is not actually better than a 20 point stop? Anyone use this stuff or find that its a huge waste of time? Also, anyone ever do anything with the probability maps in TS? Seems like that should be usefull somehow with market profile.

i had never heard of Collective2 before, that site looks incredible. I can't see how its possible to build a track record cheaper than free That seems like it would be an interesting site even if you were not interested in OPM, just a way to keep track of yourself. i have only read a bit about incubator funds, do you know much about them? from what i have read i don't really see the downside if your going to form a legal entity and don't plan on trading OPM right now. Seems it could be costly to throw away a good track record. i can't see i would ever want to take on a huge amount of OPM but i can see how my friends and family have been a bit infected by the idea of extra risk from my interest in the markets. At some point it seems like it will be better all around for me to trade their money than for them to blow themselves out gambling. Good deal all around. good stuff

haha, Rage Against The Machine for trading is an interesting idea. If anyone likes 90s music certainly check out Dolores O'riordan's new album that was mentioned above, its fantastic. For some agressive trance check out X-dream's album Radio. Thats my all time fav trance album but i dont think i could listen to that while trading. For trading i would go with classical too. Favs are any solo piano stuff by Debussy, Liszt or Chopin. Beyond that anything by Stravinsky. If you like piano stuff check out this insane Chopin/Liszt improv by Cziffra i found the other day. I would love to learn piano but seeing stuff like this just scares me.

wow both those are fantastic ideas. i especially like the Camtasia idea. I could completely see just talking about what your doing in the trade instead of trying to write out a journal entry while the trade is going on. how fast is a fast system to have Camtasia running on?

While not a trading book the the subtitle to this text is "Tools and Techniques for Determining the Value of Any Asset", Damodaran is not joking about that subtitle. I found this book from Neiderhoffer's Daily Speculations recommended book list and its what they recommended for a valuation text so it is quite quantantative. Pretty much every usefull valuation model is presented here along with some unique ideas. Calculating the implied equity risk premium on the overall markets, using Black Scholes to value companies with negative earnings as an option on future cash flow, a cash flow model to price real estate, ect. A handy compliment to the book is Damodaran's website where he houses excel sheets for all models presented in the book along with other data that is relevent, all broken down by chapters. Even more fascinating is if you poke around his website he houses video footage of his entire NYU MBA valuation class that this is the textbook for along with all the slides/homework for the class. The downside to this book is that it is quite hard to get into as there is so much information but this book puts all other books on value investing to shame. Worth its weight in gold if you are willing to do the homework.

"But the brain is actually quite good at identifying well-structured visual objects (and 'patterns')" there is some interesting videos on google video if you search for "singularity" as far as the current state of AI. Even beyond the brain being fantastic at pattern recognition, computers are still a joke there. I believe ive read its still impossible to have a computer learn a generalized rule for what a cat looks like where you could show a picture to any 6yo and they would instantly know if they are looking at a cat vs a dog. I also read IBM's Bluegene super computer is the fastest in the world, has a whole 1/1000th of the brains computer power and they have almost simulated half a mouse brain with it....i'm sure it would be impossible to trade against a computer if it ever has the brains pattern recognition but that would seem to be ways off if ever. i'll have to check out that The Three Skills of Top Trading book, looks quite interesting.

i think its interesting if you look at the CTA's on autumn gold i would say probly 90% list themselves as systematic instead of discretionary. the funny thing is though the 10% with really great returns list themselves as discretionary. i wouldnt doubt its something like a Rentech/Jim Simmons effect. With how good they have been doing now everyone wants to be like Jim Simmons and discretionary is a dirty word. until we have computers as powerfull as the human brain i don't think we are in much trouble.

well since i'm a newb but at this point given up on the idea of a career outside of trading i would love to have a discussion on building a track record. Is anyone else interested in this path? While i have zero interest in ever being "king trader of the street" looking at the CTAs on autumn gold it seems i may as well at least leave that door open. anyone a CTA here? Anyone doing managed accounts in general?