james_gsx

My daily goal is 20 YM points, but if it's clearly a trending day then I will let my winning trades keep going until the tape tells me otherwise. Otherwise I trade until I hit my target and I'm done for the day. I have become pretty disciplined doing this, my reward for leaving after hitting my target on a choppy day = going back to bed I typically have bigger stops than targets, because I have realized that my entry point may not always be 100% correct. If I use a 1:1 risk/reward I get stopped out very fast (since I usually only go for about 10 YM). But if I put a stop around 15 then that gives time for the trade to work itself out. If I get stopped out, no big deal thats life. But this works for me, may not work well for others. I am okay with losing money, I've done it before and I know it's part of the game so that may be why I am comfortable with that ratio. If it starts to backfire and turn against me then I will know I have to reconsider. Behavior modification is key. I like how John Carter sums it up, there are only a few days a month when you're really going to make money. The other days you're just trying to keep your account alive.

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB118255301502745318-lMyQjAxMDE3ODIyMzUyNTMzWj.html Did any of you see that? I personally think it's awesome. It reminds me of myself at that age. I started around 13 and I would drag all my friends to play stocks with me. We had competitions at virtualstockexchange.com and I would do nothing but look at stocks so I could beat them. Sophomore year came around and we had a stock market competition in our economics class. My friend Jim and I were sure to win, so we loaded up the entire portfolio on TASR and sold a week before it's collapse We obviously won, and that record hasn't been touched since. My senior year in high school I would just ditch school because the market was much more interesting to me. I hope this kid sticks with it. By the time he's 20 he will most likely have gone through a lot of the same mistakes we all do and he will grow up to be one of the greats. When I'm older, I hope to find kids like this when I'm older so I can give them some money when they turn 18 and teach them along the way. That will be my way of giving back.

Today was much better for me, I was much more relaxed using the 5 minute chart. Again, none of my trades really popped up and thats starting to get irritating. A couple scalps here and there, but nothing fancy. I did see a clearly defined down trend in the 5 minute and 1 minute chart, so I did take note of that.

3 minute chart, then on the side I watch an 89 tick, 50 tick, and two minute chart. I've thought of trying out 5 minute time frames. When I used to watch the 1 minute chart I noticed I was pretty emotional, I would sit on the edge of my seat in every trade. Maybe this is spilling over to the 3 minute chart?

Today would have been nice for the pit audio. When I saw the huge sell off first take off I was pretty much lost and just had to go with what was on my screen. I really had no idea what was going on, who was selling, any of that. I was pretty much in the dark and I hated it.

Nice catch. I got out pretty fast since I hit my daily goal in the middle of the trade. I didn't want to risk anything so I just locked in the gain and now I'm sitting on the sidelines watching and picking up a few stocks. I do need to work on my discipline though. I can't seem to sit still long enough for bigger 20 point gains. I tend to take the 5-10 point gains quickly, it's okay for now since my daily goals are low but I'll eventually want to move higher. Maybe I should wait for a trending day and see how I do?

lol I had CNBC on in the background and I heard them ask someone why the market just tanked. I knew it was going to tank again so I got ready this time. Sure enough it did and all my alerts went crazy, TRIN shot up to 1.70 and I went long again, good for a few more points

So I was looking over IBD and searching for some potential new investments since today has been slow for me. I looked up just in time to see the YM (most likely ES too) tank, and the tape sped up very very quickly. The YM dropped about 50 points in 3 minutes. I saw a ton of green on the tape at 13500 so I went long for a few quick points, but I still don't know what triggered that? I went over to review the tape and don't see a whole lot of big selling, maybe something happened in the pits that I missed out on? Maybe some program selling?

Basically you will only have a few chances every month to make big money. The rest of the time you and everyone else are trying to keep their account alive. They know you are new and that you are emotional, and they will take advantage of you. I'd also focus on the YM first and just watch it, take tons of notes.

I thought I made a thread about this already, but I can't find it anywhere lol Anyways, I'm getting sponsored to take my series 7 and I was wondering what kind of advice you guys could give me to prep for it. Thanks

It's not easy, and they don't play nice. If you are going to do futures I'd suggest picking up John Carters book Mastering the Trade, and a good book on technical analysis. Carter has some good strategies that may or may not work well with your personality, thats for you to decide. Learn how to read the tape, check out the videos on this site you will learn a lot of invaluable things there. Just remember, you will not be trading the e-minis but you will be trading other traders. They think that way, and you must as well if you don't want to get bullied around and thrown out. One other thing, download E-Signal and make sure you can look at the futures. Then create a setup that you like, find out the pivot points (there are calculators here) and watch the Trin, Tick, Put/Call ratio, etc. This way before you create an account you are familiar with how the price moves, how it acts at various important levels, etc. And Interactive Brokers will let you trade futures. So will Trade Station, but I believe you have to be considered an active trader for at least 2 years.

Wow guys, thanks a lot. That looks really interesting and I will have to give it a try. Thanks for the input!

So I have been writing my trading plan for a while now, basically going over all of my strategies and exactly how I play them and my few exceptions. I was almost finished and about to type it all up when I realized I was missing something I think could be very important, my own self psychology. For the last few days I have basically been staring at a blank piece of paper with a title at the top that says Trading Plan - Psychology. I can't seem to get it started, and I don't know how to start. I finally just started writing down some of my emotions that I have noticed before in different trades. For example I always feel uneasy with a quick scalp trade, yet in a pivot or gap play I am very calm. But other than that, I'm not really sure what to put down here. I'm hoping some of you guys could help guide me and add some suggestions. I was thinking maybe I could write down some emotional rules, for example the other day my best friends dad died and I took the rest of the day off because of it.I knew I would make bad decisions. But what are some other things I could look at? Thanks a lot.

Good luck, just remember you're not trading equities you're trading other traders

Well since I hit my goal early in the day I didn't want to get greedy so I left for a while and took pictures of my new car. I know if I stay around the computer too much I might over trade, I just want to be happy with hitting my goal and look forward to tomorrow. Right now I'm just watching and taking notes and not taking any trades. BTW Torero, I really like the site you have listed in your sig. I found some good stuff there!

I noticed today that I still don't know the YM as well as I would like. For example my first trade of the morning was the opening gap, at first it looked like the gap would fill and came within a few points of filling then fell pretty hard. I let a close friend sit by and watch me trade, he was emotional watching the price fall but I stayed cool and told him it's natural, our stop wasn't hit and neither was the target so we would stay in until something happened. A little while later the price came back up to fill the gap, came withing just a few points again and bounced around. I have in my trading plan that the only time I can exit a trade early is if the tape is disagreeing with my trade. I noticed heavy selling around a particular price, and I decided to exit early. I was still profitable and ranked the trade a 4 (got out early but profitable) Sure enough the market filled the gap and I missed out on those extra points. Looking back at it I have to ask myself: Should I have kept my trade because my stop nor target was hit? Or did I accurately follow my plan because the tape was going against my trade? I know that gaps typically fill, and I told myself that when I was exiting the trade. But I also told myself the tape wasn't agreeing, and I was still profitable so I should just take the profit and look for another trade to set up and move on.

I signed up for the trial, I'll try it out hopefully today.

Thank you Torero, but my youth still does take advantage of me. I do have a lot of problems that I need to work out, but I think as I grow older and more discipline I will over come those problems. My biggest problems lie within my emotion and discipline. I need to learn how to focus more and adapt to behavior modification. I have learned a lot on this forum in the short amount of time I have been here. I never talk about how much money I make or lose, except for that 5k because it's something I can never forget. It's not a lot of money for some people but for me it was huge. I was foolish, when I paper traded all those years I always did so well and I figured starting with real money would be no different and I would never lose money. So as you can imagine, I took unwanted risks and lost money faster than I thought possible. Now as an amateur to the YM I expect to lose money, but I now know that the only way I can learn is by making mistakes and watching others make mistakes.

Haha, that GT30 was a PITA to take out!

I'm new, obviously. My name is obviously James too.. I'm 19 years old, I've been trading with real money for a few months but I've been actively watching the markets for 6 years now. I started trading February 26th 2007 lol I didn't take any trades because, and I'm not kidding about this, "I don't want something stupid to happen over night." Thats word for word what I told my mom, and I got very lucky Very quickly I fell into some of the traps I didn't think I could fall into. I wanted to know everything about technical analysis because I was afraid something could come up and I wouldn't see it. I learned everything I could and quickly fell into a trap where every stock looked terrible. I couldn't figure out what indicators to use and all of that, I simply knew too much and became too emotional. Ironicaly, now I don't use any indicators. I just use market internals and price (obviously other things like my pivot points if those count and fib lines for the ambush play) Right after that I went searching for the holy grail, ignoring what I used to do that I loved so much. I was really good at finding good companies that I could hold onto for a few months and would grow quite a bit. I was too busy looking for the holy grail and I missed a lot of great plays. I wanted to find a system that worked for me, but had no idea where to start. I tried swing trading since I knew charts, but I realized I was looking at too many stocks and couldn't stay focused. Then came the earnings plays, short and sweet the ones I did good research on paid off and the ones I breezed over failed. You guess which one ended up taking over. Then I found the YM and ES. Finally something I could focus on and something that fit my personality. I read John Carters book and Pit Bull, became hooked. Now thats what I do and I love it. I've been writing a trading plan for the last few weeks and outlining all of my strategies. I'm keeping it simple with just a few strategies while I learn how everything works. I'm quickly getting the hang of it, I love it. Since I still enjoy swing trading I now just focus on the 30 dow stocks. This helps me to stay focused on one thing, I felt it would be a good set of stocks to look at since I'll be trading the YM. I still have a few stocks that I will actually invest in, and hold those for a long period of time since I really do enjoy researching companies as well as day trading. The biggest turning point for me was when I realized you don't trade stocks or options, you trade other people. Once I figured that out, it all started to fall into place. I have always been interested in psychology so reading about market psychology is enjoyable. I learned everything through the school of hard knocks, and by getting beat up in the market. I lost $5,000 with earnings plays, but I tell people it was a cheap lesson that could have cost me much more in the future had I not learned now. Anyways, sorry for the lengthy post. I hope to learn a lot here, and happy trading

I went through a phase where I wanted to know everything about technical analysis. At the end of the day, I realized it was just hurting me and making things too emotional. Ironicaly, now I don't use any indicators besides my pivot points and market internals, just price. It works very well for me, keeps things clear, and I can stay focused. My biggest problem with trading is distractions. I will look up random things on the internet, look at cars, watch tv, and if I am not paying attention I'll miss a trade.

I believe it's good to take a day off during the week, it keeps my mind fresh. Before each week I decide what day I will take off and on that day I do something productive like take on a big project with my car. I do something that will keep me busy all day and I stay away from the markets. Fridays have always been my favorite day to trade, not sure why. Ever since I was a little kid watching the markets I would always look forward to Friday to see what the market would do. It has nothing to do with returns or anything like it, it's some kind of psychological thing for me. But to each their own.

The traders audio link doesn't work for me, I even searched for it on Google and it still didn't work. Did the address change?