ezduzzit

While I am always saddened to read of yet another trader getting duped by a slick, high pressure marketer.. as others have said, it absolutely comes with the territory and there's nothing wiser than to just accept the lesson and move on under your own steam to learn things on your own. The current flavor of the day is that each of these trading gurus is going to show you their secret ways of detecting what the Smart Money ("SM") is doing and if you will just shadow them you cannot fail to keep on the right side of the trade and make money. PIFFLE! Pure balderdash... If it were so easy to consistently discern and mimic SM tactics just from watching volume and context, etc. don't you think a heckuva lot more of the floor traders who attempt to make the transfer over to screen trading could figure that out a lot easier than you or I? Well, truth is. .extremely few of them make the transition to becoming a profitable screen trader. As retail traders we also don't have the account size to continue buying as it declines (where might it stop, eh?) just as an example. I daresay that a good number of the prior floor traders may only have made money in the pits because of either developing a good "feel" for the live action in the pits or else they were even better at keeping an eagle eye out for newbie floor reps and taking the other side of their trades. Trading is a tough, tough business mostly because we tend to either terribly complicate it with scads of indicators and theories or we lose sight of just trading what we see, in constant attempts to figure out WHY the market is doing what it is doing, when we THINK it should be doing something else (one of the potentially dire risks of having a personal bias unless you are a really sharp money manager). Don't trust anybody else's ideas until you try them out for yourself and see if they work for you. If you have to pay much of anything for them, you are probably better off taking a pass. As an earlier poster pointed out.. likely you couldn't trade their method anywhere near as well as they can, if in fact that "guru" even trades for real money now or if he/she ever did. Get yourself some good trading buddies and stay in touch with them. I used to think I was doing pretty well..until one of my buds let loose with some info he said he thought was pretty outstanding if he could just get his mindset and emotions under control to trade it. He used to bug me with detail after detail about his ideas, etc. until one day I finally had enough and set aside some time to really evaluate what he was saying in order to show him that his method was probably not viable. Well, surprise! I can trade his method much more successfully than my own now yet he still can't make money with it. So, if trading is really in your blood, keep your money in your pocket or in your account, put in tremendous amounts of screen time and talk regularly to other real money traders (not during trading hours!) that have been around the block a time or two. You may never end up with a real mentor but all you really need is 1 to 3 very simple and consistently profitable set ups to become expert at. The rest is all about learning about yourself and fitting what you are and how you act into how the market operates. All the best to James and the many great contributors in this forum, E Z

I, for one, think you do a pretty darned good job James. I don't visit much these days as I pretty much just trade my buns off during this long-awaited volatility and stick to my own knitting so to speak. That being said, despite all the newbie posts for gold I do still enjoy stopping by once in awhile and picking through the pile for those rare tidbits that offer a gem of lasting value. I think your removing that rule will probably prove a good decision. E Z

I tend to stick with piano music as it soothes the savage beast. I stream piano music from my non trading pc from http://www.solopianoradio.com (the free version). Also enjoy a couple of CD's a friend gifted to me from http://www.liquidmindmusic.com and find these to also be great while practicing Tai-Chi. Happy Trading To All..

Good to find you here RumpledOne. I used this indicator of yours (before the latest enhancements) when I was using ESignal charting. I am mostly intersted in just this one enhanced indicator at this point, but I now use NinjaTrader charting. Might you be able to direct me to someone whom I can contact to get it coded for NinjaTrader which uses C# ? Keep up the great work RO and as usual, happy trading to all

Thanks to both of you (Pivot and Cooter) for the info. I will attend Joel's live demo this coming Wednesday. I already went through the TG bootcamp a good while back and have reviewed the cd's of that program as well at home a couple of times. I am afraid I have to agree 100% with your feelings about TG's current customer policies if you don't buy their software. But so be it, as I have seen their software and it really does not interest me. I do think that I will buy and study the book though, as I got a sense there were a large number of examles therein. I did read a tiny smattering of Richard Ney's stuff as well, which I found interesting but a bit hard to decipher at times. They could certainly stand some updating. Thanks again to you two and all the other contributors here for a very interesting thread. Happy Trading

I cannot speak to what the ESignal datafeed was like over a year ago as I have only used ESignal for the past year but I have never had any problems with it at all. I cannot say the same for their advanced charting as most computers, including most Iintel based dual core etc.. have difficulties running ESig's advanced charting in fast markets. It seems AMD has the upperhand in chipsets for the time being, as admitted begrudingly by Intel's move to the same architecture being run by AMD chipsets for over a year already. Fortunately, my off the shelf Sony which is a year old is somehow designed so that it runs it all without the slightest snag (lucky me, compared to some of the horror stories other traders have shared with me.) TS charting, which is free if you trade just 10 round trip futures contracts per month (pretty minimal if you ask me) is darn hard to beat if you don't require lots of market profile stuff or constant volume bar charting. Even Ninja Trader's Version 6 charting platform, which should be released a week from this coming Monday, is rapidly approaching state of the art and could be a nice choice once the Zenfire brokers begin providing historical data enough to run daily, weekly and monthly charts.. as you can only run hourly and below currently. It runs OHLC and volume bar charts quite efficiently as well from what I can tell, but you never know what surprises lurk in new versions. Good luck with whatever you choose and do let us know if other meaningful issues surface in your testing. Happy Trading

Browns... I would think twice about migrating over to Multi as many say it is full of basic bugs and slow as molasses compared to TS. I have run volume based charts on both ESignal and Ninja Trader and had no problems whatsoever. Ensign is certainly another strong contender for what you desire. ESignal just never stops increasing its prices and in fact recently announced an upcoming price increase again for July 1, but I will say that it does provide a reliable and clean datafeed compared to most. Good luck in your transition.. I too would make a changeover if I were wishing to use volume bars and got what TS provides you. Happy Trading

Hello Dupaski.. Have you found a place to upload the video above refrenced? I am sure there are some of us who would like to see it if you really don't mind going to the trouble to post it. Also.. to PP... you once mentioned Joel Pozen with reference to VSA. I found out he does a mentoring program, but it certainly is not inexpensive at $4,000. Is he really that great a mentor or do you feel the key concepts can be learned by an experienced trader from intensive effort spent with the book and the bootcamp alone? Do please keep this thread going. I find it to be one of the most interesting threads in the entire forum thus far. Happy Trading

Ahhh.. someone here finally brought it out into the open. Kudos to you BrownsFan! It is indeed true that until you have true confidence that your method has a tradeable edge, you will continue to search and adjust until you eventually have to scrap it all and go back to where you started. Now I would say that over time, most traders have heard that already and went "yeah, we know that and agree" but then they cast it off and forget about it. At the risk of sounding dogmatic here, I am telling you it will keep showing up and smacking you in the face at the worst times until you accept it as fact and focus on it until you truly have a firm confidence in the method you trade. Without that, you are irretrievably lost. There comes a time when you simply must call a halt to the searching, changing, tweaking and fine tuning and simply decide to become expert at your method and only tweak it once in awhile to adapt to real character changes in the market. I like this thread and I must say I continue to really enjoy this forum. Keep up the wonderful postings. Happy Trading

Having sat through 4 long sessions awhile back with the boyz from TradeGuider.. I agree that VSA has some merit, but I also agree with your final comments, Profiler.... as TTM/Heikin Ashi candlesticks are not truly compatible with using VSA. Either way, I am glad to see this thread get started, so thanks for that, Tin Gull. Happy Trading

Hrrumpff! The swing and position traders I know who thought they were well prepared to trade intraday have usually had their heads handed to them by the market in fairly short order. It's just not quite the same game despite the promotions by many system sellers to the contrary. One man's price action is another man's order flow, if you get the drift. It is not simply a matter of scaling down. The same instrument trades quite differently intraday than it does weekly or monthly. Can some make the transition? Sure.. but experience in one is certainly no assurance of success in the other. Happy Trading

Ok.. once again off topic of the thread but I will put it a slightly different way. How you perceive and assess risk, price action, etc. is likely very different than how I do so. Your market experience and the mindset and background you bring to your trading is also likely very different from mine. Thus, I am going to tell you that how you specifically decide to cut your losses quickly and dispassionately is far less important than your discipline in simply doing it time after time without fail. Only you can come up with a method that really works for you. Don't worry about the opportunity cost loss from missing an occasional trade that turned around and ran a mile in your original direction. That can and does happen to everyone, regarldess of method, on occasion. If you are so terribly convinced it is definitely turning around and will leave you at the station, while running for the hills then there is nothing but your pride and a small commission cost prohibiting you from jumping back in. If you kept that earlier loss small (and don't forget that it is often a small profit or breakeven instead of a loss) then you won't feel bad at all for having bailed out early only to get back in. I daresay that your equity growth over the long haul will keep you feeling good about following such a method. Now let's let these fine forum members have their interesting thread back. Happy Trading

Ok GCB... Yes, I agree that your questions may be off topic to this thread, but suffice it to say that I play basically with disaster stops put in place only for rapid and unexpected reversals. They are not there to "give the market room to work". That would be like saying, "Well, the trade is on, my job is done, let the stop loss protect me and let's see where I end up". Any fool can enter a position. Your real job is to manage the trades you put on so as to let as much of your position ride to the fullest profit possible, only after you have assured yourself that the market and price activity are not proving you wrong, in which case your job is to get out as soon as possible, preferrably at breakeven to a small profit or, failing that, with a tiny loss so that you live to fight another battle and your emotions aren't in total turmoil for the rest of the session. As soon as I open a position I am highly focused on looking for changes that might indicate my trade was wrongly positioned or ill timed. If the market does not move in my favor in extremely short order, I simply bail on the posiition at breakeven to a tiny profit if possible or else a very tiny loss and wait for a better trade. Do I take more losses than I used to? Yes, I do.. but I dont mind at all as they are tiny compared to before and even after I add them up, my profitable trades easily outstrip them. Understand that not every trader is going to agree with what I have said and that is fine. But, do consider this: you often find traders singing the praises of scaling out quite early on their profitable trades and leaving on a small "runner" to see if the trade really goes somewhere. Why then is it that many of those same traders will sit glassy eyed with their full position size intact as a trade works its way all the way back to their stop loss and takes them out? Is it because they couldn't see price activity clearly headed in the wrong direction? No, I think it stems from two things: 1) their fear of admitting they were wrong and taking a loss (even tho it could be a very small one if they acted promptly) and 2) they are almost soley focused on profit taking and not on capital preservation through controlling the size of their losses. It is one thing to consider "risking" the size of your stop and lot size. It is quite another to just give it away. Happy Trading

Hmm... a very interesting little thread though I am not quite sure exactly what we are discussing here to be sure. It sounds somewhat like what have we learned along the way to becoming successful traders. I would have to agree that you'll fare far better in this fun but highly challenging pursuit if you have a passion for it. However, it is sometimes easy to get carried away with the fun and forget it is a business. Someone mentioned early on about a lack of meaningful capital being a crutch for newbie traders. While I was fortunate not to be in that position, sometimes an excess of capital can prove to be as big of a handicap (I doubt you meant to say "crutch") as too little capital, but for very different reasons. I quickly learned a lot about myself as I dove headlong into trading. Being disciplined is probably the only truly useful trait I brought with me from my prior career success, other than an extreme appreciation for capital preservation (I was a banker of all things heh, heh) that assisted me in this trial by fire of becoming a profitable trader. My pride, my supposed intelligence, my willingness to stick with a bad situation in hopes of turning it around and other traits that worked so well for me in prior days, served mostly as ways to lay more of my money on the table for the pros to stuff into their own bank accounts. Now I finally do take a good amount of money out of the market on a regular basis, but it came more from following an absurdly simple trading plan with position sizing and money management as 90% of my focus. I learned in the most direct way that this is a game of losses, not a game of profits. If you focus on managing the losses and keeping them small, you will make it. In other words, to Hell with being right. If the market doesn't go in your favor soon after getting in, then get the heck out and cut those potential losers unmercifully. I learned not to over-think any of this and stop trying to complicate it with new and improved methods and indicators. Price, time and support and resistance seem to me to be the only technical keys to the kingdom here and even knowing all that, it will all come to naught (nothing) if you cannot control your emotions in the heat of the moment and execute almost flawlessly on a few simple rules, over and over again. I think Soultrader once said the market will quickly teach you a lot about yourself. I couldn't agree more. Happy Trading

The thread starter's comment as regards the uptick rule wasn't that futures trading was going to get hit with it but instead that it was likely to be eliminated sometime in the foreseeable future from stock trading. I recall having read that myself in a couple of places other than forum threads in the past few months. So, while it may have some merit, I don't know anyone that could put any realistic deadline to it. Happy Trading

Come on guys.. knowing Microsoft's legendary history of delivering bug laden and cumbersome software, especially during major upgrades, it makes little sense to rush out and become one of the early adopters. They claim this software is the first product that cues its own performance to the hardware capacities of your individual pc. That may well be true but my guess is it is slanted towards having the most high end components possible if you want decent performance from it and thus we all should probably remain content with using XP in whatever version we have grown comfortable, at least for the time being (or a Mac, for those who got fed up with all this stuff long ago). When I decide to invest in a new trading pc, I intend to have a certain party build it (that's all they do) and I am sure they will accommodate me by loading it with my old reliable XP until such time as Vista is modified to run better on the majority of machines out there (which may take quite some time.) Happy Trading

A discussion of this nature could probably go on forever without achieving a useful result. At the end of the day, I doubt any of us would have a good factual handle on the real percentage of successful versus unsuccessful nor am I at all sure that comparing trading to other forms of endeavor has any particularly useful application toward arriving at the answer. Most all professions demand their pound of flesh. It has always been so and shall always be that way. Some people perhaps more easily adapt and feel at home in the markets but I think we can all rest assured that percentage is mighty darn small. Let's assume for a moment that the real number (including all who try to whatever degree, which is as it should be measured across all endeavors) is in fact 95% failures, or even 98% failues if you wish. What does that really mean to a particular individual? It means nothing more nor less than what that individual's personality and mindset take it to mean. To some it will be an exciting challenge, wherein they have decided they shall be in that 2% to 5% number "no matter what it takes". To others, those figures will cloud their feelings, emotions and judgement and perhaps cause them to take actions in their trading which match up with the projected casualty rates. There is just no telling. Soultrader hit upon an extremely important issue and that was learning and knowing yourself. It has been suggested by some of the best traders in the business that you are the holy grail for which you are searching and that it has very little to do with trading method or technique. I assure you that after all this time, there is very little new under the sun with regard to methods and strategies in trading and that almost everything has been tried hundreds or even thousands of times before. Just as in other areas of life, you can take the proverbial two friends of reasonably equal intelligence, age, backgrounds, educations, beginning capital, etc. and put them both to the same task or career and have one succeed brilliantly and the other fail miserably. What made the difference? Some will say it was their beliefs. Others will say it was that one had persistence and commitment and the other did not. Still others will say it was their actions or lack thereof that made the major difference. I would say that it is a combination of all the above combined with a passion or ardent interest for the career or endeavor being pursued. That brings us right back to the phrase of "no matter what it takes" or in essence "doing" whatever it takes to succeed. A large part of that is belief but belief is lost without passion and applied action. I am not sure that it is truly important to know the specific surveyed percentages of faiure. In any field of demanding endeavor where the stakes are high (in both risk and reward) there are those precious few who are naturals and their success often defies explanation. However, for the rest of us it comes down to committing to do whatever it takes and then doing it over and over without giving up. Most people give up quite easily and of course usually defend their poor results by blaming some outside party or when all else fails.. blaming the well known "statistics "of the industry, whether they be real or just legend. They quickly point to how it was clear the odds were totally against them from the very start and thus it should be no surprise they couldn't quite make it. What is the real truth? Well, I won't claim any special access to knowing that, but my suspicions are that most people simply found reasons to give up. Whether those reasons were money, family or health related, matters little. What I suspect really matters at the end of the day, is not the statistics or power curve of success versus failure in what you attempt to do, but probably your own passion and commitment to somehow stick it out (come Hell or high water, as my father was fond of saying) no matter what hurdles you come across, until you have achieved what you set out to do. In trading, my own personal beliefs tell me that it is more about conquering yourself and controlling your trading behaviors as you continue to learn about the markets, the particular instruments you trade and about the emotions of those involved that serve to drive price across the playing field. I think most people trade a long time (or at least as long as their captial holds out) before realizing that no matter what strategy or technique they use, they are not going to materially warp the probabilities in their favor and they finally realize it is really a game of controlling the size of your losses and taking trades only when you truly believe you have an edge that suggests there is a high probability that those trades will run in your favor. In the final analysis, I say forget about the statistics of the industry. Forget about the search for the holy grail of methods or strategies (that includes fancy software with blinking lights and pretty colors,) and decide once and for all to commit yourself entirely to finding and developing a tiny "edge" in your method of play and then just keep coming up to bat day in and day out, often enough to let the odds work out in your favor. Will that provide the answer to what percentage of people fail in this industry? No it won't, but I assure you it probably will put you on the right side of that percentage and after all, isn't that what really matters? Happy Trading

No need to feel spooked Robert. Most often this is just people parroting back the reasons they were fed by various institutions and brokers with a vested interest in promoting certain trading instruments. Regardless of the so-called advantages of one class of trading instruments over another, you need to simply trade what you decide is comfortable for you and that point cannot be over-emphasized. I assure you that one man's meat is still another man's potatoes just as the old cliche says (not to be sexist, that goes for the women out there too heh, heh.) Some who have traded stocks grew tired of all the scanning and research, etc. and found the e-mini futures, which require far less of that type of activity, to be a blessing. Others have traded e-mini futures and found them too highly correlated to one another (for instance, when one is not moving it is often the case the others are not moving very well either, though that correlation only holds true for about 80% of the time or thereabouts.) They then decide they want the freedom to go "where the action is" by sorting for better opportunities in a vast sea of individual stocks, etc. It kind of follows along the lines of the hot dog vendor who always sets up shop at one area of the biggest park in the city (depending on paying customers to hopefully come by regularly), versus the hot dog vendor who is smart enough to position his cart wherever events may be taking place in the park on any particular day. The time to get a little spooked is when almost everyone is persuaded about the direction the market is going to take. You wil find, if you are in this business long enough, that widespread direction bias is often a clue to consider taking the other side or at least be aware of the opportunity that lies in that opposing direction. The big money professionals know exactly where the retail investor sentiment and bias on direction lies, in fact they often are at least partly responsible for having brought those less sophisticated parties to those beliefs. They absolutely delight in starting out a day in the anticipated direction for a few minutes, drawing in all the hopefuls and convincing them of the accuracy of their views, only to quickly snatch it all away by forcing the tide quickly as possible in the opposite direction. Anyway, you seem to be doing a good job of taking your own counsel and making up your own mind about things and I heartily encourage you to continue on in that very same manner. Happy Trading

As I began reading the responses to poor Andrew's inquiry I was flabberghasted that no one was telling this well intentioned but severely misguided fellow to stop trading with real money until he found a method where he was routinely and consistently profitable! There is no acceptable reason to let someone go on like that without calling it to their attention as the first and most immediate order of business. I take my hat off to Kiwi who was the first and only one to really tell it like it is and bring poor Andrew back to reality before he had to take a job at WalMart for a year or two just to replenish his initial trading capital. Please, let your initial risk capital come in the form of your time, study and effort, not your hard earned money. Once you have found the method that works for you consistently, that is the time to start risking 1 or two contracts per trade (again just on high probability trades) until your confidence, success and working capital all grow to the degree that you feel comfortable moving up to greater size, which I suggest you do very slowly anyway. It takes awhile, even at the smallest of size, to adjust to living with your trading emotions when you make the switch to trading real money. You will undoubtedly find that as you increase in size you may have to re-learn how to live with those emotions again and again until such time as you finally reach a size and/or risk level you do not feel comfortable going beyond. Additionally, Kiwi mentioned patience as a key trait of a good trader. I am here to tell you that successful trading can often feel as boring as watching paint dry, so you better get comfortable with that. Otherwise you are likely to be jumping in willy nilly at the wrong times just to be actively trading and I can think of no more sure way to a rapid blow-out your account. Andrew or any other inquisitive beginner should read Kiwi's advice over and over again until it sticks like glue and becomes your way to attack trading the markets. Happy Trading To All

Hmmm .. interesting Walter. But did I understand you to say you often trade 30 contracts at a whack on the Russell e-mini? Don't you get some a large amount of slippage with a trade that size? I trade it every day and I very seldom see trades of that size. I would think you could safely trade 6 to 8 contracts at a whack without large slippage, but I would be quite surprised to hear you could do it with 30. If you don't mind my asking, what type of orders are you using? That seems like a heck of a lot of risk for just 6 ticks of profit although I suspect you probably only take very high probability trades where you are skinning the meat out of the middle of a morning move. Happy Trading

You are probably not going to like this but here is my answer to how many trades it takes: If you still have to ask, then it's still not enough. Only you will know how many trades it takes and you won't know that until you feel truly comfortable and confident in taking them. No one else can even give you a good hint. One other thing... Most of it has to be real trades with live money, even if it is a single contract, or it won't mean a darn thing. The road to trading success is littered with the bodies of thousands of failed traders who made hundreds and even thousands of demo trades only to have their confidence irrevocably shattered when finally making the switch to having real money at stake. Learn about and observe the instrument you are going to trade to get a good feel for when and how it moves, select the timeframe that matches your own personality, trade demo til you are truly proficient at executing trades on your chosen trading platform and then switch to live money and one contract until you get your emotions under control, regardless of the strategy you decide to trade. Happy Trading

To put it simply, one of the very best trading books around, especially for the very short term futures trader. There is a great deal of sample trade detail, which if you truly wade through it is highly useful and seldom found much in other books on trading. You won't agree with all he says, but that is natural in any work this size. Overall, a great value that was a long time in the preparation I think. Happy Trading

Hmm.. there are all kinds of comments I could make about this, but I think we all know where these forecast deals all end up. I daresay that I can't think of a single soul who is truly good at "predicting" market moves with any consistency of being accurate. For those who haven't been around the game very long I suppose there is still always this tiny lingering hope that maybe someone has somehow stumbled upon a prognosticator from some mystical service who really calls em spot on with great regularity and is content to sit idly by collecting a mere pittance in subscription fees while handing us the keys to the kingdom so to speak. However, until this fellow can provide enough consistent winners ahead of time .. which of course is the key, I think I will just step up here and claim it is all a bunch of hooey without much fear that I am joining the crowd of naysayers who told Columbus or whomever that the world was clearly flat instead of round. Lest others amongst us feel the holy grail has somehow been found by this nice russian trader, do please prepare a few crying towels for when you learn it just isn't so. Happy Trading

Well that's the nice thing about a good forum... people are free to disagree and we can all remain open to learning something new. You might wish to edit your post to the word "Bond" from its present "Bong" so as not to excite the weed smokers in the forum, but I certainly understand your point heh, heh. I think the Euro is one of the best currencies to trade for a starter on Forex, but that is just my personal opinion. As to Biggie's question about Bird Watching.. well, bud... I wouldn't have referred you to it if I didn't think it was worth at least $70. Your point is well taken that there is no lack of parties eager to see you part with your hard earned money, but if you are not prepared to pay for the tools and knowledge to properly learn this business then you are almost guaranteed to fail miserably and in fairly short order. Of course, I know that your comment was really directed at separating the good from the bad.. and let's be honest .. yes.. most of the advice out there is pure junk and you would be far better off without it. Happy Trading

Hmmmm.. to my knowledge there is no major difference and I doubt many retail traders have access to any new pivot schemes used by floor traders on trading the parent instruments on which the e-minis are designed. There is of course opportunity for occasional meaningful differences in one person's pivot calcs versus those of another depending on whether or not they include the globex overnight sessions into their numbers, but most often there are not wide swings in the thinly traded overnight sessions. I suppose there are also those who use the variable pivot calculations that adjust every 60 minutes based upon trading levels within that same day, but I don't find many traders using those. Since the minis, as pointed out just above, don't trade on a live floor exchange, I don't see why you would want to get hold of those "floor" pivots and substitute them for use on your e-mini charts. Many traders don't even bother with those old calculations and use market profile or volume profile levels or just simple dual purpose trendlines which run through the high activity points of support and resistance over the prior two or three trading days or periods. As usual, there's a little something for everybody, depending on their style of trading, but support and resistance is fairly obvious on prior day's charts and I think it is less important exactly how you come up with it than it is to see if those points are often respected in your current day's trading. Happy Trading