MC

Thanks for the forgiveness Walter, you're a gentleman. I owe chimpo some kind of liquor beverage. I'm so sorry guys. If there's anything I can do to help get the thread back on track please let me know. I just can't believe the mess 1 click created. Actually I can, cause I see it happen on the market all day long but I never expected to damage any of your guys work.

I went through all 4 pages and counted the posts that show that they were edited by me, these are the ones that had attachments deleted. :doh: Page 1 = 8 Page 2 = 25 Page 3 = 23 Page 4 = 14 70 total for all 4 pages :crap:

:shocked: Thanks for the vote of confidence. All kidding aside I feel horrible and if this can't be recovered I will not be a mod anymore. If nothing else I'm not hiding and I'll take the chimp's beating like a man. I was playing with deleting my thead to see where I went wrong and I still don't see what I did but clearly I did something wrong. I also noticed on "soft" deletes you have the option to check a box and save attachments which I didn't do. So unless James has a way to restore from a backup or something you guys are gonna have a Mike pinata. :embarassed:

You might have to send him afterall. It looks like the chart attachments are gone. :crap: I'm gonna report my post and hope another mod can recover them for us. I'm really sorry guys, I swear I only checked the post. Dunno what I did wrong.

Thanks...nothing to it but to press on and rule out all that doesn't work so we know what does and stick to the rules.

Bump...sorry gang. I deleted the thread by accident.

:o, I'm a midnight marauder. Since my mental trading state isn't where I want it I'm still on the grind learning. Any other computer questions fire away. Myself and some others on here are techie types.

Just add a pci card. You should have no issues under most circumstances. A new system will use pci-e slots so your agp card won't work and you'll have to get 2 cards. You could use the external box but like you said those are pricey.

I'll check that out. Thanks. I can use anything to get my head out of my a$$. LOL I try to outsmart the signals...then of all things a revenge trade with no signal and moving the stop to hang myself even more. Equity isn't bruised but my ego sure is.

WOOOOHOO!!! At this rate I'll be blown out in no time. There's more indicators I won't give out but rest assured I took some good trades and managed to make the day VERY ugly. The 1st trade was up 20+ points and I was trying to trade a system rule that in reality had me counter trend trading. That will be changed as of today. The 2nd trade was a sound trade BUT the 1st trade got into my head and I sold before the real move. Part of the issue was Tradestation totals your daily P&L and I thought that single position was up the number I was seeing. Still not an excuse, cause I should have traded the trade not the profit. The 3rd was my breaking point...I got mad I sold before the move on trade 2 and took a revenge trade. Then I proceeded to raise my stop because it "had" to dip soon. This set me back pretty badly and I am probably taking the rest of the week off because that SHOULD NOT have happened.

I am asking myself that same question...25 point YM stop or 2-10 point stops might get the job done as well? I'm 10 trades in live on futures and new to daytrading so I'm still seeking that balance for my mind. Not like anyone said being a rookie is fun though. :o

For the YM I like 3 minute and 144 tick charts depending on the signal. Check those out and see if it improves or impairs the quality of your signal. My guess is it will improve entry and exit as well.

Discretion is fun, and like you said when I have more free money to play I'll do just that. Till then I need to get my head out of my a$$ and trade the plan. That's a macd gradient. I believe its stock in Tradestation 8.3 actually. My other favorite is the volume gradient I found here on TL. I disable the trend feature cause I like to see the candles true color...I love that indicator too.

How can you take 50% accuracy and lose $200 bucks? Easy, just override your systems target and lock in early profit. The point of a system is to let the winners run and cap the losers at your stop point fairly early. Then the winners on a 50% model should have a positive net expectancy which IS profitability. Discretionary traders will be outperformed by a mechanical trader 8/10+ times. Maybe not day in and day out, but long term things work out in favor of a non emotional trader. To trade on discretion means you are trading on interpretation which is emotion influenced if not emotion driven. So I can either die a slow but sure death by trading emotions, which will kill my equity. Or the discretionary trader in me can die and that will lead me to profitability. From my tone you can tell which trader I want to die in me. :p A few of the losses came from trading the pre-market and opening 10-15 minutes which I knew better but somehow got sucked in...won't happen again! Some others were due to trading without pivot points and thus trying to go through the pivot instead of fading the pivot or using it as a profit taking point. And DAMN the psyche is fragile at first!!! Due to this factor I missed many thousands of dollars in sound trade profit because my losses made me gunshy. :mad: Prime example of WHY YOU LET WINNERS RUN! This was todays trade. I had a mechanical exit, just saw weakness and some profit being at risk and pussed out. This means the next trade that goes against me eats into equity not profit money and gives me further drawdowns.

Despite living in the eastern zone when I set it to exchange time it fixed the issue. :o I can't tell you how much time I wasted on this crap. Thanks a ton!!! Now I have a legit gap chart.

Thanks, I'll give those settings a try.

I'm having trouble getting my session times setup. I've entered the session 3 times now for 9:30am-4:00pm yet it plots data till 5pm for some reason. WTF? Suggestions? This is more an opinion question, what longer term macd setting might you guys use to smooth out a 5 minute charts macd? I've tinkered some and haven't found a good setting yet to show an accurate trend to follow. I'm sure I'll have a few more to add in a bit. Thanks

Awesome...I appreciate the screen shot. And nice trade BTW.

I'm glad I'm getting the hang of this...that was exactly what I thought on MSFT the day of the gap up when it closed weak on HUGE volume and the 2nd bar as confirmation. VSA on stocks I think I'm ok with, how do you guys use VSA on things that don't have fixed floats like futures. I've tried early in the day on the YM to apply VSA and got raped because there is no set float. New market participants can enter at any time throwing off the balance. Later near EOD I can do a bit better cause I have a more clear volume for the day gauged. Thanks

My 2 cents is a tick at bid isn't always a seller and vice versa on hits at ask. So the ticks at bid causing the red bars on tick delta could very well be buyers. You probably knew that already though. I am curious to hear a more seasoned VSA'ers side of this chart though. That sure was a low volume test of a monthly high.

A few things I notice are... The volume on the bar you got stopped out on while it was testing a mid-pivot was really low...Good chance the market won't be breaking that level on no volume/no demand. The entry maybe should have been closer to the pivot level and/or the stop should have been a touch higher above the pivot. I trade like a noob and am noob cause my emotions aren't where they need to be yet...but I do believe I will get there in due time. I'm a year into the market so I have time to lose my a$$ and learn. :o Nice trade on the 2nd shot it seems though, so congrats on that.

Yep...look back about 5 posts.

I'm running vista ultimate on a laptop with 2gb and a dual core intel processor. Runs fine and Tradestation is smooth on it. Hp DV9220us is my model. A major key for cheaper systems is they may have shared video ram which eats into the physical ram. My laptop has 256mb dedicated video ram so I have no speed issues at all. The major issue I have had is getting certified software or updates for older software. If your software isn't vista certified you can run it in "xp compatibility mode" with some luck usually. Speed issues are usually from lack of system resources though, and IMO vista isn't a tremendous hog really. As for office 2007...I love it. It takes some getting used to but once you do and realize you don't need to go through 100 pulldown bars to change a font color...AND it changes in preview mode to show you what you change and doesn't apply till you click so you can try options without non stop clicking. Most hate these new products because of the learning curve, taken out of the comfort zone puts people on the defensive. And to tingull...MACS RULE! I wish I had the cash for a 17" macbook pro.

Are you calling me a f'in loser? :o J/K

As a noob I look at it the opposite. Would I rather risk $5 per tick or risk $12.50 per tick? But I often think about fills and slippage between the 2. I'm a small timer so either could absorb my impact without a trace. If/when I move up in lot size or feel my system is good to go I'll switch over to the ES and keep the YM for hedging use mainly.