This of course affects the equity curve profoundly...as the longer the TIT (Time In Trade), the more volatile the equity curve.
So if he wasn't spoofing, what was his style? Was he a spread trader? or maybe was looking for bigger moves? because according to this article ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...fortune-while-his-mother-worked-two-jobs.html ) he used just three monitors and was trading 2,000 lots per trade .Outrights,not spreads. Thanks
As mentioned before I don't want to appear like I was his best friend or anything. I just traded the same place as him. He kept himself to himself. But he was trading outrights. He started off like every other trainee, with 1 lots. So I know he wasn't spoofing because it is impossible to spoof the S&P without thousands of lots. This was a prop firm, not a hedge fund or anything. You start as a kid and get about 20k to lose before they sack you. Start with 1 lots and not risk more than a few 100 a day and with a ton of stress and hardwork you can be lucky enough to figure it out. But most of the strategies traders at all prop firms back then used were around scalping order flow. News releases etc. A lot of stuff that doesn't work now. Or work in different ways. Markets always evolving. He may very well have been spoofing at the end. But he certainly made a lot of money first through plain vanilla outright trading to get to a stage where he could even contemplate spoofing.
Thanks again mate. I suppose that prop. firm was futex( the article says he then moved to cft). Do you remember if he was trading looking at any s&p500 chart, volume,etc or was just dealing with the DOM? By the way another outright successful day trader is Andy Priston.
Yeah those are the guys that make the headlines. There are others too that punch out some huge figures. Sadly I'm not at that level. They do all of the above. Charts, Price ladders. Most stuff is off price ladders I've never really found any edge in charts apart from over significant events. There is no secret chart or anything professional traders look at. I remember before I started trading professionally I thought if I could only get on the inside and find the secrets. There aren't really any major secrets. I've had edges that were free money. But then they dry up. It's just a question of staring at the screens for hours and hours a day and over time you pick up enough patterns and see enough market cycles to start thinking 'I've seen this before I know this or that normally happens now'.
"Markets always evolving", markets change into another pattern on larger scale, but they are far from new. Patterns will stare into your face for years to decades, then one day you see something and test it out and might add to patterns you already trade. The only secrets there are the patterns you don't give to anyone, but unknown to you, others have them and feel the same.
Yes and no. Completely agree about market cycles and patterns. But the real money I've seen made isn't really off things like chart patterns. I've had setups that simply don't exist anymore. Particularly patterns in the order book like spoofers appearing. They used to be in there all day long, clear as day, you saw size and you faded it. Rarely had a down day for years but now regulated out of existence. Markets that used to trade shortened hours with a big overnight gap to exploit that now are 24 hours. Even really simple stuff like arbing products against different exchanges just with an autospreader and getting trades 3 or 4 ticks in the money. All those things are gone for good but were free money back in the day and know a lot of people that only made money off those things, sometimes millions of dollars but never made another penny once it stopped.
New patterns Same general theories work in terms of opens closes and news releases the most volatile. Mid day generally choppy. Markets sometimes trend and sometimes mean revert. The order book still shows bids and offers where some of them are real and some of them are fake. Some of them just market makers that don't really want to be filled. But the probabilities of all these things are always changing. Somedays the order book has lots of real orders you can lean on. Some days there's big fundamental news where your mean reversion strategies need to be ignored. I prefer mean reversion strategies. I used to do a lot of spread trades but the volatility is dead now, so I moved to outrights but found outrights with characteristics of spreads such as STIRS. This is how we have to constantly be. adapting. I don't have any of those free money setups I used to have, as I mentioned in a previous post. But even if anyone did they would never mention it on a forum. The margins are so thin now. Since Dodd Frank the number of real traders in the market (not just algos and other day traders looking for quick ticks) has declined hugely. They were the guys that created the inefficiencies. Without them the markets are extremely efficient. So all I can say is it is extremely tough now and probably the toughest I've seen the industry. But you can still make money but is more about experience and patience than clear edges that can be taught in a few weeks. In my experience at least.