first and last 90 mins for stocks. I trade several futures markets which open and close at various times as well, so it keeps me at my desk pretty much all day. That said, if I have a really good morning, I bag the rest of the day and go play. its a great motivator to focus on the open.
In the financial industry different people carry out different jobs during the day as a matter of routine. we all see that the quants, etc, cannot bet the indexes, etc. Lots of continuing measurable fear ,anxiety and anger going on . See LO and his buddy at MIT for their measured psychololical data on this. In Harris ("traders and Exchanges") he adroitly characterises who is doing what to whom chapter after chapter. In the seet of informed traders, there are two classes of people who deal with making money in a way that is fairly closely related to the potential that is there to take. These people are parasitic types in their thinking and their actions. They look at who moved the market and why it is moving as it does. It is definitely a nice place to be considering that a person wants to make as much as possible, perhaps. Why give up making as much as possible? is the question that prompted them to leave the herd. I started in the late 50's coming from a depreeion era family being born in the depression. So I looked at what was there. This may seem like a long slow curve but it may actually help a little. A lot of money is changing hands with forceful moves. It is all so huge and so inevitable and so routine in response to people who are not very successful and have tons of responsibilities. It is what makes the world turn almost. I just love how clear things are all the time and that they are "telegraphed" like people playing bridge or poker with transparent cards. So I am using indicators that lead the price of the big and "smart" money. Here the focus is quitting trading in the pm for super reasons: to not lose in the pm. Lets look at the tranition from am to lunch to pm. Lunch is a necessity for people and some of them go out of the office to do it. The people who have responsibilities do not go out though. I am in AZ so we do not do full days of trading anyway. New York hours are called "mornings" out here. It is a cowboy thing sort of. All oscillators are seemingly disfunctional late in the lunch period and as the settlement data is being shovelled into the settlement conference rooms all over NYC and Greenwich and Port Washington. But, take the STOCH which is wired a little different. If you sqeese it to a very very narrow state, it does get wrestless a little early and if you change to a better flag or signal than the herd uses, you get to step out in front of the heard and you get to see the smerter part of the smart money which had its settlement a little early. this is also true of the narrow indexes. $INDU is narrower than the SP.X.X by a ratio of 500/30. So the smart money who trades the index ahead of the cash just mentioned is there to see as a measure of the difference of indu and YM or DJ. It leaps out clear as a bell as to what is coming down the pipe an or around 1:15. There are 14 others too. This vector orientation is an avalanche of leading indicators peeling off ahead of the pm direction and magnitude as all vector maths do. the time of the transition is in minutes so it is not a thing that engenders any of the conventional orthodoxy measures taken by the MIT guys or he Stanford crew or Goleman, et al. It is very different to be a person not caught in the conventional orthodoxy which engenders fear, anxiety and anger. Forntrunning is kind of like monitoring and feeling (this is where emotions come from) supported, comfortable and confident. The contrast between the minds's bio chemical production for each starkly different case cannot be more in contrast. All survival type emotional reactions engender long lived bio chemicals. In contrast, the frontrunning set is short lived and engenders a sport type playing enthusiasm and enregizer bunny feeling. For me as an older high velocity trader, I am usually operating on sports memory as I trade which is in great contrast to those who are smart enough to hang it up in the afternoon after a whole morning of STRESS. There is a vast difference in monitoring the markets with sports memory trading where theings keep peeling off in an orderly way, in contrast to the "survival" game as measured by constant STRESS the player in the financial industry are measured to have as a constant part of their lives. the edge trading and not beingable to see the markets displayed in any other way than the conventional orthodoxy is one tough situation. Huge failure rates for these people who trade. Managers of the huge pools of captial cannot beat the indexes. It is a tough choice to get an MBA in conventional orthodoxy and be focus on making money by selling people on putting thier money in huge pools that really can't beat the indexes. the continual settelmet game and the quants running the investment show is what cowboys call wrangling all the time. we avoid even making the cattle eat where they do not want to drift too. Out here if you want the cattle not bothering you, build a fence around you place. Otherwise count on them eating the daisies when they drift over. Use leading indicators to see where and in which direction the herd is going. if you can learn to saddle a horse, you can always know which way the herd is going. Everybody out here knows which head of beef to look at to see where all the others are going. We call these guys leading indicators out here and we tag their ears accordingly.