I find all of this rather limiting.... If you have an edge....why not chart your trades on a heat map to discover the optimal times of the day to trade your method and rank your trades according to time-of-day probabilities and use less size during the down times.... Someone said push yourself...I agree.
And you'll be leading the way, Jack, I'm sure. Maybe you'll also win a Nobel Prize for the P, V Boolean relation or SCT!
Its interesting to consider Jacks thesis and wonder when the equilibrium point will be reached. If what he says is true and enough people learn to trade his way its obvious that before long something will have to give as the market cannot support everyone.
The classes of trading, much less the types of trading within a class, preclude any one "thesis..lol" from having an impact. You may want to go the the next trader's expo to take a look at thousands and thousands of traders going to visit ver 100 presenters, all differing in many ways. The "Financial Individual" could be using any approach in the existing and potential spectrum. The financial industry is like a mill for most people, they enter go through repeated failure and leave. Successful traders make it into one of the 32 boxes in Larry Harris' heirarchy. Pool extraction is just a small parasitic cloister of people who really enjoy dealing with optimizing making money. Look above at the "edge" comments in this thead....they dominate the trader themes by en large. In one thread there is a "deprogramming" comment on CFA's which is intended to explain how remote the possibility is for a person to be "fixed". There is little or no chance that most people can gravitate to high velocity trading and making the potential of the markets. High velocity trading oncepts are a natural filter and barrier to people who are headed for failure or he conventonal orthodoxy. It is never going to be possible or a person to get deprogrammed or to deprogram himself after he has been innoculated with the conventional orientation. You are an edge person, pool extraction has no appeal to you at this point. Ther is no way to deprogram you and there never was for anyone. People come to forks in the road and they condition themselves in one way or another. The younger a person is, the more and more incumbant it is for him to not get caught in the conventional orthodoxy since there are going to be major changes in how and why people must take care of their futures independently of the "entitlements" that they have fully paid for. Many many people will be categorically unable to go with the flow. It is very funny how before entitlements people were conditioned by the "depression mentality". As they grew older and FDR began entitlements they never did "trust" in it but instead they heartily maintained a "work ethic". The work ethic died a slow death as the entitlements became the CW and politically correct. Now we get to see the "100" hours, avoid the elephant in the room, yet one more time. The fact that there is a paradigm that can replace the conventional orthodoxy doen't mean anything to the vast majority and the herd. It is just there and being used by those who are able to choose. There is no way hardly anyone is ever going to step out of the box. It is all there and all available; all kinds of Financial Individuals will declare themselves independent of the elephant but very few will be doing the high velocity pool extraction based on a paradigm shift from the conventional othodoxy. Trump and Kiyosaki use the Learning Annex to deal with getting people to rich. They do spin out all the real issues for the future, but they don't construe the active investor to be one who is pool extracting. They just, correctly, play out "financial education", its importance and still do not escape the conventional orthodoxy. It's tough to bite the bullet and get oriented. It is extremely safe to stick with the story line of the financial industry. The two walls of the government needs for solutions and the financial industry pool control system will always continue to squeese harder and harder on the citizen who is career oriented and a working person. Pool extraction is simply optimizing being on the right side of the market all the time and periodically taking profits when you have to change sides of the market. This has no appeal whatsoever to traders as a rule. Most traders are simply looking or leaks in EMH (quants and big money) and playing edges and set ups (the poker player type traders) instead.
Quote from grob109 aka jack hershey "The goal is to be able to trade blocks of contracts at the limit just where slippage begins." If one presumes that Mr. Hershey actually trades, you'd think that he is already at the point where slippage begins. Oh well never mind, hundreds or thousands of additional traders can all execute at the same favorable spot. Uh huh, yeah that sounds plausible. ( to a neophyte)
I do have an upper limit for PVT and SCT. I'm sure what I suggest below will become understood at some point. It bears repeating. The characterisitcs for PVT come from quality stocks. As Warren Buffett said: "Diversification is protection against ignorance. (It) makes very little sense if you know what you are doing." The PVT begins with a Universe and a batting line up fo each stream of capital. Capital is rotated through the lineup and an optimum ROI results. A typical rotation for a stock in a seqence would be 3000, 4000 and 7000 shares. Between positions other stocks are in the lineup. These are 3 beta or better stocks, among other things, to assure high money velocity. As the limit of holding a stream of 100,000 shares is reached. the entry and exit is done to make as much money as possible. One batter is finsihing his at bat and another is coming to the plate. To come to the plate requires about 20 partial fills and to exit it is common to see 30 partial fills. Each stock is going through its respective optimum point for te transaction. That is to say the Vector is changing direction. Approximately 4 hours would be required to affect the crossover from one stock to another. This comes about as a consequence of avoiding the presumed transaction sited above. As a person trades and acquires capital, the person also acquires skills in trading. One of those skills is to not have an effect on the markets when you are trading nor to play your hand so that others can see the play. I routinely show these foibles of others when I am coaching. Here, I am simply repeating what fell between the cracks in prior posts. The size of he partial fills is determined by the normal blocks showing on the T&S and secondly by not exceeding 10% of the cummulative daily volume during the optimizing of the actions. All of these limitations and aspects of trading mean that A person is extracting, on average, about the % the market is offering daily. 3 beta tells you it is 3 times the normal index typical kind of movement. The selective nature of the universe tells you that the risk is zeroed out and diverification is off the tbles. Trading streams tells you that you can focus on dong the job at all times. The combined effect of this is that 2 1/2 percent a day is the normal taking. Most people, therefore choose to not do this before looking at it very much; some people choose to criticize this. And about zero people cohoose to do this. It turns out not to be seen as the trading day happens and as it happens the timing is such that is an activity that front runs the herd quite nicely. SCT trading isues are different and equally well thought through. an example that was e-mailed yesterday with respect to YM leading ES for a specific FTT (7 points/contract reversal) showed a 2 minute window for execution. In index front running this is considered a good width window for that action. aking 5 of the 7 points is considered by SCT traders to be satisfactory for the number of minutes of the hold pior to taking that segment of profits. A normal day's sequece of trading involves 20 to 40 actions. Think of this as a sequnece o zigzags whee the turns are brief and the holds betwen turns are used too accumulate profits as a result of: price movement and being on the right side of the market. By looking at this 2 minute leading interval it can be seen that there is enough room for SCT traders to trade on their specific contract level at all times. Ordinarily a person proceeds to reinvest profits according to the fllowing sequence: 1, 2, remove original capital 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 2, 25, 50. at the 50 contract level the accounts are swept weekly and transferred to the PVT accounts. After streams of capital are filled, then two types of tradig are used phase change and sector rotation. Phase change is an interim condition and is only available to a limited extent (the ROI is a multiple of PVT); sector rotaion is designed for unlimited blocks and returns 2 to 4 % a week where the cycle is an average of 4 1/2 weeks (it is a shadow method that replaces the usual big money approaches). Neither of these are ET topical. Almost no one chooses to study SCT. There is more crticism of SCT because of the ROI levels that are much greater than PVT (this is a common psychological occurrance towards any money making method as viewed by any person who is "right" about how much money may be made betting). Both of these methods are prone to the "shoot the messenger" syndrome. By switching from the conventoal orthodoxy to another paradigm, there is always the issue of using conventional orthodoxy to compare another and different paradigm. (See back testing) The fact that is is not a logical process is not on the table usually. The predominant theme of comparison is usually criticism of either the approach or the messengers. Often it comes down to the medications and mental incapcity due to aging of some messengers. The writings skills are another very reliable consideration for assigning faults to the messenger. Traditionally, I go to cash on the 19th. For many years my year was Feb 1 to Jan 31 as well. This gave me a portion of the year to better front run by adding the year end front running. So I feel at this point that several very important issues are at play for all traders, young and old. The world has gone global and the US government "entitlements" has run its course and is no longer viable from a "promises kept" point of view. China has more Starbucks and steel for skyscrapers mostly all goes to foreign Eastern countries. Just as 2006 became the year of YOU (the individual), 2007 will become the the year of the Financial Individual. TV showed 40 financial interviews a day and now it is projected at 110. Money Honey's return and Cramers double down in time. The conventional orthodoxy has "tension" added and at last TV reached the college and recent grads. Front running will have new meaning to those of use who are high velocity traders. It will take another two years before non custom coding is available on platforms. Look at the hollowness of the NYC quant conference (it is just networking of marginal people at best). This is a good time of the year to make some plans for th future. for those much younger persons it is especially important to free yourself from any financial dependence on the system. Becoming a financial Individual starts right after you are exceeding the annual ROI levels of indexes. Figure on building capital so that it lasts and lasts and lasts and it is in large quantities. Skip the "making a living" quality of life, you have to be able to make it NOW for the future. NOW is where money is made and you have to mke the potential that the market is offering.
back to the original topic, i have personally found that as my trading has gotten better and better, and as i transitioned from losing trader (tm) to successful professional trader, that trading did get more boring somebody once said trading should be boring - like factory work that is SO true. i am a discretionary trader, but i still have primary setups i use, and I still try to extract MY emotion as much as possible from my trading decisions i'd way rather be bored and be up 2k for the day, than be excited and be trading randomly and.or emotionally
My problem is similar to yours, but opposite in the time frame. I do well in the afternoons, but stink in the mornings. Except for adjusting stops if I have swing trade on, I don't trade in the AM. I have a daily schedule - work out while watching markets on Monday, Wednesday, Friday mornings, run errands Tuesday morning, play golf Thursday morning. Start trading right after lunch. Schedule keeps me from getting bored. Whenever I've deviated from it, I've gotten burnt, frustrated, tired, and bored.
i trade mostly index futures (some corn, wheat, oil, gold) and i find that for the indexes, the best trades are just prior to the open up until 11:30 EST i generally don't enter any trades between 1130 to 2:00 pm i will do something else, and/or still be in trades that are still running my way, with a trailing stop i can also use the doldrums time to research stuff for my buy and hold and longer term accounts, and to manage my positions and set up my longer term limit orders for those accounts. sometimes i have limit orders that take weeks or more to fill in those accounts