Very succinct post, Atlanta! I may have met you in the class but I don't know who you are. Yes, a lot of emphasis was put on tape reading and trading with the Specialist. The best way to learn to read a specialist is to focus on one stock and watch it closely. We were advised to do that when we begin trading and will get feedback to help our learning curve. Some traders at Bright have made (and are making) a career out of trading one stock. One benefit of this approach is that it greatly simplifies the post market analysis. One stock, one sector. No need to stay up late overanalyzing. It makes for a brief premarket analysis as well. Many successful traders are trading pairs. Tape reading comes into play here also as during market trends they may leg in and out of one side intraday. Some traders diversify by building a position of as many as twenty pairs to help control risk. The tradeoff here is that once you are managing several pairs then you cannot micromanage them all.
swingtrader & Atlanta Did the principals at Bright ( Bob, Don Earl, etc) ever explain what specific steps they take to help new traders? Aside from the monthly seminars, will there be anyone discussing trades and strategies/lessons on an ongoing basis i.e. daily, weekly meetings, etc. Thanks in advance.
My notes are a bit sketchy but this is what I am expecting as a new trader. Once I am actually there I may have a more complete answer. When I arrive at the office I will have a New Trader Orientation meeting with the office manager. This will include a discussion or explanation of Bright's risk policies, where to get info off of the quote service to use the various trading strategies that we discussed in class, use of the RediPlus software (First Alert if we want it), potential risk of the various buy/sell orders we can enter, market mechanics, cost structure, reading of daily reports, professional behavior, etc. For the first week(s) I will be given order entry assignments to help me get familiar with the software and order mechanics. I have a form to list my trades and tick off the reasons I took and exited each trade, both for longs or shorts. I want as many confirming signals as possible. The office manager will go over my trades with me once a week to look for patterns, offer advice etc. Of course I can ask questions midweek. When I reach a point to where I'm doing ok then I would meet with the manager once a month. Once I'm getting the grasp of this and doing ok then my size will be increased. This is not a race. It is important that I learn the basics and my first priority (and the firm's) is to survive my learning curve, which may take months. They believe that we learn much more from trading than from merely watching the market. Over time we get or develop a feel for what works. It won't take long before I'll find myself favoring certain strategies over others given my risk tolerance, temperament, etc., but in the beginning I want to keep an open mind. A general office meeting is held once a week, I believe each Wednesday postmarket. After I have traded for a month and learned some of the basics I can attend the monthly class given on advanced strategies and techniques. I don't know what to expect here but I'm looking forward to it! As Director of Education Don is readily available as a resource. He gets a lot of phone calls/emails from traders every day. Earl, their Director of Trader Development is available also. He talks about discipline, decision making, game plans, overtrading, etc. I like these guys... no candy coating, no bullshit, just straight answers. Of course there is the unstructured learning that comes from being in an office of traders. As a part of our continuing education the Bright's encourage us to trade out of a different office every four months or so to learn new things from traders there. For instance, an office in CA (I don't recall which branch) focuses on OO orders as a team and has done very well, refining that edge to an art form. How many traders move around? I suspect a minority, as most may either own a home, have a working wife, kids in school, etc. But even if you are going to be in a different part of the country for a week or so, maybe on vacation or whatever, just call the office manager, tell him you are coming, and trade from there.
In my previous post I stated that some traders "may have a working wife", that should read "may have a working spouse" as I saw several women trading in the LV office.
Just thought I would dive in here. We have a company wide "pal talk" communication every morning, where we share the day's news and numbers. Each office has a weekly meeting to help all their own traders...and in Vegas, we have an additional 1 hour (two days a week) to help new people.
Congratulations Don. These posts are better than all the advertising you could do independently. Atlanta gave a clear and succinct description of your training. Atlanta, I am assuming you are in the Bright Atlanta office? I heard from a buddy who left that office last year that it was dead and the Office Manager was "worthless". Has that changed? I am reconsidring moving to Atlanta from Chicago and would like to know. Also, Don is Earl V. the same Earl who was a stock clerk on the CBOE in the 80's and early 90's? I clerked on the CBOE one summer (1989) while in college. I am excited about your training and your rates. My firm in Chicago is slowly dying.
The office is Atlanta is thriving, and with it's close proximity to Neovest/First Alert, there are many varying strategies employed there. The manager is young and knowledgeable and has done a good job in growing the office. I will admit that we went through a "dead" phase in Atlanta early on ....not really sure why, but we have it on track and doing well now. Earl was on the CBOE (and other exchanges), but has been trading with us since 1992. You probably know many of the same people.
swingtrader & Don, Thanks for your replies. I have signed up for the Bright class and if I like what I see & hear in this class, will apply to trade with Bright. I have always been impressed with the timeliness of Bright's people's responses (especially of Don) to any of my questions, and the recent comments on this board about the firm has made my decision easier. Btw, I had emailed the same question to Echo more than a week ago and has yet to get a response from them. Had left a message in their toll free line for seminar scheduling last week and got the same response - none.
I just thought that some of you may want to join in the Free workshop in NYC on Sunday. 12:30 - 2PM. My brother and I will be there to answer all your questions about trading, and give you an overview of current trading tactics and techniques. (And for you guys that think I am self promoting......"well at least I didn't start a new thread or send you all emails!!"
Speculator, I am in the Atlanta office. This is my second week here, so I am still learning the ropes a bit. My last trading platform was gr8trade and before that cybertrader which I knew inside and out. Redi plus is similar, but being a slave to habit, I spent much of the first week tweaking it so that the hotkeys and layout were as close to my old layout as possible. As far as the office goes, I'll break it down for ya. The location could not be better. for most. I have a commute from hell right now but It's right in midtown where everything is. So when you get off work, if you leave at 4:00-4:30 you can beat traffic or if you stay late your within 5 minutes of many a watering hole and plenty of southern beauties where you can wait out the god awful atlanta traffic if you choose, ;-) The office is only about 1/3 full, most of the traders here trade momentum from what I have seen. (I am going to mix that with some pairs trading , and ofcourse the open only's which are discussed on another thread here). This office has some good tape readers, when guys call out things, its more of the ...."look at the bid on Lehman, or did you just see that print on THC", etc....vs. the last place I traded where I did the majority of the talking and it was more of news orientated or correlation type trading. Where I would see news on say, NOK, and yell out...."watch rfmd and cnxt on that NOK news, they make most of those RF chips, and watch those OEM's too they could drop, etc.). Here they trade anything that is moving but still weigh heavily toward the NYSE stocks. The setups are pretty standard....everytrader has 4 monitors as a kind of default, if you want/need more, they don't seem to mind. Most traders here have their own first alert as well. My setup is a redi on one monitor, and FA running on the other three. We have the spoos pit pipped over the telephone all day after the pal talk (whatever they call it. ;-) in the morning. As far as the branch manager goes, I like him. He is young and good at multitasking 2-3 things at once. His office is right off the floor and his door never closes. He trades most of the day as I believe all Bright managers do. I have had managers in the past that do not trade, and I am in the camp that prefers that they do. Also, I don't have any numbers to back it up, but when I was out in Las Vegas they seemed to indicate that most office managers are former traders, many of which did well enought that they eventually opened their own offices. Besides commission rates, that was the largest factor that contributed in me coming here. (the fact that if you do well and want to move to somewhere they don't have an office, then go open one. The only thing I really miss from my old office is having internet access at my workstation. Here you have to go to another computer. I miss using the lunch time lull to read over briefing, realmoney, check email, etc. I think if we add a few more traders we might get sometype of wireless thing so traders can have that. If not, I will figure out something on my own. I belive the rational right now is that all of our bandwidth is allocated to redi (orderflow)....and that net access might slow things down but I'm not positive on that one. Obviously, the main draw here if your experienced and not already with Bright are the fees. As I posted initially, my commissions here work out to more than 100K a year less vs. the old place where I had a base rate less than a penny per share but still had to pay the related fees. Those fees for the ecns, soes, etc, are already factored into the pricing here. (those fees at my last place paid for the free lunches, bloomberg machine, parking pass, flat pannel monitors, pool table, christmas parties,etc. from the last place). At this point (I'm 28 now...I think I'd rather just keep more of my money.) Better get back to programing this first alert..... Cheers.