I've been posting in the PNL thread recently. I've been trading on and off for a number of years - more or less convinced myself a while ago that it's actually not possible, but I carry on, anyway! I recently moved from trading ES futures to trying my hand at equities. My results haven't been amazing, but they've better than anything i've been able to achieve in a while. I trade 400 share lots. My commisions are 1c per share, I'd like opinions on my performance. Today I placed my 200th trade. In terms of ticks profit, i'm up over 550 ticks, but after deducting commisions i've not made much money at all. (if I cut my commissions in half, it starts to look more respectable) I also don't know if there's any statistical significance with 200 trades, so whose to say that my limited success isn't just luck?
Trading is v tough. Look for stuff you can control. Commissions are one of them. Whoever your broker is, they love you. IB charges half a cent per share. Go join them instead. The big money is in the big moves which generally take more than a day to develop.
Yeah, commissions are a bit of a killer, but I reall like the platform. TWS looks impossible - like trading from an excel spreadsheet. Are tradestation as cheap as IB? Has nobody else got any input on my numbers/OP at all? Do they suggest any sort of 'edge' at all or not?
Hello Brian, You are doing 10 trades per day. Its not much, once you get hang of IB's TWS interface, you can easily click it 10 times to enter an order and 10 times to enter stop/profit or exit the position. I have done 200+ orders in a day using TWS. Its not hard at all....you might need few days to acclimatize yourself. The difference in commission cost is huge. You must switch. I looked at Tradestation's commission for you (you could have looked yourself ) http://www.tradestation.com/pricing/stocks-and-etf-pricing https://www.interactivebrokers.co.in/en/index.php?f=commission&p=stocks2#america Upto 500 shares, its 1 cent a share, whereas IB is always 0.5 cents a share. I have been an IB client for more than 5 years. Before that I used to trade with tradestation. At least in 2009, Tradestation always used to get slow and lag quotes and sometimes used to get hanged in fast markets. When I switched to IB in 2009, I found IB to be much better in terms of stability. Maybe Tradestation has resolved its stability problems by now, but from a cost perspective, IB is way better than Tradestation.
This is my recommendation: 1) Switch to IB today 2) Trade with IB for couple of months, monitor your trading and meanwhile research prop firms. Going prop will reduce your commissions much more even compared to IB, but you will have to pay monthly desk fees, software fees etc. Maybe after few months of successful trading with IB and if your trading volume increases, going prop will lower your total cost even more. 3) Or once your trading volume increases, you can consider going with "cost-plus" pricing of IB, which will be even cheaper than flat fees of 0.5 cents per share. All the best.
Thanks, for your thoughts, GMST. Any input on my performance? Do I need a much bigger sample to give me an idea as to whether I have any sort of edge or not? Or do I need to monitor different stats?
Congrats breaking-even on 200 trades - that's better than losing for sure. That being said, even if you half your comms, on this sample YOU make just as much as the comms ... IMO this isn't enough for YOUR long-term success. I would aim for less trades & larger moves per trade. Good trading to you
Unfortunately, its hard to say anything with this much data. I think you need data for at least 3 months, before any conclusion can be drawn. I agree with dom993 suggestion that aiming for bigger moves and lesser number of trades might yield better results. I wish you the best!
Saw your pnl numbers, it's hard to provide any meaningful feedback because there's a lot of missing information, like which equities and what's your risk/reward structure, etc. If whatever strategy you're using was working on ES futures, I suggest you go back to trading them. For equities you need to consider each stock differently--they're not all created equal, and the ones with higher risk (higher Beta, higher IV) will give you better opportunities to catch a move. You can trade the slower moving stocks (lower IV, lower Beta), but you'll have to hold the position longer. You'll also have to adjust your stops (or whatever other risk control you use) accordingly, look at daily ATR (Average True Range) to get a general idea of how much the stock might move. Of course there's a ton of other things to consider but it all depends on your trading philosophy.
are these your first 200 live trades? then congratulations on above break even. Are you day trading? if so, it will take thousands of trades to get a hang imo. as gsmt says get the least commissions. if you are day trading commissions are quite a significant portion of your PnL. Can make or break in the long term, platforms are easy to get around with.