I don't understand taking tax money out in March, why not let it run until December then figure your bill. Might as well let house money work for you, no?
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/underpaymentpenalty.asp Tax Underpayment Penalty: What It Is, Examples, and How to Avoid One
In addition to what Ph1l posted (estimated tax payments throughout the year), I also owe some for 2022 from realized gains in my equities account. But because I never had underpayment of taxes, and for 2022, paid at least 110% of 2021 taxes, I should not be hit for a penalty for 2022. For futures (section 1256) gains, the tax benefit is much better than equities... but I still want to make sure I have at least 90% of the taxes covered throughout the year. If I clear 100k in futures profit, my blended 60/40 rate is right at 22% so I need 22k for the tax. The account is at 75k now so I will be taking out 25k instead. I'm only trading a max of 1.5NQ equiv so I really only need $27,720 initial margin. Anyway, back to the mkt...I wrote in here somewhere that I expect NDX (NQ equiv with delta 120pts) to hit ~13000 by end of Mar, this Friday and still have that belief. I used NDX since not everyone has NQ quotes. I generally don't like to make predictions, because all my intraday trades predominantly are based off the 60min charts but was pretty confident at the time. I'll touch a little more on my "style" aka strategy, method, etc... is really simple if we can take a step back to take a global view. The old addage " the trend is your friend", if applied to specific time frames, really works. If the tick price actions define the immediate trend, the 60min 50ma price action defines an "intraday, intermediate but dominant trend" and being on the right side of that trend gives you a solid edge. Then the 5min price action helps define your trigger trends. It's IMPOSSIBLE to blow an account if using this as your guide. Some days, I may take 3 or more stop losses totalling 50pts on NQ within seconds or minutes of taking a position. But eventualy, we will quickly realize the "trend of choppiness" and either stay out for a few bars looking for the closing price of the 60min bar, or just calling it a day. There will always be more opportunities. But, if we happened to be in a long, drawn-out bull or bear, we can capture a significant amount of the gains because the 60min trend forces us to stay in a position or at least in the right direction!
Fantastic results. And interesting market lessons. I'll be taking notes. Are you strictly trading NQ? Would you say your approach would work for ES as well?
It does work well for trading ES but I traded almost exclusively (>99.5%) the NQ's. I like NQ's as it's more "concentrated" and not as "spread out" over the 11 industry sectors. And, due to the ~60% tech components out of a total of 101 companies that if need be, I can dig into for a miscroscopic look at the individual names. In reality though, I can very quickly look at the top 8 (which is >50% weighting in NQ) and get a good idea how the underlying looks vs the index. Think of NQ as a sniper rifle and ES as a shotgun . I'm always asking myself... why is this working so well for me so far? I spent close to 3 years (2019-2021) studying the correlation and when my thesis proved more correct than not, I started trading leveraged etfs. I can only speculate that of all the HFT algo platforms, some with deep pockets (maybe most?) are using some form of the 50ma on the 60min as part of their formula. I've never sim traded.
Crazy - $VIX had a range of 36 ticks today. High-to-Low 19-45-19.09 (though true range was a bit bigger 88 ticks) Get ready!
CME FEDWatchTool currently basically a coin flip for next FOMC meeting (a ways away @ May 3rd): 50.9% no change 49.1% 25 bps raise Plenty of time to change dramatically. Maybe even right tomorrow morning with PCE Core news release.
Good stuff, man. Thanks for sharing all this! Nice to see someone share so freely and also have the results to back it up. Some questions if you don't mind: 1. How do you deal with range bound markets? I didn't read all your posts, but it seems like you're mostly trying to capture trends and use the 50MA on the 60 as a filter. Arguably, trading strong trends is the easiest trade you can take, but quite often the indices will be range bound and no doubt chopping up a lot of players on false breakouts and rips being sold and dips being bought as have been the regime for a great part of these last 1 1/2 years. 2. Do you use a daily loss limit for your trading operations? I know some use a daily loss limit, but I stopped using one as I've sprung back from drawdown to breakeven or even good profits so many times. 3. With your great results so far this year what's your average risk in % per trade? Thanks, man. PS: My specialty is ES. I've dabbled in NQ and I do watch it, but it's a tad too wild for me at the moment and while the movement between the two contracts are similar, there are enough differences that it can make or break a strategy/system. IMO, at least.