You know your kid and your conservatism generally pays, so I guess you don't let robo out without a leash till you're positive he won't go nuts.
Linda, I exchanged a few PMs with Damir and it gave me some idea on how he trades. As for me, I don't have a mechanical system. All of my trades are discretionary. I don't use too many indicators. Just candlesticks, CCI, and Stoch. I look for patterns and keep an eye out for price rejections, etc. I draw the Pivots on my charts every night. I'll try to post some of my YM trades here in real-time, but most of my trades are quick 5-10 pt scalps so don't know how it will go. I will try though. Feel free to PM me if you'd like to exhange any ideas or would like to chat on Yahoo Messenger sometime. -FastTrader
Market on Close orders at IB Turns out that the only types of orders they accept for futures are the ones that pop up when you click on Bid and Ask, so you cannot enter a BUY at CLOSE or SELL at CLOSE order on the top where you can individually enter orders. Those extra types of orders are only for stocks, not for futures. I believe I have used such orders for Options at other brokers, not just for stocks, but I didn't ask him about options, since I'm not trading those now. Linda
now that i think about it, that makes sense. after all, when exactly do futures close? globex is open almost round-the-clock, ACE less so but that will no doubt change soon enough.
IB closed my orders at 5PM the other day. Then I placed more and they were gone again after some time. I need to figure out what is happening with that -- when I can place an order that is going to stick. Like you place overnight orders.. What time do you find you can place them and are they still valid next day? Are they GTC orders? I noticed that their quote on the DJI was wrong a lot yesterday, but the YM was moving properly, in conjunction with the DOW quote I get from Scottrade and from TV. In trying to key my orders to the DOW, it would help if IB got the DOW price correct. lol My biggest trouble trading is with closing my losing orders, and that is why yesterday was so helpful. There's never a problem with winners because even though you want to have maximum gain, any gain is good. The trouble is with cutting the losses and by helping me to let them go, that's a valuable lesson for me. Which I'll doubtless have to learn again and again, but it was a start. Also I'm more tense with a short than a long position. I rationalize that because the market trend is overall up right now, so I think the odds should be better on the upside, but I'm keenly aware that there are daily dips even during rises, so I know that I should be more at ease with short positions than I am. So that was also helpful yesterday. I used to short in the bull market, but only special situations -- stocks I felt were pretty certain to take a nice big fall. So, I'm not new to shorting. Then I was so traumatized by the bear market that I didn't get it together to short, which would have been the most lucrative of positions. I've been making a lot of money again, but it's really been more luck than intelligence. So this equitable attitude between long and short should help straighten out all that weirdness under which I've been operating, should put me more in control of things.
4:15PM? Really? Do you know when they open again? LOUD picked up some yesterday. And that other penny, of which I sold 2500 of my shares at 1.90, went to 2.50 yesterday and closed at 2.35. I'm waiting for it to get back to 30, and I've only been waiting about four years for that to happen. See, I really do have trouble cutting my losses. lol
Missed a good trade today. Have been screwing around trying to fix something overseas. My advice is don't ever get a european brokerage. They suck.
tao: where do you live and where is the brokerage? And why? Boring day for me on the futures. My params are so wide it was probably expected I'd never trade. lol Linda