Maybe you have to go to the advanced boot camp to learn about expectancy. Seriously, 4 cent wins & 10 cent losses just won't get you anywhere with openings. For one thing, you can't use rigid numbers like that. The liquidity and volatility of stocks varies too much. My lowest priced, thickest stock I don't look to take the first bit of profit until 5 or 6 cents. But on something like BBY or UNH, I'm looking for 15 to start. And I scale from there. Sure, you'd have a great win rate on them at 4 cents, but a 10 cent stop on a stock like KSS when you are wrong? Not a chance in hell. Second, as has been pointed out already, you have to milk your winners when you have them. Some days you get some unbelievable wins, but if you have a limit order 4 cents up, you miss out on all of it (oh yeah, forgot the "price improvement"). The big days come when the market makes a nice move and you cut the losers quick and let the winners run. I would think Don is teaching these guys some subtleties and more than just what you have in your post. At least they are starting small. And if you want to learn to trade with little to no money up, you can expect to pay through the nose in terms of commissions. If I was training new traders, I would start them on openings too. I would just teach it differently. Which gets me to thinking.... How much would someone pay to learn to trade openings from someone who can back it up with real numbers and can get you a reasonable rate? Hmmm...
I felt exactly the same thing. The past four weeks or more have been bad for me. I sent many orders and got a good number of fills (up to 25 during busy day), so I cant tolerate shakeout at all. In the past, stocks that work tend to immediately move in our favour. But it is not the case lately. Specialist will shake me out of my positions and then reversed the directions. I am changing my strategy to anticipate the shakeout better. As far as opening game, I would not advice new traders to start learning trading with OPG. The reason is simply that for OPG to make okay money , the size need to be decent (e.g. 2000 shares) which means that the swing in Profit and Loss could be at least few hundreds or one thousand USD. All this happens during the first five minutes of trading day. SUppose a new trader is down 600 USD from OPG. The he would start his regular trading maybe 100 - 200 shares. I personally could not handle this mentally. How am I going to get back my $600 by trading 100 - 200 shares? Also, tape reading techniques is important skill to be acquired before jumping into OPG. Ok
A bit surprised how tight the openings were today considering it was an expiration. Got considerably fewer fills than have been getting using usual brackets.
I've been shut out the last 2 days. Granted yesterday I was working with a reduced roster, but based on the spoos today I would have expected a little nibble.
I didn't read this from the beggining but why are all these people posting in Don's journal that aren't Don? Are the people that post here work at his company?
It's more a journal on the strategy. Don started doing it a few years ago and I guess he thought he owned it. But some of us own Don now. Actually, he's been very generous in sharing and the regular posters on these threads are a helpful bunch.