I've seen Dbanks making his calls I think under a slightly different handle on mIRC in the financialchat servers in the #indexfutures room. (Dbanks, correct me if I'm wrong and you're not Davidba from that room). He does make the calls out in realtime but by the time he posts the trade and you could go do anything to enter it, you're facing slippage...on both sides...so a lot of his +1.00s might be +.25 for you if that. Just my experience watching him, havent traded anything from his technique, whatever it is. (I trade NQ mostly at present).
Yeah, great system. Now try to do the same with your own real money. You know when I papertraded I was making 15 points a day. Now with my own real money I only make about 3.
I try to post the call immediately as I see it. I leave it up to the room members to decide what they want to do. Sometimes you have to be really fast or you will not get a fill. Often you will get multiple opportunities to get filled. Some try for more than 1 point, but I only try for 1 point. One way of looking at this is to trade 10 contracts and settle for 2-3 points each day, then quit. That is $1000-1500 per day....not a bad income. Generally I get at least 2 points per day. The chat room I go to is #indexfutures on server irc2.financialchat.com
dbanks thanks for the honest answer. so nobody could take all your trades in realtime. in your monthly reports I saw a lot of +1.00 with *. *= would have given 2 or more points. 07/02/03 you had one trade with -3. if I understood it right, you are trading with a 2 point stop. what happened here? how are you handling the stop? hard stop or soft stop? and sure would like to see you in elitetrader chatroom, posting your calls thanks again
We'd love to have you there. I promise we won't criticize you for at least the 1st hour. OK. Maybe 15 minutes. Oh, what the hell. Just come and chat. It is really a lot of fun. Especially when it gets slow trading we have lots of great exchanges about important world events, like The French Independence Day. They only dumped on me for 10 minutes on Friday. It wasn't too bad.
I see on some trades you make only a tick, .25. Did you actually exit on these trades or you're just posting every tick that went your way as a profitable trade?
I show you the time the trade was entered and the entry price. Most times you can get this price or better after I have made the call. So sometimes you will be in at a better price than I get. Also, I show the exit time. When I take less than 1 point it means that the trade has been on for several minutes (4-6) and has not moved either way. At that point the signal begins to have less importance and you can not say which way the market is going to go. I try to get the commissions covered if I can, but you will also notice that I will take a scratch , When I get a signal , there should be additional follow-thru on the signal. If it does not, then I get very concerned and look for an exit point that will at lease get me out even. There is always another trade to take. In reality, you should be out of a trade with 1 point within 4 minutes. These are happy trades with less stress. When it gets longer, then there is added stress and uncertainity. This is a very stressful business and hard to master.