dont take this the wrong way, but im guessing there wasnt a thing in the world that was going to stop him.
Thanks for sharing a bit of your background. Many things I could have written myself... Since you've been profitable for quite a few years now, do you still have some room to scale in your size or do you have liquidity constraints? Also, you mentioned you don't have so much of an edge in futures compared to stocks, could you elaborate on this if it's not revealing too much your strategy?
Looking forward to read your journal - I remember several years ago you were one of a bunch of posters here on Elite who stood out to me - in a good way. All the best - I will be reading your journal!
Corey- It's interesting to see your starting a journal brings out the old time ET'rs to follow it. It'll be a nice change for this site. Hopefully we can keep the negativity and BS out of this. Looking forward to following it. Best of luck!
You mentioned trading 700k shares this week. May I ask an approximation of the number of stocks that you traded? Looking forward to your journal and best of luck for 2010.
It is refreshing to see one of the "old dogs" contributing on ET. Looking forward to reading it and learning from the pioneers of this site.
Looking forward to reading your journal, it's good to see some more respected members of ET posting again.
To address some of the questions so far... I don't really run black box auto systems. I have one that is 100% auto, but it only trades the first 15 minutes of the day. The rest of my stuff is more grey box, where the system flags a set up and I have to decide to enter or not. I also use automation to manage trades and exits and to send lots of orders quickly. I wish I knew how to program, I've made it part way through many teach yourself to program books, but the learning curve just seems too steep and long, but it's always on the to do list. I've been very fortunate to hook up with some friends who know how to program and we have worked on system development together. If I knew how to code, I'd probably be running more systems. I am not doing anything specifically to address more computerized competition. My time frame is long enough that it hasn't become too much of an issue yet. I could size up more on some of my strategies, it's just a case of working up to a new comfort level with the p/l swings that come with that. But a lot of it has to do with just physically being able to enter and exit without killing the market, especially if you have do it quickly. My sizing is based mainly on how much pain I'm willing to take in what I perceive to be the worst case scenario. Most of my trading involves being in many stocks at once, often as a basket or portfolio. My main strategy, I hit -$10k a couple times a month and I'm fine with that. I start cursing at about -20k and at the very rare -30 or 40 I'm squirming in my seat. So I have to look at my stats, volatility, the news of the day, etc and estimate how bad things could get, allow for a big margin of error on my guess, then set a base share size accordingly. I don't think about how much I can make, I always think about how much I can lose. Leaving my family behind when I started out was really tough. Our kids were 2 and 4 years old and I didn't see them or my wife for almost 3 months, living in a dump and spending 12 hours a day at the office. But she's a great lady and believed in me and knew it was something I had to do. Futures vs. stocks- I've never put much effort into trying to trade futures. The way I see it there are, what, 10,000 different stock symbols and a few dozen futures symbols. There is just so much more opportunity and inefficiencies in stocks that I'm way better off putting my time into finding more of them than in a competitive, efficient futures market. How many different stocks did I trade last week? Not sure exactly but probably about 5 or 6 dozen.