Yeah I know. I just don't feel the passion for futures. Anyway I will be back at the table in a few weeks, no sweat. So if I went in for live trading futures to fill the gap, or forex or whatever, I would just be rushing in with too little preparation when I could wait it out. It's not like I am giving up a lot of earnings. I am right now standing at $18 less than I started with three months ago. It won't hurt me to not trade for a bit.
Got bored this morning and looked into offshore forex brokers. None cater to Linux users. However just out of curiousity I tried installing MT4 with Wine. It installed, seems to be running. I am betting it will be slow, running in Wine, but maybe comparable to webware, I don't know. This was on my laptop. Maybe it would be faster on the Optiplex. I figure on putting in some more RAM and a SSD, actually, so it ought to run WinDOHs apps in Wine pretty good. I was actually surprised it installed from the exe installer with no issues. I signed up for two demo accounts. Brokers are LQDFX and TradersWay. LQDFX has 500:1 margin, TW has 100:1 and the minimum deposit for live account is $10 for one and $20 for the other, forgot which is which. I didn't compare commissions or fees yet. I will mess around with the demo accounts Monday morning. Not saying I will start doing forex live, but if I ever do it probably won't be with a US broker, and I will probably deposit not more than $5k. I am curious about how MT4 will behave on my computers. Running Ubuntu 16.04. 18.04 kinda sucks, a lot of stuff seems to be missing from the gui. I am expecting the 20.04 release next year to be better. Support for 16.04 runs out in 2011. If 20 sucks too, I will probably switch to Debian.
Just paper trading today. Waiting for a check to clear into my bank so I can shoot some dough into my IB account, and then I will be fully funded for day trading. Meanwhile I am fiddling around with stuff and paper trading and I was so busy with managing 4 to 6 positions at once I couldn't fix whatever was wrong with my custom short sell button, and all the stuff I started trading this morning was in a bearish trend. I kept trying to be a bull and snipe on the pullbacks but it was eating me alive. I was down like $21k and then TVIX to the rescue. TVIX made $31k for me, catching all the up swings on one minute candles, made $31k on it, finished almost $10k up. Paper account is now well over $1M from a $100k reset. I wish I could do that in live trading! I am a little more slow and careful with real money and I have only had a $10k account to play with, lately frozen for PDT violation. That's me... stock market violator, I guess. Hey I'm not ashamed. I was having so much fun trading this thing that once again I wasn't watching the time. But I figured out how to get my orders executed after hours, so it was a productive session. I was stuck with 16k shares of TVIX and 4k shares of two penny stocks that I was hoping (yeah I know, never "hope" a stock up!) would go up a half buck a share, I probably would have been okay holding all three positions but this was something I needed to figure out for later on, anyway. Oh I see I am still stuck with the little guys. Well thats okay I guess. I will log on and close those positions at the morning bell. But TVIX close order executed no problemo. Tomorrow I will troubleshoot that short sell button. I would have probably finished $50k up, if it had been working right. It's my bracket order, I know. It won't take long to figure it out. I think it is all about the offsets, pos/neg, all that. I want to spend an hour or two this evening programming in a new set of hotkeys. I need to have all my alligators in a row by the time I can trade like a grownup.
ARGH. I was afraid of that. I got stuck holding 7800 shares (paper trading. Whew!) of DF overnight. Dropped to $1.12 and I took a $3700 loss on it. Another lesson learned, thankfully in paper trading. WATCH THE CLOCK!!! I was so wrapped up in the TVIX action that I was blissfully unaware of the approaching closing bell. Good thing I was able to get out of my 16k share TVIX position. It gapped down like $6.50 overnight from bell to bell. That would have really sucked. Posted a $604 gain on CRK, the other one I got stuck with. TVIX active again this morning. Hmmmm
Growley, maybe of interest -- IB, like some other brokers, has what's called an MOC (Market On Close) order that automatically executes your order during the last few minutes of the day. You can also configure orders to exec at specific times.
I watched one where a chap lost $20,000. Talk to me after the show.Maybe he did,maybe he didn't.If you can base your living on clicking within a second you're a certain type.Not me.
Eeep. That's a bad beatdown, yeah. I guess he didn't believe in setting stops, or else he was trading craaaaaazy volume. If I lost $20k in one sitting I think I would just quit trading for a while until I figured out what the hell just happened and how not to happen that thing again.
Hmmm yeah I will look for that. However I will probably end up setting an alarm for 1545 NY time, and close out manually. I might want to let something run overnight some time, or give myself time to pick a good exit point.
I think TVIX is gonna make a big move again today. I won't be trading, though. Have to go to Slidell with the ol lady to pick up our truck before she goes to work. They just replaced the engine. Now I just got to replace the driver side door and the passenger side mirror, and the windshield and we will have a nice truck again until the automatic transmission (I hate those things... FAILURE POINTS!) goes out. I will probably source one from a junkyard and rebuild it myself, and have it standing by.