Completed my first E-mini trade today. Bought NQ on March 28, should have sold it of course. Held it for 10 days, sold it this morning +24 points. P&L $480, commissions $4.80 (1% exactly ) I held it through a couple significantly down days, and overnight for 10 nights. I didn't use charts or candlesticks or any of that other fancy analytic stuff. As long as futures don't have Time Decay the way options do, I think with some patience you can generally come out with a profit even if things go the wrong way for you at first, and without a lot of frenetic trading (with tons of commission charges). Of course, here I am make generalizations after my very first trade. Silly of me I guess.
What was your reason for entering the trade in the direction you took? What you felt the "global" environment would produce economically, politically, etc.? I am pretty much going for the tape reading approach, which rules out any holds longer than a few minutes in general.
+2.25 points / 8 rts / 1 contract I think I might change the trade time cutoff to 10:30am for now (instead of 11:00am). Constant concentration on price movements isn't easy with nothing to look at but numbers. I noticed my mind starting to "wander" a bit. That is one nice thing about charts -- if your mind wanders you can look back and see what you missed. My last two trades I closed for +1 tick each. The first of those was caused by an entry I took which felt wrong the instant I entered it. I felt like the sucker pulled in when the train was about to reverse. So, exiting quickly seemed the appropriate thing to do even though it broke the 3 tick minimum rule. In this case it proved the right thing to do as it looked very unlikely that the 3 ticks would have been filled. It touched, but only a few traded. The last one tick trade was also entered a bit late, but I had faith in it in general, until I saw 1000+ contracts pile up a tick ahead of my exit. I didn't know if they were real or fake offers, but decided I wasn't going to stick around and slug it out. Stepped in front of them and took my one tick exit. The end result of that trade was that my 3 ticks would have been hit, but it was quite a fight to get it and there is a reasonable chance I would have stopped myself out for a small loss before that happened. So, I suppose the play worked out, but after that I realized I had better take a break. I've noticed that if I am going for more than one tick, but start settling for single tick exits, then I am about to slide into a losing streak. Fill sheet attached, though the time stamps are not correct in the screen shot. I had to restart my computer to get the shot because I use a Mac keyboard on my PC because I really like the feel of the key action. But, it doesn't have the Print Screen key so I had to plug in an old PC keyboard and reboot, re-login, then take the screen shot. The time stamps are the time the app received the past fills from the server. There is an exchange time stamp if I scroll right, but don't figure any of you are going to plot the actual trades on a chart, so who cares if the time stamps are wrong?
It was pure SOMP tape reading. It just seemed that NQ was starting to tick upward. It was 1:00 pm on friday. I do think the timing within the day (and week) is a factor that an experienced (not me, yet, obviously) trader should be able to take advantage of. 1:00 pm lunch just ending seems an important pivot. Also Monday morning, as we saw today, just seems to be the opportunity to take advantage of a surge or purge after the weekend. Obviously, I naively made the exact wrong trade when I bought on March 28 instead of sold. But I wanted to make the point that holding overnight may not be the worst thing. With patience, and tolerance for down days, you may still come out ahead. Of course, the other nice thing about E-minis is you can trade them through the night (on Globex). Even if it's just to close out with some loss, before the market opens and does more serious damage to you.
Thats right. You didn't use any of that fancy analytic stuff. You used the worst thing possible: HOPE
+1.25 points / 14 rts / 1 contract What can I say... I just didn't feel the love today. Mucho churning. I only managed to take the full 3 ticks on a few trades. Spent most of the time nickel and diming it. Even intentionally entered a couple of OTW (One Tick Wonder) trades, though they aren't in my current plan. All in all, I guess I'm happy that I at least covered commissions.
Not sure if that is sarcasm? But to answer the question, that is my ultimate goal. But, I have not as of yet managed to make a consistent, good income with trading alone. I do some computer programming on the side to pull in a bit of extra cash. I am a student of the markets, with a bit less than a year under my belt. Have tried many things and learned many things. I feel I have a good shot at turning the corner, so I keep working and refining myself.
I was being sarcastic in a nice way! Try positioning these for more than a minute. You can make multiple points.....and several hundred and eventually thousands a day. When you are more confident increase to 2 .....3......4 contracts. Take a look at some charts! Just use a stop loss system. You are generating way too much commission. Good luck! ebo