I watched a live trading webinar with Greg Capra and he was buying and selling right off the chart. Not sure what platform allows that, but I too am very visual and I'm always watching my chart, L2 and Time&Sales in Etrade while preparing to place the order in IB. I get a "picture" of footprints and price action that way.
Hog, so glad to hear you are well! (Read "The China Study" if you haven't already ) I attached the chart and DOM for ES that IB provides. Looks great to me and since I seem to be too ADD to learn TT Trader, I think I will just use IB.
oops... sorry for the late reply. Posting in your thread so that you may not miss the response like I did yep long time no talk, missing RW too. But frankly your progress rate is very good and wonder where you'll be in next 5 yrs Yeah NoD, the one trade we miss bcoz of break/recent loss tend to be the best trade of the day. What may happen next is overtrading. Particularly for L2 scalping(so far) I do not have clearly defined rules, a lot comes from intuition/tacit recognition; hence any prejudice tends to be expensive. Okay so what's your #2 to do ? thanks and all the best.
+$94 Day +$697 Week +$2561 Month This is not bad considering all month Iâve traded ¼ - ½ my previous size and I blew about $800 with order errors. Iâm very satisfied with my trade management and discipline this month, but still disappointed that I donât take all my setups. I think the order errors have made me hesitant to manage more than a couple trades at once, which limits me when several stocks set up at once. This just may be a problem I can put behind me though because Iâve been really reading the S&P action well and am chomping at the bit to trade ES for real. I watched ES action in IB this morning and in between I traded some small positions in stocks throughout the day while mainly paper trading ES using IBâs DOM action: Long @ 910.25, nice support established, sold @ 914.25, pullback from high of the move. Long 910.50, pivot off higher low, sold @ 913.00, overbought. Long 910.75, same setup, sold @ 914.75, pullback from overbought. Things looked too narrow and choppy after that so I called it a paper day, and missed a couple more nice moves both ways out the chop zone. I believe this would've translated to about $525 minus commissions. This has been a fairly consistent profit level from all my paper trading days. I used stochastics and S/R levels on the SPX chart in E*trade to guide my entry and exit zones. This worked really well. So many people have warned against trading futures, at this point the only thing stopping me is a bizarre mental block caused by these dire warnings posted all over ET and told to me directly as well. I never needed anyone to hold my hand in the past year (ok, except that one time, Bob), so I believe I will take the plunge next week. Have a great weekend all!
Nod Thks, i will look at that China thingie. I do watch health "somewhat". Do very little chocolate, cheese, etc, but yes there is always room for improvement. Should also drop in more often for a cocktail, i wish someone would tell me that acts like DRANO and is good for you if controlled, ha. Booze never was a problem. Go for the ES, it seems to be able to get you thinking of going with the flow more. I personally would like to see you work on the theory of "TREND CONTINUATION" rather than fading. Could it be you are doing well in the paper trading of futures because you are DISCOVERING the difference between stock trading and futures trading. I will let you get that feeling more as you go live. Do this since you are starting out, do not force ES, let the mkt come to your signals. I did not trade today but looked at a chart and see a narrow range bound day. Your synopsis of the days action concludes you have a darn good handle on the mkt. Heck, i assure you there are persons out there that are still clueless on how to interpret what the traders (players) are doing in the game. Try this as an exercise during the day: Pretend you are a big shooter, be one of the BIG dogs that are running with the pack. You are going to continue running with the pack and not wonder out and fade the pack. You have listened to the previous war stories of the pack upon their return with the fat bones dripping with the meat and blood of the enemy conguered. They are nice to you and refrain talking about your side adventures of fading the pack and missing all the fun. the real challenge in trading futures is being with the big dogs, being with the winners when the "RUNS" feed on themselves. Thats the joy of this game............BEING RIGHT. Put yourself in the other big traders shoes and look at what you would do if you were long or short when price does what price will do when you and your big dog mutts all do the same thing. We are in summertime, prime vacation time, slow times as a rule. Start out slow, do not get overwhelmed by the speed of some moves in ES compared to stocks. . here is a little advise from Connie Brown, a BIG DOG in the SP 500 mkt. "I called in my trade and when filled, in the next breathe i placed the STOP LOSS ORDER without fail". Good trading to you. "Continue on, soldier on, STEEL yourself" You being from Pittsburgh, you know how to steel yourself.
Once there was a pivot off the low today, I followed each move to the long side, so despite the action being somewhat restricted, I did follow what there was of the trend from the first higher low, exiting after each run to "overbought", then reentering to the long side as long as the next pivot was from a higher or equal price area. There was a higher low established after the mid-day chop right around 2:30 p.m., but by then I'd lost focus on ES, went back to watching stocks and as a result missed another solid long entry, as well the exhaustion move to the short side at the end of the day. The action didn't seem insane at any point and it appeared I had time to put in my stops. From some of the comments I've read on ET I was under the assumption that once you put on a futures trade there is some kind of large risk of seizure, causing inability to put in a stop, thereby placing you at risk of immediate ruin.
Nodoji, you should try out Ninjatrader for charting with IB. I tried almost everything and that and Sierra charts were my favorite. I went with NT because it is free unless you want to place live trades from the platform.
Wait a minute, need to clear up some confusion. I was born not far from Scranton, and I studied guitar with Pat Martino in Philly, but I've always been an avid Steelers fan (I think that's where Pittsburgh comes in)
NoD I may take the ES plunge someday myself- I'll probably have to switch to IB to do it, cuz I'll need the data, and not all futures brokers give you data. Anyway- I'm very eager to hear about your experiences with the ES You may also want to check out QuoteTracker- its free and it has IB integrated trading built into it.. can probably chart the ES with it too BigHog- that "trend continuation" thing is hard to learn! I have this natural tendency to think "well its been going up for the past hour, its gotta come back down.." and then i try to trade the other way, and well, it wants to go UP.. so it barely moves down, corrects itself back to oversold w/o moving very far and then POP.. it keeps going up it seems logical to go with the flow, but it can feel unnatural.. i dunno i still havent been able to fully absorb that mentally..