I am not looking for anyone to tell me the Holy Grail, but if you have any advice on possible systems to start out with, time frames to use, and rules of thumb for profit taking and stops, that would be great. I'm not looking for anything too crazy just yet, just a way to get my feet wet w/o getting taken to the cleaners. BTW, I've got TradeStation 6 w/ Level II & E-minis. An equities account w/ ~ 10K and a futures account w/ ~4K. As weird as this may sound, I'm actually more comfortable with options but their bid/ask spread is just too large to day trade well. Any suggestions, help, advice, etc. is much appreciated. Thanks!
check out posts by deeman go to resources look for tripacks "gems" go get em take what the market offers you appriciate doing this enough to work hard, grind it out and dont blow up
I traded options for a year and a half. The 5¢ spreads, and the time-decay made it difficult. Then in October the daytrading rules started being applied to options too. Yesterday I started trading Single Stock Futures, and I'm pleased with it. Your $10,000 securities account will be restricted by the daytrading rule. I don't know if TradeStation has Single Stock Futures trading. There's no daytrading rule applied to Single Stock Futures. I recommend looking into them. Here's a couple links if you're interested: www.nqlx.com www.onechicago.com Those are the only exchanges that Single Stock Futures trade on.
The best trading vehicles are the NQ and ES, imho, no market maker games, excellent liquidity, no day trading rules and great leverage. lately i'm scalping the Es for 1 point. it's going quite well, i'm averaging about 2/4 points an hour. Attached is a chart i use.
2 to 4 per hour? That's fantastic. I saw your screen shot, but can't really tell what you use. Would you care to elaborate on your scalping technique a little? I'm happy with 4 ES points per day (per contract). Jay
In the chart you see a band, that's a SMA-8 of the high and low, i use that as my main trend indicator. the bars are green when price is above the SMA of the high and red when it's below the SMA of the low, they're white when they're in the band. Enter in the direction of the trend, when the brice is between the SMA-8 bands. Exit at a pofit of 1 point, try to scratch when trend reverses. I also look at the $ticki, in an uptrend i prefer to enter when it's below 0 and vice versa. This may look easy on the charts, but problem is getting filled at the price that you want, this makes it pretty aggrevating and impossible to do for more than 2 hours after another fully concentrated. I experienced that i do best when i trade the first two hours and last hour of the trading session.
Ditch, Thanks for the insight. A bit manic for me though. I wonder what Nitro uses? He scalps like a madman. Jay
Ditch's idea seems quite sound to me, have been experimenting with something similar lately but for 1.5 ES pts. It can work, but I am not sure if I would like to work all day like that. One to two hours at most, after that you may lose patience and start making mistakes. Nitro's scalping does not necessarilly appeal to me, but if that works for him...
Well today was my first day day trading equities. I didn't lose but I didn't win big at all. Because of software upgrades w/TradeStation and some other reasons, I stayed away from the ES, NQ (I even checked out the frequently disrespected YM's). So I studied the DIA's and placed a few trades. Essentially, I got out too early, I guess I just didn't want to lose. On the options side, I did well with some positions I had from yesterday and could have done really well, if again, I held some positions longer. I just used a simple MA crossover with 5 and 1 min charts. Thanks A LOT for all of your HELP & ADVICE. (I've been digesting it and looking at the past posts that were recommended--but it's going to take time .)