Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/politics/15poll.html So lets cut this leftist lie about democrats being the educated ones and tea party being uneducated. It is a huge leftist lie.
Trading is self isolating. I can make much more money trading than working, but it does get me outside of the house. Stacking pips all day will turn you into Gollum, working for "the precious"! People can smell that on you. You have to get out and be a social animal. I have determined that long after I reach my econ goals I will still work. Saving lives, or trying to save lives is deeply gratifying. I will never stop being a part of Allied Health.
The Tea Party is a subgroup of the GOP, and the GOP is clearly anti-intellectual. If I were motivated enuf, I could quotes from last week alone to support. I have no doubt in my mind a member of the GOP invented the word, nerd.
The system we had will never come about again. I suppose i can share it now since its a dead strategy, and it makes for an interesting story. When dark books first started coming out there was a dark book called Millenium, that would not show up on Level 2. Big customers would send in orders to millenium and just say that they wanted to pick up as many shares as they could through them, throughout the day. At first these guys at millenium were incredibly sloppy with their algorithms, so they would send a market order for 100,000 shares or something like that through millenium. So no one could see the millenium order there, but it would follow the stock around. Now these millenium orders wouldnt hit the bids or offers, all that they would do was follow the stock around, and constantly eat any number of shares you would put through them. So what we used to do is send basket orders to 100 different stocks at a time for 500 shares through millenium, and just see which stocks had a millenium order on it. Then you would buy a couple thousand shares and put it through millenium, trying to test whether or not the order was legitimate, and whether or not the order would follow the stock around. Once you would find one that you thought would eat a large number of shares, you could load up on 10-20 thousand shares of something and then just start aggressively buying the stock up, and buying it up through every single level, for 20-30 ticks, and testing the millenium order with a couple hundred shares every couple ticks to make sure it was still following you. Then once you got to the top of where the millenium order would go, you could pump 20,000-50,000 shares through it, and get rid of your entire position, and flip short, and watch the stock collapse to where it was before you pushed it up. Basically it gave us the opportunity to be market makers, and push the stocks anywhere we wanted to, and then unload our entire position into millenium, and no one even knew that it was there. Eventually they learned what we were doing, because we were constantly filling their orders at the very top of their ranges, and as soon as the order left, the stock would collapse. The other thing you could do was take a stock like Ford at the time, which only had like a 5-6 tick ADR, and if there was a millenium bid crossed to the offer price, you could simply stack 100k shares on every single ECN, and as you got hit, you could simply sell it instantly at the offer. It doesnt seem like much, but if you put 500k shares through a stock for 1 penny all day thats a quick 5 grand. Its funny cause still 4 years later Brass has been riding my ass about a comment i made about making thousands of trades per day, which only goes to show that his knowledge of trading is incredibly limited. I doubt he will acknowledge he was wrong now that he knws the strategy, and the reason for the statement. Due to the fact that there was a limited number of millenium orders on the market, i wasnt about to explain the reason why at the time. There was days at that time when i would make over 5000 trades, because we were constantly pinging millenium, on every single stock on the market trying to find these orders. It was pretty intense, almost like playing a video game, you were constantly pressing keys and punching shares all over the market all day, in order to find and test these millenium order, and when you found a good one it was free money. Of course since these were dark book orders we never knew exactly how many shares they would eat, we were only hoping they would eat everything we fed them, so it would get dicey when you ended up having a 30 thousand share position, and you went to sell after you drove a stock up 30 ticks, and all of a sudden, the order would only eat 2 thousand, and you were stuck trying to figure out a way to get out of 28000 shares on a stock that only has about 500 shares on the bid every couple ticks..... That was why you had to have a lot of money/pain tolerance for it to work, the worst hit i ever took on a trade was for 75k, when i had 50,000 shares, and the order left on me, on a stock that had only traded 150k all day, so i was left trying to piece out, all day, and i ended up being a quarter of the volume on it. The time when you really needed skill was when the orders fucked off and you were stuck trying to get out of 20-30k shares on an illiquid stock. Anyways thats the arbitrage story, it was good times while it lasted, but they got wise to it, and started fragmenting their orders, and got more complex algorithms, so that strategy is dead. I doubt anything like that will ever come about again.
Nice story and you should post it upstairs somewhere. A lot to learn for an intermediate. Too much for a newbie. I will again say, FX. You are a natural scalper, just check it out. Oanda gets their two pips, you can get a profit, everybody wins. I know you strat was not a scalping strat, you were playing the spread, but that is gone. Just check out FX. Oanda welcomes scalpers for the the same reason Mark Fisher teaches ACD. If you get good, they make more money. I respect all traders, this is a trading site. Like I said to Mav, if I call you an asshole down here in fight club, it does not translate to what goes on upstairs. That said, no more trading talk down here, you right wing asshole
BTW, In my last attempt at a journal, I used F, as an example. Remember Max, and all the lurkers here, this is sport. We are blessed to be here. Max can say I am a commie, and not be shot, and I can say he is right wing nutbird, and not be shot. Just sayin, no kumbaya, but we do need to appreciate what we got.
This is the first time i have ever posted this strategy on here, I have no interest in posting in the trading forums much anymore, there are a few good traders but it is grossly outnumbered by people who think they know what they are doing, who try to tell you that you are doing it wrong, when they have no clue what they are talking about. I know alot of traders who are far better than me who i have met over the years, and i chat with them about trading, because i know they know what they are talking about, and i have seen their numbers I used to be a scalper, i have turned more to systems trading since 2009, scalping is much tougher now due to the rise of HFT, i dont think it is possible anymore to try to profit in small increments, on stocks cause bots always front run your orders... When i was scalping outside of millenium my average profit per share was about a quarter of a cent on high volume, so if you have to hit the bid/offer all the time instead of sitting on the bid/offer, that quarter of a cent margin dries up pretty quickly, especially with ecns charging you as opposed to giving you money for adding liquidity. The ECN credit alone kills a scalper,if you have to hit the bid/offer..... instead of a .002 per share positive you end up .003 per share negative..... thats a half a cent in and of itself..... even posting 200-300 shares in the first 10 minutes of the day there is no way you are getting a good fill anymore, unless the stock is rolling through you, so you have to look for bigger time frames in my opinion.
If u can trade stocks you can trade futures, etc., etc. The HFT thingy in my opinion was designed to get those who the PDT rules did not get. They do not want retail in the stock market. Futures has a fixed contract value. You will eventually blow up. FX, for now, gives a trader with less than a million buying power without leverage a chance to make some money. Price action, which by definition of your strat, you would have to be, does work. You will buy the last tick in an uptrend or sell the last tick in a downtrend fairly often, but most time you can manage that as FX is a mean reverting marketplace. If you have no problems being an LTCM/ Niederhoffer type trader, you can make nice change before the Swan catches up to you.
Republicans and the tea party members are anti "intellectuals" like krugman. but is fricken ridiculous to argue that a party whose core group of individuals are probably the most educated and have the most money is anti intellectual. Almost all the republicans I know have college degrees and many have post grad degrees and plenty of experience. That makes many republicans intellectuals in their fields. So when we see leftist baloney, we call it out. AK posed an article from a leftist bonehead who claimed lower taxes kept investment money on the sidelines. We see Krugman demanding more spending claiming it is good for america. We are anti intellectuals who make political motivated statements like those.
In my opinion, the way to go is stocks, i dont (personally) know any heavy hitters who make their money solely off of futures or FX, I understand the reason people are drawn into those markets, because you can basically push unlimited size without effecting price. So id imagine those who become good at futures or FX, do very well for themselves. With that said, those 2 markets are the most efficient markets in the world, all the big money is in those markets, due to the almost unlimited size you can push. So it is alot harder to find inefficiencies to take advantage of. If i was only trading futures or fx, i wouldnt be able to generate enough trades a day to remain profitable. In the stock market, you can take an edge and spread it out over thousands of stocks, so there is alot more to exploit. In futures or fx you have to become good at trading specific instruments, as opposed to the stock market where you can figure out a system to trade then apply it across thousands of stocks, and wait for a specific setup. For example it i was to wait for one of the setups i like in stocks, i would have only been able to make 1 trade last year based on the ES, i posted a trade last year where i made 15k, but that was the only trade i was able to find for that system the entire year, where as i can find 2-3 trades a day in the stock market on that specific system, and when volatility is really up, i can find 5-20 trades a day, so its much easier in the stock market to allow your percentages to work for you and remain consistent. IMO. Here is the only BIG directional trade i took on the spys last year. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=3259115#post3259115