Seems liks day trading is all but finished!

I find Openbook very useful. The only problem I have these days are the specialists that freeze the book on you when the market is moving. He's probably front-running for his own account before deciding to unfreeze the book and spreading the quotes. Friggin' crooks!

 

the hell-bent-on-daytrading attitude is a definite negative for everybody even though some will get on hot streaks and feel on top of the world, its a great high. Its like a gambling addiction, and everybody figures it out sooner or later. Stop trading for the adrenaline rush and you will realize that a longer time frame and less leverage will allow you to have a normal life and still make money.

 

What if I don't trade for the adrenaline rush, but still am a scalper? Would that be acceptable?

 

I strongly would rather not do either. 1600x1200 is a sure way to go blind. 1280 x 1024 is the smallesst I will go. I guess you can reconfigure the font sizes at 1600x1200, but then what's the point?

nitro

 

Is that on a 24" monitor?

 

Normally in my daytrading, I try to locate a entry near the beginning of the days primary trend. For example, the emini range has been about 16 pts. My stuff will try to locate a entry within 3 points of the start of the primary trend and put on a 4 point stop. This gives me the 3:1 reward to risk ratio I try to keep. Normally, I'd ride the trend until the 16 point range was met and then apply a tight trailing profit stop.

In this market, my stuff is getting the start of a trend and then getting blown out by the countertrend moves. To avoid this, I decided to use a target of 1/4 of the days range (4 pts.) and go for a higher hit rate. This gives me 1:1 on the reward to risk, so the target must be hit early, otherwise my win:loss ratio is going to drop to around 50%. To make the same dollars as my previous method, I'm going to have to increase size of each position to 4x my previous size. I hate not letting profits run all day, but until the followthrough starts coming back I've got to be a little more defensive.

The idea doesn't change my entrypoint or really change the idea behind the trades. All it affects is my money management.

Here's a example using one of my production systems modified to use targets from the beginning of this year to the end of last month for 1 SP contract:

 

19"

nitro