Thanks for your advices. My real question is whether I can't learn to trade well on my own? Or none of you successful traders (making enough for living) has learn to trade on your own?
Great post but you left out a few things. 1. Names of the best shops to learn at. 2. How to get hired at these shops. 3. How to get a mentor to take you. I'm sure I'm missing lots of stuff but let's keep this thread going !!!
Why does he have to go work for someone? A. he needs to be capitalized for 6 months to begin with if hes serious. B. There are enough strategies on here to get at least a start and if he trades small enough he can figure out his psychological boundries. C. once he has that he can then begin to really build a trading system he knows is his and he could actually trade. D. He flounders and eventually goes profitable consistntly, or he comes on here and rants about impossiblity later on. fin
yea, I'm trading at a prop shop right now. The thing is that I'm learning everything on my own. I would like to know whether I can make it this way. I do think learning to trade this way is a lot harder than those who have good mentor. Btw, you said ecn activity can be very confusing, doesn't that also apply to everything else in the market? It seems almost everything is there to confuse the traders.
Depends on how you look at it. The most confusing part for me was finding a style that fit my profile. Also understanding how the P&L actually effected me psychologically. First you need a plan. When you put on the trade you need to know why. I mean really know why you are doing what you are doing. The key point here is to have a catalyst for your entry. There are many great threads on various methods.. Try a few out and see if they click. If you can't handle the epilepsy inducing montage. Maybe try trading one of the ways that doesn't require that. You could use charts and macd, theres a thread on that. One on hershey rockets using the stochastic ect. it really all comes down to what your comfortable with. What style you can be attracted to and feel right about, and have no reservations about following your rules. You will still lose at first, but at least you will now have a real chance. Its only as intimidating as you want it to be. It reminds me of a quote from Wayne Dyer that says "whether you believe you can or can't your right." Do some research tonight, and tomorrow get in there and figure out what approach you would feel comfortable with and start planning. Your going to look crazy, but take a pen and paper with you tomorrow and write down anything that interests you. On a chart remember the time and price it occurred. Then I want you to go to cybertrader and download their free simulator that simulates a random trading day. Then start putting positions on and off when these interesting things wrote down occur.
ChaosNSX Thanks very much for your helpful advices. In fact, it's my second month in the prop. The first month I has graduated in the firm by using rebate trading. As result, I don't have much experience on trading volatile stocks and I still don't know any profitable setup to exploit. Anyway, I'm trying to find out these setups in my daily observation and trading. I do around 50 roundtrips a day with 200 share lots. The way I trade, I look at ecn activity, when I feel the price is going up, I go long, when I feel the price is going down, I go short. If the price go against me 1 cent, I take the loss immediatly, I have been quite discipline. It depends a lot on how accurate my intuition is to the price direction. I would use the 1-min chart and the s&p future to help my intuition. I do have stochastic and few moving average on my chart, but I just look at them as reference, my final decision for entry and exit is always based on what I see on the level 2. I have been trading like this for 2 weeks now. It's not really successful yet. I'm about breakeven. I know many here would advice newbies to start off with illiquid stocks with about 500k to 1 million volume. However, the stocks I trade are the most active NYSE stocks, because my style applies better on them, since I need to get in and out quick, I always need liquidity. I'm looking forward to develop and tweak my trading style till it becomes profitable.
For the past 2 weeks, I have been trying different stocks, GE, S, F, CDE, EMC etc. Which branch are u trading at?
Ok, lets slow down a second. Did I read that right you trade liquid stocks and only give it 1 cent room? Did you know stocks used to trade in 1/8ths before pennies? 1 cent was not even the spread. Its good you have discipline, thats key, but now you need to let go of the 1 cent stop... loosen it a little. equities intraday need room to develop. Your catching noise. I would say at the minimum give a stock 12,5 cents an 1/8th. Keep that same discipline but give it room. Then focus on where to exit, this goes back to writing down interesting occurrence in the market. What areas does your stock like to test, once a countermove is underway. Makes no sense to trade for a tick.