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Also would like to introduce myself. I've been trading SP Futures for longer then I'd care to admit. Still working at making it the full time endeavor.
Currently using Ninja, and love it. This looks like a great forum, and thanks to Mike for providing it.
Thanks for your forum Mike!! Many of us have lost more money than we like to admit. It will be fun to learn and share. I trade ES and am looking at currencies. Born and raised in Wyo. next to yellowstone Park. Now in Texas. Hello to all....Big Thanks!!
Hi zeller
I had the same situation as you , I ran my business from home and couldnt devote 100% to the market during trading hours .
What I did was record data through the week and replay it on the weekend and trade in simulation against it . Mind you it can be easy to develop a bias before you replay your data so avoid watching or listening to the news , that in itself was a benefit for me .
I record all my data on Ninja , its not perfect and kind of a resource hog but it makes a big difference .
New trader here as well. Have been on SIM for a few months using NJ. Still learning the features on the system. Lots of good info here and I do enjoy the comments on the various indicators.
Thanks Mike.
I'm a 28 yr old entry level C# developer new to trading and fascinated by the technological/quantitative aspects of it. I'm looking learn everything I can from everyone here via your personal experiences and/or ideas.
Feel absolutely free to correct me when I'm wrong and give me any and all advice that will be helpful towards my development in becoming a successful trader!
Thanks Mike for setting up this form! I hope that I'm able to contribute to it.
for a new trader its not untrue how can a new trader have a good winning stratagie when they dont even understand the market or anything about the market they need to learn how to trade first so that they have a solid fondation to build on and better understanding so when thay try to write or buy stratagies they will know what they are looking at...sharky
Mike thanks for this site it is really awesome!
I started as a stockbroker when I was 24 yrs. old and just loved trading. The firms eventually decided they wanted to discourage their brokers from trading individual stocks and pushed us into mutual funds and managed money so the firms could have less risk from law suits and make more money on fees. Wall Street I am sorry to say is one big conflict of interest. After being a broker for 20 yrs I quit. Nobody would trade much after 9/11 and firms would not let you sell short unless you had half a million in your account where I was. Firms would short in their own accounts for the firm Ha. I just want to trade my own account!
Anyway after trading futures for the last 6 years and blowing up my account three different times. I finally feel confident and am profitable. I hope it doesn't take you all as long or cost as much as I threw away!
I use Tradestation for most of my charting and NT for most of my trades, but I am loving all these NT indicators keep em coming! There is amazing ideas being shared in here I hope I can contribute. I wish we had sites like this years ago!
Rob
I have been in stocks since the mid 1990s, when I did well with tech stock, enough to buy my first house. Then after the dot.com crash I stayed away from stocks until about 2006. I got into options, and did pretty well just buying and selling calls (it was a bull market) then I blew up in late 2007 and realized I didn't really know what I was doing. I took some courses at Optionetics, and realized I REALLY didn't know what I was doing. While some told me I was dumb to take the courses and they were too expensive, it was very eye-opening and worthwhile for me. I love options and the various combinations of strategies you can employ.
I have an options blog that I haven't kept up to date with lately as I've been focused on futures and NT the last couple of months, but it might be worth a read for some.
Over the last few months I became interested in futures when I saw Dan Gramza speak at optionsXpo earlier this year (2009) in San Diego. They are much simpler to trade than options, provide a lot of leverage, don't experience time decay (theta) and have better tax advantages as well, so I figured I should really look into futures.
As far as programming, well, I've been writing programs since I was 10 years old and grew up in Silicon Valley (San Jose) and have a BS and MS in computer science. I've programmed in C# and .NET since v1.0 (since 2003, 2004? I can't remember what year it came out) and am a self-employed contract programmer, mainly programming in C# for customers. So my schedule is very flexible which allows me to watch the markets at the open 6:30am (West Coast time) and the close 12noon - 1pm (lunch). I've enjoyed diving into the NT APIs and like a kid in a candy store with all of the capabilities that it provides!
I've been sim trading, discretionary, on NT for a couple of months now and am going live here in a week or 2, starting small with a couple of contracts at first and growing with success. I mainly trade ES as it has the most liquidity and fills are fast, but I hear YM is less choppy and trends better so I may look into that as well as NQ, which the CME is really pushing. Along with NT I use thinkorswim for options analytics and just got set up with Tradestation for end-of-day trading my IRA, but I like NT for intraday scalping and automated trading.
I've followed the "don't pursue automated trading strategies" blog post(s) intently and still "hang on" to the dream of creating automated systems that, at least, make some money while still requiring some attention, care and tweaking, but given Mike's experiences and comments from others I keep my expectations low. Still, as a developer, I like the challenge. I just last weekend started coding some strategies, all that were failing in backtesting, but they were too simplistic. While I manually trade I think "why did I do this?" and realize some of it is "gut" feel of the market that is hard to put into code, such as "indicators are saying go, but I think I want to see a break out of this range first" etc. and that can be hard to automate. I suspect my automated strategies will be very complicated and have lots of filters and conditions on them that will put the odds of success in my favor, and the number of trades it takes will be much fewer than I would manually, but I want the odds in my favor, in much the same ways that experienced options traders like to gamma scalp. Also, I am impressed with those that can trade without indicators, I'd like to reach that level of understanding of the markets somedays. Until then, I'll stick to my crutches
Anyways, love the site and I hope I can contribute...
