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I'm the Björn and I'm from Germany. I have been trading CFDs for 6 years now and have now switched to futures for the first time and have the SierraChart platform which is already causing me problems when hiring
Greetings. New to the forum and new to futures trading. Up until now, I have had my brokers at Goldman and Raymond-James handling my money but have decided to take a more active role role in some of my assets. Hope my questions will not be too simplistic and elementary.
Thanks for your help and patience to a 30 year Naval Aviator. uctiger
I am happy to have joined this forum and already getting a lot of useful information and some nice indicators. I work in IT and have done a lot of development over the last 25 years and I will be sharing some of the things I have developed for Ninja Trader. I have traded in stocks, options and futures. Options are a little slow for me so I am concentrating on futures now with NQ, ES, RTY, E6, and FDXM. I have been trying various trading methods both commercially and my own ideas which I will be making future posts about. One method seemed particularly promising and I doubled my 5k simulated account in about 10 weeks. Then I went live and market really seemed to get volatile. I let my emotions get to me and lost about $800 in a couple days so went back to simulated trading to continue my learning and practice. I have blown up my paper account a few times but I think I am making progress in protecting my account and allowing my trades to work. If you don't make mistakes and journal them, then you won't learn and will keep making the same mistakes so I am trying to make all my mistakes before I go live again. I'm starting to see what will consistently work for me. Eventually, I may try another shot at automating my strategies, but for now it is manual. The danger with automation is curve fitting that works for a couple of months but then stops making profits or even starts losing money. I am learning that there is no holy grail of indicators, signals, or strategies. The best signal is the signal between your ears so have to keep your eyes open and know the psychology of the market.
PRAYER IS NOT A STRATEGY, but prayer along with two other reasons to execute a trade may be a viable strategy.
I look forward to sharing all of our ideas and helping each other become successful.
Excited to be here. Ever since college I have wanted to do something relating to the markets. I naively believed the only way was to head to NYC and work on Wall Street (this does not suit my personality). Here I am, years later, realizing I can do this from the comfort of my home office. I began my journey in May of this year and have tried to absorb everything I possibly can in that time - easier said than done when it comes to understanding the markets! I am at a point now where paper trading isn't really doing me any good as I have found consistent success when paper trading (75% increase from September to Late October). My issue is when I step up to live trading I found myself struggling with even entering trades or, when I do enter, giving the trade enough time to develop. I am able to cut my losses pretty quickly so I have that going for me I just am unable to make my way into many trades. I am hoping here I can stumble across something that allows me to get over the mental hurdle. Happy trading, folks!
First of all I'd like to thank Mike for building the forum. I found futures.io through Peter Davis from #Jigsaw and I'm excited to be here. Now I'd like to introduce myself.
Who am I:
I'm Seb, in the lower 40s, live in Germany. I am an optimist and have tons of energy and stamina. I'm convinced that we can achieve anything if we focus and keep on working on our goal. The fun is in the learning successes and not in crossing the finish line. I'm very social, like to communicate and believe in the power of connecting. If we connect our brains and share the knowledge, we will exponentially outgrow the results we achieved on our own.
My goal
is to become a professional, discretionary day trader, to earn good money and build my fortune over the years.
Why did I start trading:
On my 40th birthday I was sitting on the beach, watching the waves and reflecting my life so far, especially my career, what I went through, how I changed as a person and what the future could bring. Job wise I felt extremely intellectually under-challenged, so I was looking for something I can grow on.
I am fascinated by politics and economics, especially the impact the actors' behavior have on the bias of other market participants. I feel excited and energized watching economies breath and country leaders tackling their egos and behaving like a bull in a china shop.
I'm also very into self development and trading is the perfect environment to improve. In my opinion the one of the biggest challenges we face as an individual is to conquer ourselves. To understand our fears, temper, hopes and desires is key to become a better human and helps us getting our ego out of the way to success.
To me being a good person and trading success is strongly dependent.
My trading career:
In my early days, when I was about 24, I tried to trade warrants, once. I was young, not having a clue of markets but convinced that trading couldn't be that difficult especially if even the bakers' wife is winning with stocks. That was already late in the tech bubble. So I put all my eggs into one basket … which ended … expectingly disastrous with a total loss. After that I avoided stocks.
Back to the beach on my 40th birthday, when I made the commitment to me, to become a successful trader, I decided to invest the money in my education instead of loosing it. I looked for a mentor who has been successfully trading for ages, making his fortune of it, from whom I can learn. Coming from zero knowledge it's quite difficult to find a good one since there are different ways of trading, different markets and of course the wanna be "mentors" who live from the money you pay them and not from their trading skill.
1. First Mentor: My first mentor taught me trading trends in larger time frames (hourly and daily). He focused on stocks within indexes. Picking the most trending ones to play them long or short based on the index trend. This approach is strongly dependent on trending markets and leverages through the years. Plus you have a huge SL since your references are highs and lows in hourly and daily charts.
Since I had a clear goal I have been focused on my first mentors approach was just much too slow. Through my research I came across Market Profile, Footprint, Volume Profile and the DOM. Changing to someone who had experience in this field was the next logical step.
2. Second Mentor: My second mentor gave me a great overview of the tools, what he uses how. That really helped me to grow and understanding what information was valuable for me and I could add to my knowledge and what was just some "mentor" trying to sell the dream but not knowing much about how. Since it was I lot to digest it took a while and I had to step back from trading for a while to get myself sorted.
Finding me:
The most challenging thing to me was trading setups based on candle patterns or other mechanic signals. My mind is structured that way, that I have to understand context and conditions, why things happen and who is causing them. Because I did not see these setups helping me, I decided to stop trading and focus on learning again. Without education, I thought I will not have a solid foundation to build on and to understand context. It's like going to warfare with no experience and getting slaughtered in the first minute.
With more research, courses of Prop Shops, Peter Davis and Market Profile legend like Jim Dalton I found my way to get me sorted how to structure the market in a top down approach. It felt relieving that the things which I learned from my second mentor somehow fell into place with the discretionary learning I added. Jim always says: "Trading is not a science, it's a form of art." And in my eyes he is right.
The first big step in the right direction was focusing on one market, one time frame, one chart, getting rid of all indicators and gadgets. My breakdown today is the following:
1. Understanding market condition through large time frames
2. Seeing the confidence of the participants by how a market trades
3. Market intention by volume and time
4. Entry confirmation by understanding order flow
Actual Stage:
Looking back 2 years and a few months, I feel proud of where I got. I am intellectually challenged with trading and becoming a better human. At the beginning I started trading real money. When I crossed a line, I stopped, refocused and said to myself: "Before I'm not able to explain to me why I won or lost money I'm stuck in the demo account." I'm still on demo. I worked my way through to understanding stage 3 of my breakdown. Actually I picked up training in reading the DOM again. Peter Davis had a great video which made me understand what to look out for, what to note and how a learning process in order flow reading usually builds. And it works.
Why did I join the forum:
Like I wrote at the beginning, I look forward to great conversations, learning from each other and to make new friends.
I'm really looking forward to it!
Thx for reading if you made it to the end.
Successful Trading,
Plan to just day trade a simple system with NQ using Sierra Chart via CQG with Tradovate.
Happy to help with questions in those areas.
Thank you for all the helpful information here.
Have a great end of year 2018!
Hi Guys, thanks for the opportunity of being member of this forum hopefully will give my 2 cents and take a few dollars change in return ...
I'm getting back in the game after being out of the picture since 2007... back in the days I was trading futures on European futures for a good decade... I will need help because English is not my first language and opening a account with a broker and getting a platform tide to it seems to be a process...anyway I guess I'll get there...
Futures are still my main goal and really dosent matter on what because in my case risk management and TA are my elements... discipline remains my biggest challenge
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