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if you find yourself posting here in this thread due to your trading then the best advice i can give is to just stop trading and thinking about trading for a few months and come back fresh with new ideas but please just stop trading
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Agree might be time to take a step back and re-evaluate some things. Take a Break> PaperTrade> then maybe a Prop account like TopStep or one of the other ones out there to try to hone some discipline.
I have a question with respect to this. Are there a set amount of contracts in the futures market for each individual traded symbol? Or do they create and kill contracts based on demand?
You're quoting from a post written over a year ago (this thread is pretty old), but OK:
Suppose you go into the market and put in an order to buy CL (West Texas Intermediate Crude). Someone else takes the other side with an order to sell. They are matched and you now have an open long position. Let's say you only bought 1 contract, although this applies to any number. The contracts are standardized as to amounts and dates of delivery.
When you and the seller had your orders matched, a contract to buy a certain amount of Crude on a certain date was created, and a contract to sell the same amount of Crude on that date was created. Neither contract existed before, and didn't need to: a contract is created by agreement of the parties. (The counterparty for each is actually the exchange, which means you are not tied to the person who took the opposite side of the trade, and are not at risk if they do not uphold their obligations.)
These contracts can then be traded with any other participant in the market. For instance, you can close your position by putting in a sell order. Someone will take the other side of it, and your long position will be closed out on the books. The other person (the buyer) in this case may have opened a new long position, or may have been closing a short by offsetting with a buy. Margin is put up by the parties to cover the mark-to-market debit or credit that is made to each account due to fluctuations in price during the day. The amount of margin is very small compared to the value of the crude that the contract is for, but the oil is not going to be delivered or paid for for some time.
Futures contracts are not assets and don't exist until the actual contracts are entered into. They disappear when closed out. The "open interest" (total contracts in existence) expands and contracts over time based on trading. If contracts are held until delivery, actual physical oil will be bought or sold based on the contracts that are held (x number of barrels at y price,) and actual real oil and real money (quite a lot of both) will change hands.
You or I will have closed out our futures positions (or our brokers will have closed us out) before that happens. (Well, unless we actually possess the actual oil or money and plan to go to delivery. )
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
I get wrapped up in these explanations and lose track of the time.
I think it's worthwhile to go over these basics sometimes, though. No one arrives at futures trading with all this settled and understood in their minds, and we had to learn it from someone else at one time too.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
You certainly continue to teach me a lot @bobwest, I truly appreciate the experience you share on here every day. Not to mention the admin work you do. Cheers!
BTW before I start...that has got to be one of the cutest Korgy pics I've seen. There's another one floating on the internet of a puppy that just finished a whole jar of jam and passed out the same way.
Okay...There's so much on this topic all over. I have to say to you if you're still around and any other's that are serious. Trading (retail) is a performance profession. It's probably one of the hardest things that I had to learn and still am learning. As someone that worked in the industry and will tell you that even guys like me are a dime a dozen that can't cut it. You'd think it was the opposite right? Well I'll be the first to tell you we are no different than the rest of you. We're human just like everyone else. After about three years I'm finally starting to find the traction that I worked hard for through all the emotions, sweat and tears in some cases. Literally so many times rubbing my greasy face and forehead in defeat, broke down and in total disappointment.
It was the psychological aspect that I couldn't get my head around. We aren't meant to be trading so to speak. I'll add that I had my own psychological hurdles attributable to my own individuality. You may have to find those of your own.There's plenty of info on this and I suggest reading up first to anyone "trading in the zone" forget who wrote it and guessing if the author was real or not. I'll tell you that it applies totally...Just like in professional golf, another part of m background, every player needs a coach. It doesn't matter if you're tiger woods...you need a mentor or a guide. It doesn't matter if that coach can't play a lick against your own game. Do you think Butch Harmon could out play Tiger even in his prime...NOT. It's the guidance and the eye/experience to see what he needed to do do and work on. Second read and listen to any and everything from Dr. Brett Steenberger. I've seen his name flashed on Futures IO already and I can't say enough how much that man has changed my mental aspect. Just listening while I'm driving again and again. I don't even have to be practicing the exercises he recommends. It just resonates after so many times again and again.
I needed a break after pushing so hard for sometime after I did nothing but force myself to learn and break myself down again and again full time, but it did help in ways. I don't recommend this approach to everyone...as I'm a beast for punishment...another nature of mine so I have to be mindful. I'll tell you the best my golf swing was, was after I stopped playing and practicing for a few years. Everything just came together, just connected and I was hitting the ball so solid, drives to chips...even the put. FYI did you know that the swing is the same all the way down the clubs fundamentally. A lot transfers into trading that I take from the game. I don't play or haven't swung a club in over a decade, but it gets to the point that I practiced in my sleep/dreams. Another thing the amateur doesn't realize. I still do to this day...I can't control it. Just happens.
So when I took a break and let my mind relax from the pushing it started to connect naturally, although the pushing did help. I was at a place where the only option was to incorporate a hard stop each and every time into an edge. I mathematically or psychologically deducted that was the only way for me to make things happen...I problem solved. I journaled and made influential posts with word to tape to the mirrors/walls. I trade FX and I find it arguably one of the hardest vehicles to trade against equities and such, but it's all come together and I don't mean that by the end all be all. That is the quickest way to become a relic in trading. The stop I use is so tight that people wouldn't believe possible that I could make the risk/reward ratios. If you told me that I would've said bullshitt you liar.
This is a game of odds and it's not about this trade or that trade. It's the series of trades that my edge brings me. Man, I'll tell you that there's times that I have trades turn around from three or five points and I get stopped out. I'll let it happen depending on how things are for me that week. I still feel kinda lame when I let a seven point gain reverse, but what I'm really after is the ten or more. Although that's something I still work on as I size up more throughout the coming years. So it's the series of trades throughout the week. Not the one and only or even the two or three or whatever. When I get stopped out or seems like I'm going to, I tell myself literally it is what it is. I have no control what-so-ever. IT IS WHAT IT IS...This is my favorite thought.
I just saw this thread and hopefully you are still trading and others like you are reading my experience and find it helpful. Hopefully I didn't ramble and I'm not the most eloquent with the written word. I feel comfortable telling all this here since it doesn't seem like a shitt-hole like forexfactory or something. We're all human.
I don’t know if you’re still active, but my suggestion would be to spend a few months to a year, locating a single pattern that you can recognize and trade.
Just one pattern, and to make your life easier perhaps only spent two hours looking for it during trading hours. Spend the weekends looking through charts to locate that singular pattern. Learn all about that pattern, learn the environment in which it goes in a predictable manner and when it does not.
Spend a year on it. Once you can recognize that pattern, then you can actually have someone code up an automated strategy for you or that simply alerts you when that pattern condition is present.
But you got to spend a few months to 18 months to really grasp that pattern. And only play that pattern only trade that pattern. When you do this you’ll start to Devine when the pattern fails and overtime will be able to troubleshoot why the pattern fails, and you’ll also know when you have a good trade in front of you and have the confidence to take it.
It’s hard for us. It’s about consistency, discipline, and that’s almost impossible. That’s why a lot of us try to automate these strategies. But one way to manage discipline and to manage patience in ourselves in this path were on, is to limit your time trading during market hours if you’re still struggling.
Don’t spend, all day behind the screen, tell yourself that you’ll spend just two hours waiting for and looking for this singular pattern condition that you spent prior a few months studying and locating, and only play that pattern for a year, spend two hours in the morning, 930 to 1130 looking for that pattern, if it plays out, take it, if it doesn’t close the computer go do something else. Do that for year. that will force discipline, but also force you to only look for that opportunity.
Overtime when that pattern is present, it will seem to you like the sun, because you understand it and by its formation, you can see everything else. But it takes time, a year or two years three years on a singular pattern. Don’t deviate.
Chaos at one level of magnification is harmony at a higher level of magnification.
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