Hi! I am Tony. Though I have seen some of the world, and lived on the east coast for a few years, I was born and grew up in the heartland of Oklahoma, and find myself back here at the middle of my life (recently turned 50). I consider myself - and I have discovered that this is NOT unique in the world of independent full-time traders - a reformed engineer. To be more specific: an aeronautical. engineer with a Master's Degree from George Washington University - and 20 long years of experience... before the fateful time when I decided for a few legitimitate reasons to go on Sabbatical. Up to that point, I had been maxing out my 401K contributions (for 20 years), and every company I worked for: Boeing Space & Defense, Spirit Aerosystems, and American Airlines - all offered matching programs that I took full advantage of. Maybe once or twice a year I would spend 1-2 hours looking at my investment allocations, and the (primarily mutual fund) choices that I had, but ironically - despite the fact that I actually USED calculus in my job everyday - numbers did not fascinate me when they had to do with anything financial. I made enough money to support my family, my retirement account seemed to be growing - and that was good enough for me. For some reason, "business"' and the basic concepts of how to fundamentally analyze a company (including any and all related topics on investing) simply did not interest me. So I was quite ignorant of them on that fateful Spring day when I took temporary leave from my Lifetime Career. Long story short... having a lot of free time (for the first time), and "deep down" knowing that I had been neglectful of my retirements accounts (now in the six figures, despite my ignorance) - I resolved to bite the bullet, and obtain a more solid understanding of all the basic investing topics. I literally started with just learning about the stock market itself - took a brief detour down a rabbit hole trying to understand "what IS money?" and "where does it come from?"... That proved to be fascinating (and more than a little disturbing!) - so I veered myself back to INVESTING. And when I started to study portfolio allocation, factors, and technical analysis, etc... I suddenly realized one day that this was actually some fascinating stuff! And after gaining much more confidence in my ability to lightly manage my own portfolio - I may have stopped there. But by that time, due to my research I was getting every type of financial spam email - and one way or another I stumbled onto active trading. I was briefly intrigued by the "magical freedom" that supposedly could be had in day trading... and by then I had opened a little cash brokerage account to play. around, but ultimately realized that if I was going to stare at a computer alll day long - it was a lot more logical to just continue doing it in an industry where I had actually obtained the type of "expert status" that only comes from 20 years of practice... So I had pretty much decided that when I returned to engineering I would take a lot better care of my portfolio - and augment it by using some of my new abilities to actively (but boringly) swing trade stocks. And THEN, I stumbled across... OPTIONS. I could immediately grasp the potentially massive leverage, but what got my FULL ATTENTION of course was that "no one knew how to price them until these two gentlemen, Black & Scholes - had devised a model". Imagine my surprise to find out it was just a "simple" second-order partial differential equation. Further, three-dimensional volatility surfaces were very similar to methods I had used in grad school for conceptual wing design. Anytime you had several variables to optimize - for example, the various geometric properties of a wing size and shape... well for my thesis I devised a way for a wing designer to assign a range of values to any two of the variables and my computer program (that would only run on the old dual-proeceessor Sun workstations... I'm dating myself!) - would provide as output a "response surface", which was NOT flat, and which (in this case) represented resulting wing weights - for that combination of variables. Very, very similar to taking, say, strike prices and expiration dates, and then plotting a surface that represented the value of each possible credit spread. By this time I literally became obsessed with trading... and it was not greed. I was a professional "problem solver", and yet this particular game was one where I just could NOT CONSISTENTLY find the answer. I blew up accounts... large accounts... which of course was sickening, and yet I didn't get discouraged. I knew there WAS a way to consistently profit, but like so many novices I thought that it was a matter of strategy. I quested for "the grail" for a long time... and slowly learned through failures (as my strategies seemed to just naturally veer towards MUCH MORE SIMPLE - especially as compared to the elaborate algorithms that I had originally been programming in Excel). Finally, after a lot of blood, sweat, tears... and cold, hard, cash - I realized that: 1) this was NOT just a math problem, it was very much a psychological game, and 2) there IS a Holy Grail but it's not a particular strategy. Yes, there was a need to use the right type of strategy for the volatility regime... but the TRUE Holy Grail was proper Risk & Money Management. It's hard to believe, but it's been over five years since I left engineering, and life is good!

Hey Traders!

My name is Greg and by day I'm an electrical engineer (actually, more of an engineering manager, these days) in the aerospace business. I'm in my 50's and heading for retirement in the next couple of years. I've been fascinated by trading for a while but have very little experience. I'm quite well read in finance topics but don't really have much practical experience in trading or market micro structure.

I'm planning to do a whole bunch of paper trading and am willing to put many hours in. Mostly I'm here to see if I can pick up some practical ideas on some of the basics that I should be practicing. Unfocused practice is simply a waste of time. Up until now, I've only used futures for delta-hedging option swing trades. However, I'm really interested in learning how to scalp / trade intra-day futures, probably starting with /ES.

Greg

I swear, you can't swing a dead rat around here without hitting an engineer.

Seriously though, welcome Greg! You have something in common with Kevin Davey (former aerospace guy and member here @kevinkdog ). He has written a few books on trading, so maybe you would find some of his writing relatable. His focus is algorithmic trading, but his trading journey is an interesting one. Building Winning Algorithmic Trading Systems is his first book.

~vmodus