I have been trading Forex actively for about 11 years and full time about 5 of those years. As the account grew, I slowly switched to higher and higher time frames and now only look at Forex charts once a day. Time for something new. I have known about futures for several years and up until now just haven't done anything with it. Last week I opened an account and after the 4th of July holidays I will begin trading it live. I have been demo trading for a few weeks and find many similarities between Forex and Futures along with many differences. The system that I have used for so many years trading Forex works even better in the Futures market (at least so far ). Looking forward to seeing what I can do.
I could go back to day trading Forex but where's the fun in that? Time to experience something new.
I trade at all hours of the day but I am not necessarily in front of the computer all day. Not having a day job has its advantages.
Going to be starting mainly with NQ adding others in as my experience grows. I like the volatility of the NQ.
I will try to grab screenshots as I go but with the NQ things happen quickly so I am not sure how well I will do with posting during the day. I will post results at the end of the day at a minimum.
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Launch day tomorrow. I will get an early start and trade as long as I feel up to it. No particular goals or targets other than to just get in there and trade.
Spent most of today going back 120 or more days looking at how my trading system worked in varying conditions. Looks promising. It is interesting to see how much volatility changes with NQ. Some days are all over the place and others are smooth and trending. Doesn't really impact how I trade. It just changes the number of trades I have to make.
I love trying new things and demo time is over for futures trading. Time to experience the live side of futures.
I will update as often as I can but as many know NQ can be a fast moving beast. I hope to post several times during the day but I don't make any promises.
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Morning update. Took 3 trades this morning all 3 profitable. Had to leave for a while to take care of other things but looking forward to the afternoon session.
Still getting used to how quickly NQ can move around. I am used to the snails pace EURUSD moves most of the time. No big deal.
We shall see what the afternoon brings.
Later
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I think I did pretty good for my first day of trading Futures. 4 trades and all were profitable. I was very conservative with my entries and as a result I missed several good opportunities. The speed of NQ was quite an adjustment for me coming from the Forex world and primarily EURUSD. I think I have a good understanding of where to place stops and what to expect when in a trade.
Trade 1: Decent entry but I closed it early because I am a bit superstitious and I wanted my first live Futures trade to be profitable. LOL!
Trade 2: Almost got stopped out. It came within 2 ticks of closing the trade but fortunately it made the turn and came on down. Didn't get much out of that trade but it was green nonetheless
Trade 3: Much better entry, trade turned green quickly but then found some resistance and bounced up and took me out at a reasonable profit. My stop placement on this trade was really good. Right after the trade ended it continued to move in the wrong direction.
Trade 4: Much more like it. Good entry and better exit. Most profitable trade of the day.
I finished the day out up $850 but could have done much better. Learned a few things about trading NQ live today and will use these Friday in my trading. I plan on being a bit more aggressive with my entries and I plan on trading longer than I did today. I think I only had about 3-4 hours in front of the screen.
I didn't grab any screenshots of my trades today because I was very focused on what was going on and what I needed to do next. Here is a shot of the final profit for the day.
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It was bound to happen. I have always fought with going with the trend. I guess you would say I am a contrarian trader. I never wanted to be the one who bought at the top or sold at the bottom. Cost me today. 1 bad trade in which I failed to fully follow my rules. Oh well, it pays to follow the rules it hurts when you don't.
I still missed way too many opportunities. I will fix that this weekend.
Doesn't look like the market is going to give me a chance to redeem myself. Guess I will take the 400 dollar hit and head into the weekend. Time to spend running through the playback simulator.
Still looking forward to next week. 2 steps forward 1 step back.
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Putting my programming skills to work. I seem to be having difficulty in catching the trades early enough and completely by my rules so instead of having to evaluate all of the entries manually I am writing a strategy to find the entries for me. Testing it now with the playback simulator. So far it is about 7 out of 10 for accuracy but that is improving with testing.
On Monday I will let it run on the sim account and when it takes a trade that I agree with, I will enter on the live account. If I don't agree with the entry I will make a note of it and find out why it took a wrong trade. That way I can evaluate it with live data but not kill the account if it makes a bad entry. That is one thing I really like about NinjaTrader is the ability to run sim and live side by side.
I have designed it to open the trade and place the stop but not to exit a trade by itself. It has to hit the stop. This allows me to manage the trade.
Once I am satisfied with the stability and accuracy of the strategy I will post it. It takes a bunch of time to work the kinks out of a strategy so be patient. It may be several months before I am comfortable enough with the code to let it out on the real world.
BTW: The title of this post is from Weird Al Yankovic's "It's All About The Pentiums". Funny video.
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Think I have the code ready for Monday. Testing looks good but only live data will tell for sure.
I had to do a workaround on testing the code since it appears that the playback engine cannot deal with multiple time frame data. The joys of learning a new system and software.
It switches where the signals come from depending on time of day. All three time frames for early morning, switching to just the highest time frame during the volatile 930 am (eastern US) to about 10 am. Once the noise has passed it only uses the upper two time frames. Taking whichever trade happens first. So it essentially automatically filters out the noise to keep from getting too many signals.
Should be fun to watch. Like I said earlier I am going to let it run on the sim account and take any good trades on the live account. I expect many false signals since this is essentially version 1.0.
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). Looking forward to seeing what I can do.
