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Yeah, most people who don't give up first seem to think so.
Did I mention the aggressively unfriendly "support" staff? They are definitely in a class of their own. (However, they have always instantly addressed and fixed any actual bug or technical issue I have reported to them, and I think there were only about 2, maybe 3. They take you seriously if you have encountered a real problem where there's a real technical issue. They will be unhappy with you if you simply didn't look in the help to find an answer.)
The program, and the support and documentation, appears to have been entirely the work of extremely talented programming people who never have had a thought about user friendliness, but who do a great job of what they are focused on. You can get friendlier software, but it would be hard to get better, just from a pure functionality point of view, at least in my opinion.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
Their documentation is some of the most thorough I've seen. When I was in school, one of my professors in a sophomore-level weed out class had a hierarchy of how to seek help: (1) read docs, (2) read man pages, (3) seek help on the class newsgroup, (4) ask a TA, (5) pray to your favorite diety, (6) ask the professor himself. The general message being: do your own research and exhaust your options before bothering people who have already answered your question elsewhere (oh, and don't ever actually ask the prof).
SC has the same mentality, and it is practical. The fact is that most people are just lazy, and would rather ask someone for the answer instead of looking it up themselves. I applaud SC for being firm and straightforward, in today's world of entitlement. If you look at what actually matters -- the fact that they fix bugs in a timely fashion, and produce stable software, then there's no better than them. They mean what they say, and there's something to be said for actual honest communication, instead of the usual BS people throw around.
As someone who has fought these types of things for my whole life, I might recommend the book "Atomic Habits" -- I have been reading it, and it underscores something we all know but struggle to do: our outcomes are the result of our processes, and these processes are simply a bunch of small habits, good or bad.
That's exactly how my first job was out of college. Exhaust all options before asking for help from colleagues.
Over the years I now recognize that I've become lazy and anonymous online posting has only further enabled it. In the past the shame of asking a stupid question IRL or asking a question before exhausting all options ensured that I was self sufficient and resourceful. Without that IRL negative consequence, it's created the bad habit of asking questions before exhausting all other options.
FWIW, what I mentioned above did indeed help me, from the standpoint of learning to be resourceful. Don't be lazy, do your research, don't rely on others. However, from my experience being on and leading teams of engineers, it's just as important to know how to ask for help and seek the opinions of others. When you're on a team, working in silos is counterproductive and often leads to many problems (not knowing what others are doing can be quite dangerous, if there is overlap or a potential conflict between what two people are working on separately).
That doesn't quite fit our online trading community as we are most definitely on different teams, but in the spirit of learning, we are surely on the same team of "market students." So, keep in mind that especially here, it's perfectly okay to ask questions once you've done some basic due diligence, and no one will think you're lazy.
The key for me to holding on for these larger profit targets has been to trail the stop loss 1 tick behind the previous bar, but only start trailing once the price nears a target S/R level. This way I don't get stopped out early on the way to the target, and sometimes the price continues through the S/R level and the trailing stop captures even more profit than a fixed target at the S/R would have.
My initial stop at the entry was 4.75 points, so the trade turned out to be close to 2:1.
When entering the trade, there was about 10 points to the next S/R, so I thought there was a good chance for the price to make it close to that area. When the price was about half way to the target S/R, I began trailing the stop loss 1 tick below the previous bar. In back testing, I've seen plenty of times in the recent months where the price "stair ways to heaven" and the trailing stop loss captures 20+ pts.
Today's 30 minute open was very choppy again, like the past Monday. But unlike the past Monday, the range was wider and allowed me to lock in a little profit per trade. Trailing the stop loss after the breakout has been a godsend.
It minimized my loss on Mon, gave me a a ton of profit Tues and Wed, and Thurs it gave me a little profit.
If i had held strong for a high fixed profit target today, I would have been stopped out at the full stop twice today, which would have eaten away at most of this week's profit.
EDIT: Entered a 4th trade after 10am because I couldn't help myself (the setup looked too good to pass. 10am is a self imposed limit anyway because my goal is to only trade 30 minutes per day, and enjoy the rest of my day after). It was stopped out by the trailing stop for a small profit, but it's the 1st time a trailing stop incurred 3 ticks of slippage! Usually trailing stops give you the price with no slippage, sometimes 1 tick slippage. But it's my first time experiencing 3 ticks. I am considering changing to stop loss LIMIT in the future. Only problem is I want my initial stop loss to be market, just in case if I get owned I want to be out asap. But after the breakout in my favor I want to change the trailing stop into a stop limit.
Or maybe it's not worth the hassle... just keep it a stop market, and a few ticks of slippage is worth it compared to the risk of the price shooting through never to be seen again.
I typically think of stops to open as good candidates for stop limits. That is, you want to open a long at a certain price higher, but you aren't willing to pay higher than that. But on orders to close, whether at a loss or a profit if you are using a stop, you want to actually just get out.
Excellent week in terms of results, best week I've ever had in terms of amount risked, process, and confidence.
I designed my strat around the high volatility opens for trading the first 30 minutes. This first week I'm all-in on using it, and 3 out of 5 days have the least exciting opens I can recall. But even with this, the strat was able to hold strong and turned a very nice profit!
I can't wait until we're back to a full week of high volatility in the open. Waiting patiently for the day where I can stairway to heaven 10+ pts in the opening 30min.
Hopefully this is just the calm before the storm.
Make ES open volatile again!
My wishes from Friday have been answered! At 9:36 the ES broke out for a nice +7.5 points stairway to heaven. ES open is great again!
There's something magical about trading the 9:36 breakout. I wonder what a backtest result shows for only trading the breakout setup at 9:36 everyday. Skip the day if there's no breakout at 9:36.
But on a more serious note, I think NT stole 1 tick from me from an earlier losing trade. Aren't limit orders supposed to be filed at the exact price of the limit order?
@josh I must be not understanding how stop limit orders work. Before I make a fool of myself to NT brokerage support (and they flag my account as a mark, if I'm not already), do you know why this happened?
I know for a fact I placed a sell stop limit order at 3214.00 using the chart trader. The log shows:
Order='xxx' Name='Entry' New state='Filled' Instrument='ES 09-20' Action='Sell' Limit price=3213.75 Stop price=3214 Quantity=1 Type='Stop Limit' Time in force=GTC Oco='' Filled=1 Fill price=3213.75 Error='No error' Native error=''
Why is it showing Action='Sell' Limit price=3213.75 Stop price=3214? Why isn't the limit price the same as the stop price for the pending order?
