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Last week I vowed not to scale up yet, but I just can't restrain myself any longer! It's just not doing it for me.
Tomorrow moving up to 2 contracts, and also continuing to buy back in for double dipping.
Let's get that bread.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Thank you @Mich62
I'm an idiot... the answer is I was margin called. Excess position margin went below 0. Coincidental (and totally avoidable on my end) that the liquidation price was 3 ticks above the stop loss.
Deleting the 2 posts.
Friday was a hard lesson learned. I got used to taking money out so frequently that I forgot about margin calls!
Essentially what happened was I scaled up contracts to max margin on the same day that I took a withdrawal, so when the position moved against me (but before the stop loss), it was forced closed.
I topped off the account with a larger amount this time, and today had phenomenal results. Caught both the initial down at open, and the up breakout at 10:00.
I'm much more comfortable using OCO orders for simultaneous buys and sells, and managing multiple different stop losses for different sides. Hot keys for everything helped a lot too, as I am transitioning to trading only on a laptop and removing all the extra screens.
Of course today I was on the correct side of the market movements, but even if I wasn't, I'd still give myself an A+ for managing the positions.
Thank you for your help! You were instrumental in getting NT brokerage support to actually answer the question.
First they told me it was because I was trading without live data (wtf?)
Second they told me it was because the time on my local machine could be slightly different than the exchange (wtf?)
Only once I sent them your screenshot, and after an entire day of back and forth emails, did they finally look at it in say it was a margin call.
Finally stopped being lazy and made some changes, for a monthly savings of roughly $300!
1. Stopping iqFeed data subscription at the end of this month. NT continuum is good enough for my trading style.
2. Downgrading from a ~$200 per month azure VM down to about $10 per month, with auto scheduled shutdown for most of the day.
Cutting expenses feels just as good as generating revenue!
Hoping NT enables ACH (as they've promised) for an additional savings of $120 per month on outgoing wires.
