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Hello all, Thank you for viewing my Journal. This is my journal that will layout my decisions from front end software picking through my attempts at automated trading.
My first major hurdle was User Interface: It could just be me, but this has been a major source of contention for me.
Software and my lack of being able to pick one!: I have been actively switching software from 2012 to this year! I have opened and closed accounts at most major brokerage firms. The reason I’ve been doing this is because I have not found a user interface that I like. I’ve done Swab, Trade Station, IB, TOS, MT, Sierra Charts, fidelity, etc.
I believe this has hindered my trading significantly, as I could never get comfortable with what I was viewing and I did not take the time to really get into the details of what I was viewing, as 90% of them look like crap to me.
For instance: Each software package/ firm offers a DOM, but each DOM is not created equal! More over, I didn’t take the time to learn Order flow, as many of the brokerages above do not offer Order Flow as an option - or if they didn’t I didn’t know that! Again, totally my fault. Thus, I focused more on Candle sticks.
The one interface that I found that I liked in 2019 was ninja trader, but I didn’t know enough about there clearing houses to go with them and the lack of ACH was a complete turn off to me. Moreover, having to wire, or do checks is absolutely Stone Age thinking in 2020! Last year I in discussion with a NT rep, they said that ACH was coming in the future. In my research of both Phillips and Doran, I found that Phillips does ACH. Additionally, their assets under management are higher than Doran, thus my expectation is their Risk Governance is better than Doran.
When I decided to open my NT account, I thought it would be an easy process, which for the most part it is, however, I ran into some issues due to my employer. The NT staff worked closely with me to ensure Phillips had the documents they require to open my account. All good now!
Now that I have NT8, I’ve been actively loading my strategies from other systems into it. Thus, I have been learning C#.
What I have been doing is downloading various indicators and creating my own.
The indicators that I have downloaded and like thus far are:Price action Swing, zScore, ATR Trailing, McClellan oscillator. I really like these indicators, but it’s to much for me on the chart. More over, these are lagging indicators and I need something that is leading.
For a leading indicator, I’ve turned to reading the DOM and understanding Order Flow. I will admit this a significant area where I lack knowledge, so once again I turned to google to help me. I’ve discovered two sites that offer free trading exercises, pricesquack.com and jigsawtrading.com, (I hope I can link the websites here). I do not use there products and know very little about them, except that I have been using their free trading drills. Normally, I would use my real account for this, but this time I’ve decided to use a sim account (this is a first for me, normally I just trade my account and not worry about it.) But, I’m tired of giving the market money and I’m dedicated to learning how to trade.
Open ended Software issue: I’m going to upgrade my life time license to a multi-broker because I really like NT8 and I want to link my TD Ameritrade to it.
After creating my journal yesterday, I decided to take my training wheels off and trade real money!
I plan on continuing to sim trading, utilizing the lessons that I high lighted in my previous post, as I feel I still have a metric crap ton to learn about the DOM and Order flow.
For Order Flow, I’m using the more expensive data package from NT, that allows for volumetric charts. While I don’t think these charts are the holy grail of trading, I do find that I really like them and they complement price action trading.
I did two trades today, but then my real life called :-).
Thank you both for your feed back. I tend to agree with you both, but I will say that I'm super surprised at how order flow has supplement Price action. I've been using Volumetric charts along side my DOM and that helps tremendously. The ability to see the volume at each interval is awesome...
Also, I have integrated Delta into the fold.... I'm learning a ton, that's for sure.
I will post a picture of my chart in a bit, work and trying to trade are up.
Today's trading started off all SIM, but then I ended up trading real money on MES. On the Sim, I switched over to ES to see how that would go. I also started thinking through my position size.
My observations: And please experienced traders, comment the heck out of my approach!!!! As I want to learn this!
My trading goal is to build a 5 - 10 contract position and either bulk exiting or bulk exit with runners.
1) Timing is significantly different than building a 10K + share count stock position, or maybe I just suck at building stock positions :-)
2) Buying into a pullback can be an expensive drawdown on the account, at one point I was down $1800, but I ended up finalizing the day up $1500.
a) The reason for the drawdown was because of stops or being early on the Longs/Shorts, please see my decision point below.
b) Timing is key, and I will have to refine my entry points,
3) Stops Decision: I have one of 3 decisions to make here:
a) Remove them
b) loosen them up
c) wait for less volatility
Switching over to MES provided much better results as the market slowed down, and I was able to add to my P&L.
When you are typing a post into the "Reply to Thread" editor, if you look over just to the left, you will see a big icon that says "Drag and Drop Attachments, Paste Images." Try that -- it will take your image. It will put your image wherever you have the cursor, and you can move the link it creates to any other spot you like.... It works like this:
I just did a copy/paste using the Windows snipping tool. It will take image files too. Play with it, you'll like it.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
Let me be sure to make clear that the method is to use that big icon as the receiver for the image. You drop it on that big square, and it takes care of it.
In case I didn't explain it, I wanted to be sure I made it more clear....
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
-- it will take your image. It will put your image wherever you have the cursor, and you can move the link it creates to any other spot you like.... It works like this: