[MPBigley]

Some time ago I posted some questions regarding trading equities for a living. I believed at that time that I could daytrade equities. While papertrading a system I developed (simple, like me, lol) I ran across a couple of things that intruiged me, and began to build a simple trading system based on the idea. Granted I have only paper traded it for a few months, but I wanted to post some of the criteria to get all of your helpful input. Please feel free to shoot holes, offer advice, negative or positive as you wish. I'm looking for constructive or destructive, lol, criticism.

Sorry, I must preface this, I can't get away from the equities thing, lol, and I know most of you all are futures traders, but, principles usually apply across the board. I manage some family members accounts, and was using some ETF's, specifically the Proshares indice ETF's long and short to hedge some portfolios back during the 'correction' in early March. I noted how these ETF's correlated to the indices and began to follow them daily. Specifically, Proshares has some X2 (long & short) ETF's that track the major indices. I began playing with the idea of attempting to build a simple trading system to profit daily from utilizing these vehicles to daytrade or scalp or swing trade. I also wanted to keep it simple, and trade one market, learn it, understand it, live it, and attempt to profit from it. What I did was use the QID(NASDAQ 100 SHORT ETF X2) and the QLD (NASDAQ 100 LONG ETF X2) and used two specific technical indicators (RSI & STOCHASTIC) on a 1 minute intraday chart. The ETF's trade completely opposite of each other, hence, when an extreme buy indicator is generated, on one ETF, the inverse ETF is generating an extreme sell indicator. Proshares has ETF's that track (X2) all of the indices long and short, and although I haven't researched it to the extent I did the QID/QLD relationship, I'm sure it can be applied across the board, although liquidity might be an issue on the other ETF's. Generally speaking, it usually generates a total of between 3 and 5 buy signals per trading day, and over 70% of the time it is a valid profitable signal. I initially worried about liquidity, but after following the daily volume and tape for some time, I belileve that is not an issue. I am also using stops (mental, though, not order wise). I stated I had about 100K in capital, but, have found using a small portion of that capital, I have been able to paper trade successfully for some time. I realize that, that literally means nothing, but, am wondering how long I should continue to paper trade this thing before attempting to get my feet wet ( or chopped off, lol). Am I onto something that I can make profitable here? Can anyone fire me some questions about problems that I am not foreseeing? Anyway, I began to research this more in detail after reading all of the wonderful information contained within this website from all of you. Some common themes I garnered were, keep it simple, do only one thing, understand it, live it, preserve capital, and constantly keep attempting to learn. I welcome any and all of your input, as you have generated a lot of ideas from just reading your posts. Thank you for your time, and I apologize for the length of this.

MPBigley