atto

Doing great. You? Still trading NQ?

What are the chances I happened to sign on this week too? Glad to see you guys are still kicking around

Going along with what Urma said, I stumbled upon some interesting statistics regarding candlesticks. Using k-means clustering of various candles, some (unexpected?) statistics can be calculated about the biases of each cluster (candle type, in this case). Intelligent Trading: Quantitative Candlestick Pattern Recognition (HMM, Baum Welch, and all that) tl;dr: "bull hammer" type candles are most commonly followed by bear WRB's using the QQQQ sample set that the author used.

I highly recommend against trading family and friend's money. You will stress your relationship, and you don't want that extra risk. Additionally, your trading will likely suffer. If you're that good, just give them some of your extra money .

Most of the people in this forum are on paper or are trading small account. I do neither, so have a little bit of experience to back me up. Actually, no. That's only 11.51% ROI per year, compounded continuously (which is very close to how compounding works for day traders). We don't compound annually. No one would care for those returns on a $5k account, especially with a sample size of 1. I did a similar run in a little less than two years. Did I benefit from an outlier in returns? Possibly some, but that same run encompasses roughly 900 trades, which is a large enough sample size to reject random fluctuations of luck (in fact, it's large enough to reject anything lower than your 11.51% or 15% ROI with well over 99.9% confidence). I simply could not experience the same returns on a $5mm account (expecting a $100mm account in less than two years). Liquidity would severely hurt performance, even on a "highly liquid instrument" like ES. Also, as capital increases, capital preservation becomes a lot more important. Blowing a $5k account is not the end of the world. Blowing a $5mm account is a pretty big deal. Trading is simply the exploitation of an edge, again and again. The best analogy I've come up with is with blackjack card counting. By default, the casino runs about a 0.5% edge against the player. By counting and changing bet size, the player can do about a 1% edge on the casino. So, his goal is to simply press that edge again and again, as many times as he can. Trading is slightly different, as we never can be completely sure what our edge is exactly. However, with enough testing and experience in different market conditions, we do know confidently that we do have an edge. Once that is established, we run it as many times as we can. Sure, variance plays a large role in returns. However, given a large enough sample size and a positive expectancy edge, you can do quite well. Here is a simulation of 900 trades (sample size 200) with the same average return and standard deviation of returns that I had (this is all per contract, so no compounding). As you see, variance does play a large role in returns (over 100% difference, just based on "luck"). However, you can also see that there is a statistically significant edge here.

I agree. This is a bit ridiculous. I used to have Adblock disabled for TradersLaboratory to support the site, but I've put it back on. edit: I count 41 Adsense boxes on the main forums page, and that doesn't even include all the new embedded ads between posts, floating to the side, etc. That violates Google AdSense's program policies (maximum 3 ads per page). Admins, you run the site, so you're free to do so however you wan; however, you're very quickly alienating your userbase.

As a friendly word of warning, $800 is not nearly enough to trade any index futures. Yes, if you hit a couple winners early on and use tiny stops, you could survive it, but as a new trader, the last thing you need or should want is high leverage. It'll hurt more than will help, I guarantee you.

Sorry, just making wj's phone ring. Btw, wj's phone rings whenever I post.

We've had one for years. Vendors and shills were never a big issue.

That's pretty much what has happened. There were very few new people in chat, and most of the rest of us have been involved with chat for a year or more. The needs of the group shifted, and we're all at least acquainted with each other's styles. Everyone who was involved at all in chat was notified of the change, and the we are not some secret closed off group. There's absolutely nothing against TL or anyone here. Also, it seems the new plans are excellent for those looking to learn off pros, or watch over someone's shoulder.

We moved to skype. It's offsite, a little more private, and allows for easy audio. And saves all history. Add any of us, and we'll add you to the room: - atto42 - wjrusnak - mic.o8o - hlmtrader - iheartmoney - jaygostrader - jfw215 - thatoneguy861 - traderwilliam - xracertrades

We moved to hindsight only.

I used to be quite active here, and still drop in the chat room every now and then. What always set TL apart from EliteTrader, T2W, etc is that James is a trader, so his priorities were to offer a wonderful trading forum, first and foremost. Yes, running the site like that makes less money, but it also fosters an environment that is highly conducive to learning for new traders, and a place that experienced traders feel comfortable in. This place is obviously yours, so you can do as you please, but I would strongly encourage you to focus on content and moderation verses monetization. The biggest contributors to this forum weren't always here; rather, they came from other trading forums where business interests often conflicted with a safe discussion environment.

From my understanding, the options were just a "worst case" measure, and were placed way too far out. So basically, they opted for cheap options (thinking there's pretty much no chance their main position will go that much south), which didn't do a good job covering them.

I'm surprised they're still open for business. I wish their "transparency" included exactly what went wrong: how their risk metrics failed, why they were so directional, what kind of leverage they were using, and how they will adjust their strategy so this never happens again. Their returns looks as if they've been short premium, and a few deep OTM positions got hit, but it says their losses are directional. Anyone have further insights into what their trading strategy is/was?