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robertm

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Posts posted by robertm

  5. Posted

    It depends which country you are a resident in, the tax relationships between those countries (your broking account & your residency), how your country of residence treats foreign earned income, you structure, and and and, lots of stuff.

     

    Its certainly not a good idea to live in the US and have a Swiss trading account anymore though :D

  7. Posted

    Hi. I am very new to options, at least in the sense that I haven't actually traded live with options. I've been hanging around forums but until now I still cannot find a sticky thread where all newbies should read before doing anything. I start this thread to ask some basic questions and would encourage anyone new to ask questions here too. Ok, here's the questions:

     

    1) If I sell options, do I get the premium credited to my account instantly? Or does this depend on broker, eg some brokers may use the premium collected to offset the required margin?

     

    2) If I sell options, and later on I suspect my trade will go bad, can I buy back at the same strike price to cancel the overall position?

     

    Agreed with what the others said.

     

    Check out this link, lots of cheap cool options stuff

    Trading and Investment Tools by Peter Hoadley

     

    The optionsexpress.com website has a great demo platform, they offer it for the CBOE as well as a free tool. Throw on some options & watch the interaction with price/volatility

     

    The best value for money options information I've seen anywhere is a guy called Chris Tate out of Aus, save yourself the expense of an Optionetics or TOS & look into his materials at http://www.tradinggame.com.au. His book is dated but still accurate, the charts are mostly Aus but the theory is sound for options in general anywhere.

     

    If you want to see some real "instant" feedback on how options interact with changes in the underlying get a demo account with IG Markets / Index and watch their day expiry options on FX, Dow, DAX etc. It gives you an instant feel for how much joy/pain go with a time expiry instrument rather than waiting 3 months for your Jan options to play out.

     

    Best advice I ever had on options:

    You can't trade them unless you can make money trading shares (meaning you must understand how/why the underlying price moves)

    You can't trade them unless you have time to monitor them actively, although that's pretty easy these days.

  9. Posted

    There is a great book by Van Tharp: Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom, Van Tharp, Book - Barnes & Noble

    Van Tharp coined the idea of R-multiples and looks at the answer to your question in a lot of detail. The link above lets you look into the book and see a lot more. The maths of trading are critical to your success in being profitable. I'm teaching my daughter to trade and one of the reasons I use range bars in my trading is so I can make my risks per trade uniform easily and position size easily. I don't need to think about my stop - I know its two bars. Its part of my trading plan and setup. You can see examples in the blog I use for my daughter:

    electroniclocal.blogspot.com. We had a short trade at 1099.75 today that you will be able to see on a chart in today's blog later this afternoon.

     

    You beat me to it :-D. I was fortunate to be introduced to R values before I ever made my first trade, great way to flatten out all the variables of time/instrument. I was bored one day (and sick of the scams) and blogged about the basics of it here at TL also -

     

    Level the playing field: Measuring results using R Multiples - Traders Laboratory - Professional Traders Community

  11. Posted

    Fractals is a niche. An obviously and increasingly corrupted one. So far, this thread has not been talking about gaining an edge. It has been about fractals – their presence(s) and qualities. If I don’t think your .01% of Quants & Algo's are actually finding and trading ‘fractals’, then I certainly don’t think the other 99.99%, are, more casually, but still ‘purposefully fractal trading’. The drift of your posts is that everyone is trading fractals – just so long as we loosen up the definitions enough. The drift of my posts is that no one is really trading fractals, regardless of the purity of the definitions being applied...

     

    Then we at least all seem to agree that ONE method of trading involves patterns that replicate over time frames and time horizons :)

     

    So moving on, is anybody game to try and tie range breakouts, Fibs or indicator only driven systems into that :rofl:

  14. Posted

    robertm

     

    I get what you’re saying but it’s …Way under complicated :)

    A ‘similar pattern’ does not a fractal make.

    That’s just co-opting the word for a catchy buzzword like Bill Williams, Jack Hershey, etc try to do … obviously, with much more success than is good for the trading ‘public’ btw

    Real fractal work don’t allow the occasional spotting of ‘one’ and letting the rest be noise, etc.

     

    The ‘people see what they want to see’ line is getting tired too – especially the ‘want’ part.

    If I saw what I wanted to see my net worth would be in the billions and so would yours… (my gift to you… happy holidays already)

    We routinely ‘see’ within the constructs of what we are predisposed to ‘see’- but that is not a necessity. We can at any point choose to improve at seeing what is...

     

    They see what they want to see until they can see otherwise. Only time and experience can accommodate this. Even if you lay out what you do step by step, without seeing things from the same base construct (or POV shall we just say?) they will be unable to interpret the information being presented to them.

     

    No idea who Bill Williams, Jack Hershey are though, I tend to find my own judgments :)

  15. Posted

    People just love to overcomplicate things :crap:

     

    Markets are fractal in so far as we can see the same patterns (setups) repeating regardless of instrument and time frame, allowing for a singular system approach. This is not "perfect" though (nothing is), at too small a time frame it will break down as price cannot move sufficiently to form (ie, when bars are too small). And no one system is the perfect solution for every market at every time.

     

    To understand this more look at the harmonics in the market. Have you ever seen the youtube video where they sit a flat surface on a speaker, cover it in sand, and start ramping up the frequency? As the frequency increases the patterns formed will alter to resonate with the new environment.

     

    Anybody that was trading tick charts (maybe range bars, don't know as I don't use them) on the ES or similar around this time last year when the market was undergoing rapid expansion, then collapse, of both range and volatility would have seen this happen. The patterns were repeating, and found throughout many instruments and time frames, but the changes in range/volatility changed the frequency of the market, thus changing the patterns emerging at that time :)

     

    Whether or not that is the way you find best to trade is beside the point, people see what they want to see regardless of the information in front of them.

  16. Posted

    As you all know there are thousands of stocks. I'm having a difficult time screening correctly. I want to screen stocks that declined, and view them until they create a buy signal. Even if I take that approach there's still hundreds to choose from. What software do you use to screen stocks? I would like to screen technical analysis. I'm using think or swim, and its extremely difficult to screen..

     

    Check out Amibroker. It's cheap, and good data is cheap as well these days. Easy to code also & has a very clean chart display.

     

    Stock, Futures and FOREX End of Day Data in MetaStock Data and ASCII Data formats has a good data product with a 30 day demo, check out the "custom folders" as it automatically creates sub folders for you of sectors, S&P etc & keeps them up to date automatically. They have some Amibroker add on for organising sector groups etc, and their service is always awesome :)

  17. Posted

    The tax man is pretty easy to deal w/ if you are a losing trader. And it's not bad if a winning trader, but until you can make money consistently there's not much to discuss.

     

    So to clarify - are you a consistently profitable trader?

     

    Agree with above. Don't spend any money on setting up entities to avoid tax until you are making enough money to warrant it. If you plan to trade full time you might pay a little exra tax just before you get rid of your job, after that your income will taper off until you ramp up the trading account (unless you can cut your full time hours over time rather than in one hit).

     

    As for the number of trades etc, just give your end of month statements to your accountant, or better yet your broker may do an end of year tax statement for you to give to him(or her). No need for any book keeping that way, just focus on your trading :-)

  18. Posted

    I saw someone used esignal to trade directly.

     

    I also know esignal provide data, perhaps its integrated somehow into 1 platform to trade using a broker, but use esignal software to show/execute the trade.

     

    So not sure how it works for HSi in this case.

     

    Is IB the only broker for HSi with good reliabilities?

     

    Thanks.

     

    I've never used it but eSignal does interface & let you build custom order entry functions etc.

     

    Also keep an eye on their exchange waiver fees eSignal have with some brokers, IB is one of them (although possibly not for HSI). Saves paying for the same data feed twice if your broker charges for a Ninja feed or something.

  19. Posted

    All I do is trade right now, but I'm going to medical school in the fall, so I guess I won't be "full time" then. In any case, I only trade 9:30am to 11:00am anyway, so I'm with brownsfan on that aspect. As far as trusting the advice here... who cares whose profiting? If you are learning to trade and to understand the market from the people here (whether it be candle sticks, moving averages, wyckoff, vsa, or programmed strategies) and you're making a profit... what does it matter? There is so much valuable information for any kind of trader on this forum. If you want "proof", go find a guru that charges $5000 for his course and I'm sure he'll prove to you in any way he can that he "makes a profit". This is truly a gold mine for a trader who's willing to do the work. In short, you found the best trading forum on the web. Good trading to you.

     

    Agreed, I never asked for or saw a single trade result or statement from anybody I stole ideas from. I'm sure some of them are not profitable at all given how often they change their systems, but they rake in millions from their fees for services rendered. So long as I can make money I don't care if they ever become profitable themselves (beyond their highly profitable marketing skills that is :( )

     

    - trades so they can tell those to whom they are selling trading systems that they do make some real trades :)

     

    Nice call :rofl:

  20. Posted

    Teaching could be accommodated and, if there is interest, then I would be pleased to go down this line.

    As long as there is understanding of a system, then there will be success, but only in that order.

    Thanks for the info DBP - if there is the interest then I would definitely go down this avenue.

    Let's wait and see if there is any interest.

    TEAMTRADER

    'Trade what you see and not what you hear or hope'

     

    You know while participating in this thread I realised that one of the best parts of the trading journey is when you reach a point where you can have an offer like this to view somebody's system and just think to yourself "that's nice, I hope they do well", without giving it a second thought.

     

    Well worth a look for any newbies wondering how a system is structured though, I stole ideas from some of the best I could find over the years :)

  21. Posted

    1. Have/find a solid edge...They do exist...

    2. Have enough screentime monitoring/trading your edge so you know it like the back of you hand and you have good understanding of the markets.

    3. Be well capitalized, to not burden your self with unnecessary pressure, which will cause mistakes.

    4. sincerely(believe), be able to convince yourself that you will make money from trading.

     

    If 1-4 are true then I dont see why not.....

     

    yes...most that trade full-time by default had to quit their jobs :).

    That said, if you have 1-3 but you dont have 4, dont quit your job. 4 is the most important ingridient--not just for Trading but in anything.

     

    Best Regards

     

    Getting a part time job that lets you trade the hours/market you want is a good first step as well, better then diving right in the deep end :-). Going full time and going through that first drawn down is an interesting experience when there is no pay check arriving next week regardless :2c:

  22. Posted

    Not even sure I would qualify for part-time hours.

     

    Where's HR around here?

     

    ;)

     

    Such is the beauty of being "commission only", no work, no pay, but live by your own rules :)

     

    Bull market = 2hrs per week & lots of travel.

    Now = a few more hours, but I'm sick of the travel anway ;)

  23. Posted

    Agreed newer (but not total newbie) helps a bit as they are yet to settle into a style of their own. Once you have chosen your baseline due to the mentor you had or view of the world etc it's hard to look at another persons view of the world & be in sync with it.

     

    The balance is making them accountable for their own decision to take/leave a setup, using their own risk appetite, being consistent over a long term etc.

     

    Breakouts are pretty easy to catch as you can alarm them, the retracements mid trend are the ones that can blindside you while pissing around on google or some trading forum :-D

  24. Posted

    I agree - all traders would have to be trading the EXACT same way for this to work.

     

    For anyone to even be slightly interested in this, you will need to detail your trading method(s) and explain them. Basically you will be looking for new people that want a system to grab onto and you will train them. Any profitable trader is not going to abandon their method for yours simply to join a chat room.

     

    You can do it without being exact. So long as you are on a similar theme - breakouts, continuations, same instrument/timeframe, then you will be trading the same moves but maybe slightly different techniques :-)

     

    I agree on the missed signals being annoying with short term though, spotting the setups when looking across several time frames or symbols is one of my bigger annoyances, and teams of good dedicated like mind traders are hard to setup and keep together (everybody loves the good times, not so patient at sitting out congestion)

  25. Posted

    Personally, I find visual learning the easiest.

     

    I am just throwing out an idea --- what about creating a general traderslab coding forum channel on youtube with tutorials on various topics? I set up an account on youtube so there can be no excuses-- you can log in as

     

    traderslab1

     

    password is:

     

    donkey00 (those are zeros)

     

     

    just throwing it out there --- thoughts??

     

    http://www.youtube.com/my_videos

     

    Like it, quick and easy to punch out vids these days. There will be lots of "oh wow, never thought he'd sound like that in RL" going on though :rofl:

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