Jump to content

Welcome to the new Traders Laboratory! Please bear with us as we finish the migration over the next few days. If you find any issues, want to leave feedback, get in touch with us, or offer suggestions please post to the Support forum here.

GCB

Members
  • Content Count

    145
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by GCB

  1. Just makes sure there is something on the screen that lets you know you are in a trade. I've taken the P&L of the screen and having thought my stop was hit did not check to see whether all my contracts were sold. I left for awhile came back to find I was still in a position without a stop. In this case I actually gained something but it could have been a disaster. Now I have something on my screen which lets me know how many contracts I'm long or short.
  2. I don't think it's an issue of the software. I just think when you stopped coming around, James, a few people dropped out and before you knew it nobody showed up. It was a good thing but it needs a leader. Tingull was sort of second banana, but I think his mentor advised him that chat rooms might be distracting. I miss it, but I can't be there every day either nor is it helpful for me to be chatting all the time. Sometime I need to just focus on the market. But the camaderie is nice.
  3. Abe it's good that you are keeping good records and reviewing your trades. This will help you develop. A few questions: What is you methodology for getting into trades? I can't detect and overall pattern. You seem to be very active in the market while it wasn't doing much. Then when it started to move you were not in. Why was this? As to your comments about soft stops and changing your strategy while in a trade, this is a bad idea. Although occasionally an experienced trader will scratch (terminate) a trade before it hits a stop or target it is is good idea as a beginner to learn to commit to all trades as planned and see them through. If you get into a habit of bailing on trades early it will be hard to break later. Practice planning the trade, getting into the trade, setting a hard stop and target and then letting the trade play out. Since you are paper/sim trading this is the time to do that. Remember trading is about letting probabilities play out, not about being right all the time. If you don't let your trades work themselves out then the probabilities cannot play out. If you do this you are not really trading at all, you are just churning your account and inevitably losing money. But the last thing you want to do is to change your strategy while in a trade. Never do that. There is no way you can consistently win doing that. It's okay to move your stop in the direction of the trade (only!), but try your best to leave your stops and targets alone. This is the only way you will ever be able to find out if your plan actually works, by letting your trades play out! Otherwise you are going to be in a perpetual fog. If you are constantly changing "strategy" in the middle of trade it just means you have no faith in your plan and you need to go back to the drawing board until you find one you do trust. Good luck.
  4. I recommend soybeans. I could have made bank today on beans but I didn't have time to take the trades I was so focused on YM. (Plus my little sons kept knocking on my office door. Gotta love 'em now though because when they get bigger you never see 'em.) Anyway. Soybeans. They breakout and trend better than the indexes.
  5. GCB

    TinGull's Trades

    I tell you what. There were some guys who got their accounts blown out today. (Not me. I did pretty well.) Anyone who wasn't using stops. All those short squeezes. Mama mia, some money changed hands today. This is the kind of day that can crush you if you don't have hard stops in. Thank goodness for bracket orders.
  6. GCB

    7-25-07

    That's interesting because that's what I'm leaning towards. Stay in the trade until at least a preliminary signal in the other direction. I'm kind of glad to here you say that, because it validates a bit what I'm thinking. Do you trail your stops at all, or at least at some point move them to breakeven? I'm going to at least do that, but again trailing stops aggressively eventually seems to just take me out on routine pullbacks. I haven't figured out any way to go for 2 or more times risk without being willing to endure pullbacks, i.e., endure giving a lot of it back at least once during the trade (omitting those wonderful trades when the you get 2x+ risk instantly with no retracement). Tight stops don't work for me. Entry has to be perfect with them and even then just a little noise and I'm knocked out before I have a chance.
  7. GCB

    7-25-07

    brown, I use candlestick charts, but do not directly trade the candle shapes. So your secret would be safe with me. But I gathered enough from perusing your various posts to see that you are scalping for 1.25 on the ES. Are you still all in and all out? Is that still working for you? Have you ever scaled out? I'm thinking of switching all in/all out, but I'm a Carter duckling so I learned to scale out. But sometimes it seems like it only helps to take pressure off. But when you scale out price has to move that much farther for your profit to match your risk. Anyway, not totally on topic, sorry.
  8. I had a trading mentor for awhile. I still consider him my mentor. But I'm not employing his services at this time. He taught me two very important things. 1) Take every legitimate setup religiously. 2) Traders are just people, just specially disciplined people. (He didn't teach me this I just learned it from getting to know him.) It was a great and helpful experience. I also made a good friend. He's a great guy. His name is Kevin. This is the link to his website. http://www.protrader1on1.com/
  9. GCB

    7-25-07

    Nice, brownsfan! Can you post a chart of the setups and tell us how you arrived at them, or is it a "trade" secret?
  10. I don't have a problem with volatility. By that I mean overall movement. It's just the sheer erraticism of it that bugs me. I'm seeing a lot of long wicks where I don't remember there being as many. Random false starts. Bursts that go nowhere. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!
  11. Really!? They finally got rid of that rule? Wow!
  12. There's just so much noise. Moving averages are pretty useless. Trendfinders? Might as well give your money to charity where it will do some good. Eyeballing is good enough to find the trend. Anything else just lies to you just when you need it to be most accurate. I'm a programmer and I've written many of my own indicators and I can testify that almost all of them aren't worth the time I spent on them. Levels, trendlines/channels, fib levels and the tape are the only thing that make any sense right now. To me anyway. I've tried just about everything in the indexes and they march to a different drummer. You sense the cold, blind calculations of programmed buying and selling in them. Thank goodness for soybeans! (Thanks for the thread ref, walter.)
  13. Thanks Walter, hope it helped!
  14. Today, 7/25/07, the YM is all over the place. On the other hand the Russell looks relatively well-behaved. I've noticed that the YM has been more and more erratic lately and seems to be attracting more and more attention from traders and, unfortunately, black-boxers. It's becoming more like the ER2 used to be. Or is it just my imagination? We are a definite moment of truth on the DOW and bottom finding is usually very erratic. But still... Wow the tape just flew by faster than any future contract I've every witnessed. How weird! Perhaps the YM will become the contract de jour and the Russell will calm down and become more and more like the YM used to be. Pleeease. I love having to trade only half as many contracts for more profit potential. All I know is the days of 10 point stops, maybe even 15 point stops, on the YM seem to be over.
  15. Abe, I feel for you man. It's a rude awakening when the market does its thing on you and takes you to the cleaners. What happened to you does not make you a bad person, only human. Realize that the market operates in a fashion to take money from the majority of the participants. How does it do this? By tapping deeply into the weaknesses of our human nature that, without proper training, we spontaneously resort to when we find ourselves under market duress. The more duress the more we tend to resort to instincts. The less trained our instincts the more we react by our raw nature. The more we do that the more we lose. That's what the markets try to do, because that's the only way they can exist. Think about it. The markets have been in operation for centuries and they keep on going even though the vast majority of the participants lose. How can this be? Why didn't the operation shut down long ago? Because 1) the world needs the markets and 2) the only way they can go on is by most participants losing. If most win where would the money come from? So the market must shuck and jive and rise and fall and fake and break in a manner which causes you to become rattled and make a bad decisions. It tries to do this to everybody and it succeeds with most. No trader is immune to the allures, taunts and threats the markets endlessly waves in our faces. There is only one way to beat it: Have a solid plan that you do not deviate from. You cannot trade by emotion or impulse. When trading the markets you must be like Odysseus when he sailed past the sirens. You must lash yourself to your trading plan and do your dead level best to ignore the almost irresistible calls to succumb to your feelings and impulses, to fear, greed and hope. You can do it. But it takes time to program yourself to not do stupid things. The only way to succeed is to have a trading plan you truly believe in and can execute without hesitation. So focus on building a solid trading plan in a market you feel comfortable it. Don't feel like you have to trade YM or ES. Trade corn if it fits you better. Try to find a place of comfort and ease. If you are too stressed by trading something is wrong. There is probably always going to be some tension in trading. But if your heart is pounding and your palms are sweating you need to focus on building your confidence in your plan. But don't beat yourself up. Realize what the market did to you it has done to all beginners. What will separate you from the beginners who blow up and flame out is to accept personal responsibility for your losses and resolve to learn whatever it takes to eliminate those errors. Don't trade real money again until you have made some real progress in this area. You can do it if you really want to. It will be the hardest thing you have ever tried. But once you get there no one can take it away from you. And you will become one of the few who truly took control of their own destiny. As the Trading Doctor says, not by looking without but by looking within. Good luck and keep us abreast of your progress Gary
  16. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a price weighted stock index which is calculated by special formula based on the stock prices of what are considered the thirty most important companies in the US. These stocks change from time to time. In fact, only GE is left from the original DJIA. The YM is a index future whose price is totally calculated by supply and demand, the buying and selling of futures. It takes its cues from the DJIA. But the DJIA also takes its cues from the futures markets. So it hard to say which comes first, the chicken or the egg. When the stock market and the futures get out of sync, arbitragers step in a buy (sell) one and sell (buy) the other. It's an amazing process but somehow works out. Think of the market as sort of the Wikipedia of price. Everyone contributes and somehow we end up with something more or less representative of value, at least over the long run.
  17. Thanks brownsfan! It has been a good week so far. Good luck to you the rest of the week.
  18. GCB

    TinGull's Trades

    Tingull, I took the very same trade, except I waited for a pullback to 14070, and I still got stopped out! It was only a couple of hours later that I realized that the DJIA was right at 14000 at that time, hence the big selloff, and the subsequent grind to nowhere. I wasn't too disappointed, though, because I was following my rules. Of course, I just added a new one--keep a better eye on the DJIA on new highs and breaks of 1000s and 500s.
  19. Very inspiring article, Janice. I appreciate your perspective. I have long suspected that a certain childlike purity of spirit is at the heart of every successful trader. A trader cannot be treacherous, because we tend to fear being victimized by the very evils we ourselves are guilty of. No one worries more about being robbed than a thief. No one worries more about being proved a phoney more than a fake. Guile leads to guilt and guilt leads to fear. The fearful worry more than any about being scared. Why are they scared? Because at some level they believe what they are doing is wrong. This is why it is so true that a trader must believe he is meant to trade. You can't "try" trading. You have to do it. As Yoda said, "Do. Or do not. There is no try." In short, you have to become like a little child to enter the kingdom. That may sound like too much, but I think there is something to it.
  20. This brings to mind what I call the vagarities of discretionary trading. Or, as someone else put it, the fog of war on the right edge of the chart. Few things are more maddening than watching the market in an uptrend (or downtrend) presenting you with pullback entry after pullback entry and on each one finding some seemingly reasonable excuse not to take the trade. The ticks aren't right. There is short-term resistance (support). It's too close to lunch (the open, the close). The tape doesn't look right. The last few up (down) candles had long wicks. I have to go to the bathroom. My socks are too tight. And on and on and on. Then finally you take a trade and it happens to be the one that breaks the trendline, takes out your stop and then reverses and goes higher (lower). It's..enough....to..make....a..person....crazy! If you have enough knowledge and information you can always find an excuse not to take a trade. This is the fundamental flaw and challenge of discrectionary trading. That is, just where does discretion end and emotionalism/rationalization begin? In my experience there is almost always one or two bits of information which are not quite ideal for each and every trade. The market rarely does me the courtesy of fitting itself neatly and perfectly into my rules. So then then question is how much can I ignore certain information and what amount of ignoring consitutes not following rules. In my experience this is where the rubber meets the road. Day in, day out.
  21. Unfortunately TradeStation does not supply range bars. I wish they did. One of the trading magazines had an article about them recently and they seem very straightforward. They are probably really good for level type trading like your flip trades, walter. Alas...
  22. Well then, "Como esta frijole?" I.e. "How have you beeeeen?"
  23. I have a pretty broad definition. A speculator is anyone who buys (sells) anything with the sole intention of selling (buying) it later at a profit. A speculator assumes risk to obtain the possibility of profit. BTW, Another reason traders offer information is as a motivation to organize and be thorough about their own study. John Carter and my personal mentor both put out newsletters and both have said doing it is one way to force themselves to do their homework.
  24. Probably another reason traders like to help other traders is to counter the ruthless feeling that the so-called "zero-sum-game" principle (which I think is a fallacy and a canard) brings in. If we help others we perhaps are attempting to assuage the feeling that we are taking advantage of others. But the feeling we are taking advantage of others is unjustified. When you get right down to it, trading is not much different that any other market. We sold our house in California and a year later it was valued at $100,000 more than we sold it for. Did the person that bought it "take" that money from us? Not in the least. If the market had crashed would we have been taking money from him? No. That's just the market. Nobody really knows what's going to happen. Which is why no one is taking anything from anyone. You might say that a house's value couldn't go to zero. Ask the couple in Dallas whose house had to be leveled because of incompetent exterminators. Or ask people whose houses were in the path of Katrina. Futures contracts rarely go to zero anyway, and I'm sure they do less often than houses do. The fact is the world needs trading. Traders narrow spreads and keeps prices honest. Futures markets need speculators to take the other side of trades from hedgers. Speculators serve the purpose of assuming risk, which adds to financial stability. Thus they need to be rewarded handsomely when they do it well, or no one would do it at all and financial markets would suffer greatly. Trading is even mentioned positively in the Bible by Jesus himself*. * “For [the kingdom of heaven] is just like a man about to go on a journey, who called his own slaves and entrusted his possessions to them. To one he gave five talents [a unit of money], to another, two, and to another, one, each according to his own ability; and he went on his journey. Immediately the one who had received the five talents went and traded with them, and gained five more talents. ... Now after a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. The one who had received the five talents came up and brought five more talents, saying, 'Master, you entrusted five talents to me. See, I have gained five more talents.' His master said to him, 'Well done, good and faithful slave!' Matthew 25:14-16, 19-21
  25. The desire to help and especially to feel we have something to offer others is part of human nature. This is why the veteran quarterback will mentor the rookie, not just because the coach tells him to, but because he wants to, even though he knows he might be helping the rookie take his job. There is also a need in most of us for camraderie and feeling we are part of a team. When you work with other traders that need is somewhat met. It makes us feel good. The idea that by helping others you are potentially hurting yourself is sort of like worrying you are going to kill your lawn by pulling up a few weeds. In other words, it's very unlikely. Oh, if you have some super-innovative trading scheme you might want to keep it to yourself. But which of us really has such a thing? Most of us are using things everyone has known about for years. Let's suppose you write a book about trading and from that book 1000 people become a better traders than you. Is that measly 1000 people going to effect the market to the detriment of your trading. Not in the least. Plus, for that 1000, 100,000 will try trading and fail. If someone has the gift for trading and is meant to trade I'd rather be the one who helped them along on their path. Their success can't hurt me.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.