Ended the day profitable, but not by very much. I was mainly focused on getting comfortable with TradeStation. I’m nut sure exactly when I’ll start making live trades on futures. I’m still just watching the quotes, trying to get a feel for how they move. I will focus on ES first. I had initially planned to start with YM, based on the advice in Mastering the Trade and elsewhere, but the ECBOT outage on the same day I was deciding kinda changed my mind. Anyway, 3 trades on TEK… 1 win, 1 loss, and 1 b/e (or, if you want to be precise about it, 1 tiny loss).
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September 21st, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Hi Richard, I am especially interested in Tradestation’s automated trading and EasyLanguage. I would be interested to read/watch what you thought about it and if it is worth opening an account over. Also - does TS charge a monthly fee? Thanks
September 22nd, 2007 at 9:11 am
TS seems to be a fast, robust and professional platform - looks good so far!
By the way I have been using QT with a Scottrade feed for a couple of days now and the bwdth that I am getting SUCKS! I am lucky if it goes in the triple digits and it takes forever to backfill a stock with intraday data. If I go to a 3′ chart it even seems to skip some candles. Any advice?
September 22nd, 2007 at 11:29 am
Ugly - Been with TS for over a year, written a lot of ES code so far. As far as scripting language goes it couldn’t be easier. The automated trading is good as well but haven’t used it live yet, excellent for backtesting if you believe in that stuff.
TS charges $99 unless you do a set number of trades per month, check out their site.
Richard, might want to look at ER2 as well.. If you like your indicators it’ll provide a better view than ES (IMHO of course) since it gives more ticks than ES. YM isn’t too bad either in that respect.
I appreciate your videos, I only trade futures these days but had a similar style to yours when doing stocks. Please keep it up. :)
September 22nd, 2007 at 2:12 pm
I haven’t looked at ER2 yet. Just like I naturally avoid the wildest stocks, I have a natural aversion to ER2 just by its reputation. But, I’ll look at it eventually. One thing at a time.
The trades per month is something silly like 10, so any daytrader would have no trouble waiving the per-month fees. There are fees for data from the exchanges, though.
September 22nd, 2007 at 2:16 pm
@David: I used my TD Ameritrade feed with Quotetracker, so I don’t really have much experience with your setup. In fact, the reason I went to QT in the first place was so I could get away from Scottrade’s data. They don’t count volume correctly, and have been promising to fix that for almost two years now. The one or two times I did hook up scottrade and QT, I did not notice any problems with the charts or the backfill speed. I could just be superstitious, but I think scottrade’s 10 minute charts are the most reliable–I’ve noticed the fewest data problems with those on their elite platform. I know it should all just be different views of the same data… but, that’s what I saw.
September 22nd, 2007 at 2:19 pm
@Ugly: the easylanguage part is almost exactly like VBA for Word or Excel, if you’ve ever done that. Very.. easy. I’ve already coded like 5 indicators based on ideas I’ve seen in books. I haven’t tried any strategy testing yet, but it doesn’t look too hard. I may try to make strategies out of combinations of indicators tomorrow, and I’ll let you know how it goes.
September 22nd, 2007 at 3:04 pm
@Richard: QT w/ Scottrade is basically useless to me for candles
September 23rd, 2007 at 8:48 am
If you look at ER2 on a tick chart you can get a lot of nice moves. I would have to say that tho unless I’d want to change my nick name. Anyhow, looking forward to hearing what you think of TS.
September 23rd, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Hi Richard,
Glad to hear you are trying TradeStation. I have been using it for many years. I don’t use its Matrix for trading, just its charting and Easy language. I have written all the indicators in EL that we use in our trading room and they seem to all work well. Good luck with TS from all of your EOTPro friends.
Glen
OUFan
September 23rd, 2007 at 7:28 pm
@David: I just launched Quotetracker, attached it to Scottrade’s Realtime Streamer, and was able to see 3 minute charts just fine. I looked at several symbols that I haven’t viewed in weeks so I know I was getting scottrade’s data and not cached TD data. I really think it works about as well as it does on their platform, for me. I know their data isn’t as clean as other feeds, though. Maybe you are getting connected to an unlucky server. :-)
@Glen: thanks!