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Tradestation Margin Reqs for various Futures Contracts
Oct
12
Actually, my service just came back on… so maybe I will trade a little today… not sure because I really hate jumping in late. Will see. I spent a little time this morning sprucing up my tradestation setup a bit. Now I will get audio alerts for high and low $TICK readings, and I’ve also set myself up to look at gold futures. I wanted to have at least one thing to look at which wasn’t quite so correlated with the S&P. I’d look at oil, but I don’t want to add another data feed until I’m completely rocking the futures (and I don’t want to scare Mama’s Boy out of the game just when he’s starting a winning streak).
On a sad note, not only did I scare Ugly away from futures, but now he won’t even daytrade at all. That’s a little extreme, but whatever. Good luck, Ugly.
(don’t send me angry mail… I know I didn’t actually scare anyone away from anything)
[Edit: I did watch the markets a bit, but I won't make another video. Made an ES trade for just 1/4 pt. Tried to get filled at the bid for an EMD trade that would have worked, but didn't get filled. I kinda-sorta watched ZG (gold) today but am not yet ready to trade it. The volume, at least today, is very erratic. One candle will take 2 minutes and the next one will take 9 minutes. Crazy.]
Oct
12
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A retail investor trying to trade just using displayed liquidity on public exchanges is operating at a big disadvantage. I’m surprised the SEC has allowed this to happen.
Oct
11
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
DT kicked ass today. I told him I wouldn’t fuck with him while he was down. Check out the VO. I guess its time to unload. He obviously doesn’t need our pity anymore.
Here is DT after watching the hockey game and drinking beer.
DT at the beach!
DT’s trading mindset for today’s session.
The VO sticks together.
NSFW! Motivational pics that couldn’t be posted here at the family site.
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
Oct
11
Man, as the video shows, I had the choice between going long General Electric Company (NYSE: GE) or going long Ryland Group, Inc. (NYSE: RYL) at the open… and I chose fricking GE. Oh well. Per my plan, I only watched stocks in the morning. So far, I am liking my plan. I also traded Macy’s Inc. (NYSE: M) for just a tiny gain, and it dropped like a rock a few seconds after I covered. Damn, just not my day in stocks.
In futures, I made 5 trades for 4 wins and 1 loss. I am still not a very good futures trader… the trades I choose are not ideal at all, even though I have indicators sometimes screaming at me to dive in and make a fortune. Especially today, it was difficult for me because we had so much volume that I didn’t have much time to think. Most good trades passed me by while I considered my options.
But, I do think I am making serious progress. My win rate is around 80% this week so far, which is similar to my win rate for stock trades. My number one problem is still that my average win is smaller than my average loss. That makes it hard for my PnL to get any traction, even winning 80% of the time. However, barring a string of losses tomorrow, I will have made money in futures this week. If I have a good day tomorrow, I will have broken even on my futures account (I’m down about $150 from when I started on 9/24/2007). That milestone always feels good. From there, the sky’s the limit!
| Stocks Mentioned In This Article | |
|---|---|
| Stock | Links |
| GE |  |  |  |
| RYL | | | |
| M | | | |
Oct
11
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
The last time I was arrested, it was a pain going through all of my known aliases — tapeworm, bass ackward trader, shorty shitstain.
Actually, I chose tapeworm because of my desire to read the tape. That dream never materialized, so I changed it to bass ackwards trader. If you follow this link, you can see where I was actually headed with that one. It seemed like a good idea at the time. There are a few charts over there. Eventually, I will post the links of all the hairbrain trading ideas I’ve had.
I’m in love with the MAMA (MESA Adaptive Moving Average) for the moment. Oil has had some nice trends, and its kept me on the right side for the most part. It may be the flavor of the month. We will see. So now you can add another alias to the list — MAMA’s boy. In fact I need to let the local sheriff know, so they can update my records.
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
Oct
11
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
MAMA for DUMMIES!
If this success continues, I’ll have Richard change my name from Bass Ackward’s Trader to MAMA’s Boy!
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
Oct
11
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Game Walkthrough
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Division of the S&P 500 into 9 parts… cool map by today’s percent change, and the % weighting in the S&P 500.
Oct
10
I started watching ES and EMD today, instead of just ES. More details in the video. 3 trades for 100% wins.
Take a second and drool over how great those eotpro fib extensions are. Really awesome.
No stock trades today… they weren’t moving like I hoped they would, so I stopped even looking.
Oct
10
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
I’ve been using the MESA Adaptive Moving Average like a set of training wheels. It keeps me on the right side of the trend, and used in conjuction with inside, narrow range bars it provides a nice low risk entry. I need to work on holding for larger gains.
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
Oct
9
Not on my game today… will be better tomorrow. Check out the incredible series of TAP box plays today, though. That setup is awesome.
Oct
9
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
I’m on the road this week, traveling for my day job. I’ll not be trading much (if at all), or blogging, or even Wallstreaking. If you start to jones for your daily dose of emo, then just click my name to go to my blog reruns to tide you over ;)
Anyway, I was reading about Timothy Sikes, whose book Richard profiled a little while back. I was reading his latest blog post, and when I went to make a comment, something struck me to use as a disciplinary trick to keep me from forcing trades.
Timothy gave out his pick for trading in the next session (emphasis is mine):
You’ve been taught to think that you always need another play and that if your money is just sitting in your account, it’s not working for you. OK, here’s my pick for tomorrow:
Nothing!
You don’t need to trade stocks every day, or guess how the market will fare, or how oil will fare, or how Carl Icahn’s rumored blah blah blah might make you money. No! The way I built my wealth so quickly was to wait for opportunities to present themselves–not try to will them into existence. In fact, my largest losses have always occurred whenever I did try to play these guessing games. Yes, that’s correct–you’ve all been brainwashed into churning your accounts far too often and I have a lot of work to do to teach you the right way to trade. So, take some time and reflect, there will be further opportunities, you just need to have patience.
Most of my losers have come from forcing trades when I had no setup, no edge. I constantly struggle with sitting on my hands when there are no compelling setups to trade. I always want to be in a trade! I try to trade all throughout the session, every session. Timothy’s words from above further emphasized something I already knew I was doing wrong. But with my emotional makeup, I always want to be in a trade. Sitting out is painful! I’ve come to realize that for me, losing is actually less painful than sitting out, because I choose to do that rather than sit on the sidelines many times.
Well, I posted the following comment to Tim’s blog post:
Most of my losses come from forced trades. This is good advice, Tim. I need to take it more often! I want to trade all during the day, every day. If I’m not in a trade, I feel that I’m missing out! I was up 30% in two months starting in July, but then I ground it all away back to 0 by trading day in and day out through the September chop.
As I typed in the text in bold above, that thought finally came into my conscious mind. I knew I always wanted to be in a trade, but I hadn’t really thought about it. Writing things down helps to solidify vague ethereal ideas into concrete ideas. This is one of the main reasons I blog about my trading–it helps me to realize things about myself that I didn’t “know”. Many times, when I write something, that’s the first time I really even thought about it!
So what was my big idea to help my discipline problem? Since I always want to be in a trade, that’s exactly what I’ll do. I’ll always have a trade on! I’ve been playing around with the idea of trading several systems simultaneously, one range-bound and one trending, instead of trying to guess which kind of a market we’ll get each day. I’ll implement one of these systems right away. I’ll carve off some small portion of my equity, and continuously trade a trend-following system in something like QQQQ. That way, I’ll always be long or short a small position in the markets, and if I see a good setup elsewhere, one that’s good enough to take my attention away from the system trade I’m in, then I’ll jump on it. Otherwise, I’ll just watch my system trade. No need to sit on my hands, no fighting my urge to be in a trade. I see it as emotional judo–take my weakness and use its power against itself. This should really help the quality of my trades increase. When I’m in a trade, I don’t tend to take other trades at the same time, even some that look good, and that should work in my favor in this scenario!
I’ll post more about my thoughts for this system over the next week. Please feel free to comment about any of this, whether you agree or disagree! And thanks, Tim, for the inspiration!
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
Oct
8
The worst trading days always lead to the most trades. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is.
In stocks, I had 4 trades for 3 wins and 1 loss. In ES, I made 5 trades, for 3 wins and 2 losses. I’m still not trading ES like a pro, though. Gotta get better at it. I’m having a great time programming TS strategies and backtesting them, though. I took the time to learn how to do that this weekend. Turns out it’s really easy. The hard part is making a strategy that backtests profitably. I found one ES strategy that works reliably on the short side over the last 5 months. So, I’ve got that running now to give me a heads up when those trades happen. It’s not set to automatically execute trades, though. I want to push the button myself for now, anyway. Hopefully we’ll get some of those trades soon, so I can show them off. There were no signals for that strategy today.
You can see on the stock trades that I made an inticator that points out box formations, so I can try out box plays more often (I find them harder to spot than triangles sometimes). I traded one .50 box today, but I used a very tight stop instead of the full .50 stop. You might say that was a mistake because that meant I had to take two entries (1 stop-out and 1 win) instead of just having a single winner. After all… the box play never loses money! I swear, that thing’s unstoppable!
Oct
7
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
To use phase, we must first understand what it is. Put simply, phase is a description of where we are in the cycle. Are we at the beginning, middle or end of the cycle? Phase is a quantitative description of that location. Each cycle passes through 360 degrees to complete the cycle. One basic definition of a cycle is that it consists of an action having a uniform rate-change of phase. For example, a 10-day cycle passes through 360 degrees every 10 days. For it to be a perfect cycle, it must change phase at the rate of 36 degrees per day each day throughout the cycle.
How does this help us see a Trend Mode? Easy. By reverse logic. In a Trend Mode, there is no cycle, or at the very least, a very weak one. Therefore, there is no rate change of phase. So, if we compare the rate change of measured phase to the theoretical rate change of phase of the weak dominant cycle present in the Trend Mode, we get a correlation failure. This failure to correlate the two cases of the rate change of phase enables us to define the presence of a trend. Because we know that we have a trend, it is easy to set our strategy to a simple buy-and-hold until the trend disappears.
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
