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What a day. 3 wins, 2 losses. My execution was horrible. I am glad these errors are popping up now that I am trading small. I kept my losses small, but let a R 2 gain turn into a loss on my second trade. I bought more shares instead of selling them on my 3rd trade. I am going to look at the “close position” tab on Book Trader with IAB to fix this finger F problem. At the end of the 1st hour of trading (my “day”), I am up 20 SPY cents, or 28 bucks and R 1.4 net. I have gained R 12 in 5 trading days. As a reward I will trade 300 shares tomorrow. Marty Schwartz look out.

On a side note, I eventually plan to scalp YM. I was watching it this morning, and the spread was 1 point more than 95 percent of the time (a guesstimate).

SPY Scalps:

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Market kicked my ass today…. and then my computer kicked me while I was down!

(ended the day down 3 pts… no big deal)

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2 for 3 today with a loss that I let get out of hand for my style. I think I will put in a hard stop in at 10 cents for the current market and my methodology. My 2 winners had drawdowns of 1 cent and 3 cents during the trade. Plus 21 SPY cents total, R 1.8 net, or a whopping 36 bucks.

SPY Scalps:

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This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com

I’m not sure where my dog learned this. I guess he’s more aware of his surroundings than I thought.

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I tried a trade near the open, which turned out to be a loss. Shortly after, it was hard not to notice that there was very little ES volume… so I called it a day.

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2 scalps today for 12 SPY cents. I could have gotten a lot more out of the second trade. I was ready to bail on a 6 cent initial protective stop today. I still consider 10 cents my “official risk”, so I netted R 1 after commissions. My max drawdown on each trade was 1 cent using market orders. I am pretty freaken happy with that! Done early as I see low volume ahead of the weekend.

Chart SPY:

Time and Sales SPY:

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This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com

I went over my scalp winners for today and yesterday, and these are the drawdown amounts after my entry for each trade in SPY cents before I exited for a profit:

7 cents
2 cents
4 cents
5 cents
2 cents
3 cents
1 cent
1 cent
2 cents

I am very happy with these results. These are with market orders, so I am pleased I am hitting the momentum at the right time for the most part. My stop is mentally set at 10 cents, with a 30 cent hard stop in case the shit hits the fan. I am wondering if I should tighten my mental stop to 5 or 6 cents. The smallest winner (2 cents) had the biggest drawdown (7 cents)…..go figure.

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I had no microphone, but I wanted to put something out, because I know that some people don’t visit the website, but only watch via youtube.

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I’m at my parents’ house today, visiting for Thanksgiving. I missed the early morning gold action because their firewall was blocking tradestation and I had to troubleshoot that. After a couple adjustments, I got it to work fine on their network (note to anyone who cares, since it’s not obvious in their online help: you need to open up TCP traffic on ports 11xxx).

I’ve never traded in front of my parents before, and I must say it’s a little intimidating. But, I made 2 trades so far for 2 wins in the first hour, and my mom said she wanted to quit her job and trade along with the eotpro.com folks! So, I’d say that was a positive reaction.

I didn’t let the computer trade because it’s a wireless connection here, and I really don’t want the parents to roll their eyes at me as my computer throws away hundreds of dollars. “But mooooom, it usually makes money, I swear!” But, my computer _would_ have made 1 trade so far for over 2 pts of profit. Damn!

I forgot to bring my headset, so I don’t know if I will be able to make any videos for the rest of the week.

[edit: I stopped for the day shortly after this post, because I think the cash markets were going to close at noonish... don't know if there was any action later, or not.]

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I forgot to mention I have a NYSE TICK chart up as well. So, 89 tick, 1 min, 2 min, 3 min, and 5 minute chart, and NYSE TICK chart, that is all I need (Steve Martin joke).

I tried to play the open like I saw on tradethemarkets.com. The first trade worked, but then I kept scalping immediately for 2 more trades for a 12.5 cent loss and a 10 cent loss. I should have had 10 cents out of the first trade, but for some reason my trade details and ticker disappeared from the IAB execution screen. I gotta figure out what happened there.

I need to wait for swings and a definable setup to scalp the way I do. So my very bad. I recovered, and ended the day up R 2.25. I quit early as I see chop, and low volume ahead of Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving all! My wife is cooking….I mean buying a cooked turkey from the Marriot Hotel here in Mexico. Nothing like the taste of home ;).

All times central on the trade log.

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This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com

As I’ve been looking back at my trading history, I’m realizing how much I have lost over the three years I’ve been trading.

I started with $1000 in a Scottrade account, and I turned that into $300 through n00b trades, holding on to losers and buying cheap options. I literally knew nothing back then. I refunded and lost a couple hundred more. Then I funded up to $2000 in my Zecco account. Free trades, but PDT rules. I lost a few hundred of that, too. I took a $10k TD account that was only supposed to be safe money (like CD safe) and took it to $9000, refunded to $10k and back to $9000, where it sits now. And you know the story about how I took my $2000 Zecco money to the prop firm, turned it into $2600 and then down to $1200 where I am today, through overtrading, bad discipline and just a really unfortunate situation with BIDU and my order servers shutting down.

Adding it up in my head, after three years of active trading, I’ve lost around $3000. My trading accounts have been around $2000 most of the time that I’ve traded, so I’ve completely blown up 1.5 times so far. People (not on the internets) who know that I “trade” have no idea what my actual performance is, including my wife, sadly. If she did, I’d never trade again! Whether that would be good or bad I’ll leave for you to decide.

Why do I write this?

Part confession–I am Prospectus, and I am a net loser at trading. Honesty on the internet, a cloak in reality. Welcome to my sad world.

Part warning–Trading is NOT easy, and the trading education, especially the self-taught one, does not come fast, easy, or cheap.

Finally, to place these facts in front of me, where I have to face them. It’s so easy to zero the PnL meter and start again. Then being a couple hundred in the hole isn’t so bad. But that meter’s been running the whole time, and financially, as a trader, it would have been better if I had never been born, to use a figure of speech.

What have I gained for my $3000 and three years of effort?

Knowledge of myself–my flaws and weaknesses, but also some strengths.

Some knowledge of the markets, though admittedly I seem to know more about what doesn’t work than what does.

Ability to execute orders along with endless market jargon.

Friends in many traders throughout the world who have offered help and encouragement.

Have I learned how to be a profitable trader? No dice there. In the end, that’s the whole objective of trading, and so far, success has eluded me, or I’ve avoided success, depending on how you look at it.

So there’s a full inventory of where I stand. I’m not going to quit, so the only direction for me is forward.

This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com