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

Back from hiatus. I will spare you the details. Suffice it to say my family and I are doing well and I am in a great state of mind to trade.

Trading gappers has been a struggle the past month or so with starting up a new business. I decided to start scalping in the mornings instead, and an hour in the afternoon. I have been watching Richard’s awesome videos, along with www.tradethemarkets.com videos. I realize that momentum breaks would fit my style. I am determining the trend off of a 3 minute chart, and timing entries after what I determine breaks from consolidation areas. I have 89 tick, 1 minute, 2 minute, 3 minute, and 5 minute chart up on my screen. I use a 10 cent stop (30 cent is actually entered then I get out manually if 10 cent stop is hit). I am using IAB platform which makes scalping interesting to say the least. But it is workable. Working momo setups, I use market orders for entries and exits. Will see how it goes.

For longs, I wait for the candles off of the 89 tick, 1 minute, 2 minute, and 3 minute to turn green (as they are in progress and/or completeted), then get long if I determine trend is up. I watch 5 minute chart for S/R, and to determine if move is extended. That is basically all I did today. It worked well today in this momo enviornment. Plus 66 SPY cents on 10 trades. Not bad. Risk 10 cents per trade.

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

I made 3.75 pts if you include my ZG trade, and my computer made 4.25 pts. Yeah, the machine won, again. Go figure.

My computer and I both quit ahead of the FOMC announcement, so we didn’t even have to work a whole day. Sweet!

Have I mentioned that I played with Ninja’s platform last weekend… I must say, it is pretty nice, but still lags tradestation in some areas. In other areas, it is clearly ahead, though. With just a few lines of code, I was able to pull data from different charts on different timeframes together. Hopefully TS is aware of the competition that’s starting to spring up, and will make some enhancements.

Gold gold gold. We love gold.

I don’t know why, but gold trades smoothest around 7AM central time. I normally wake up at 7:45… hrm may need to change my sleeping habits slightly.

• WP-Print 2.20 Readme
  wordpress plug-in for making printer-friendly versions of articles.
  (tags: blogging plugin Wordpress)
• Bourse : cours, cotations des actions et conseils boursiers sur les titres
  (tags: finance French bourse)

Rough day for me!

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

I traded three times today, one loss, one scratch and one more loss. Down -2R for the day, so I quit, like I was supposed to. My trades were seat-of-the-pants, and not from good setups. Bad form. I would have been better off trying to trade Renko trends or working on my automated front end to Remata’s web servers.

Anyway, one thought I’ve had lately about tick charts is this: My TD feed sends roughly one “tick” per second. So if I watch a 120 tick chart, it will serve as a 2 minute chart during the fastest trading times, but during slow times there will be considerably less printed to the chart. Here’s a comparison in RIMM from today, first, 2 min and then 120 tick:

As I stare at those, I get the following observations:

1. Either my charts are too big, or Richard’s web page is too small.

2. The tick chart also condenses the lunchtime chop into fewer candles, as I wanted.

3. It’s easier to see the bull / bear battles on the tick chart. There are huge candles with wide swings on high volume, where the markets are out of balance. When things calm down, and a trend emerges, that seems to be a safer time to get involved.

Anyway, those are my simple thoughts. If you have any, simple or otherwise, leave a comment.

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

• Program Trading and Daily Buy/Sell Execution Levels
  (tags: trading program_trading)
• Hurricanes - Psychic Destruction
  Someone calling himself “Hurricane Richard” claims to be able to suck the life out of hurricanes…
  (tags: weird funny)
• David Hale
  Cool artist
  (tags: painting)

I added yet another row of beads to my bead-reading indicator… I describe that more in this video. I made 5 trades for 5 wins with that indicator today, netting just under 3.5pts. My computer made 4 trades for 3 wins netting 3.25 pts of its own. Life is good.

If you have any suggestions for other indicators that could go in the bead list, feel free to say. I think I have a pretty good cross-section in there now… I have a couple more in mind that I may try, having to do with price and volume volatility since I don’t have that dimension covered yet. It’s trickier though… time to get out the statistics books!

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

If you don’t like rap/hip-hop, don’t click this link, because you won’t get it anyway. If you don’t understand parody, don’t click this link - you won’t get it. By all means, if you don’t want the “hook” stuck in your head, do not click this link.

I had another nice day, and this is my way of giving back. Thanks Teresa Lo. Now click this link if you want to make some money.

The funny thing is that FB (you’ll see who FB is when you click the link) has some serious talent. Its even funnier when you discover his true identity. Kinda like Clark Kent and Superman. If you’re not 18, don’t click the link, because FB is not part of the SuperFriends.

Richard said its boring to post things like “I made money, and then not post a chart of how you did it.” FB should keep this post from getting boring. :-)

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

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

It doesn’t look like the VO is that interested in participating without their fearless leader. We welcome your quick return DT.

It died almost as quick as the WallStreak futures room when Phileo took a brief hiatus.

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

• Blackjack and “Money Management” (long)
  Overview of a few common “increase as you lose” and “increase as you win” systems
  (tags: blackjack money_management betting_strategy)

Here’s my afternoon video. I give an overview of what I think the 3 most important statistics are for a daytrader, and talk more about my beautiful new bead-reading indicator that I’ve been talking about for the last two videos.

My computer never took any more trades since this morning, since it refuses to trade near VWAP, and we were near VWAP for most of the day. I took 5 trades on YM for 5 small wins.

(if you care about the articles I mentioned, they can be mostly found via the Best of MtM page. Maybe the most interesting one is this one, because for whatever reason many traders know nothing about profit factor.)

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

The last two days have more than paid for the Ultimate Trading Course. Teresa Lo recommended that I either use a daily or 15-minute timeframe. As a compromise, I have been experimenting with using limit orders to gain entry after the trade triggers. Two trades for two big winners in the last two days.

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

I show an enhanced version of that beady indicator from yesterday, and my computer’s trade so far.