I have found a lot of valuable information on futures.io (formerly BMT) and wanted to create my personal trading journal showing how i have combined several tools into somethings that works for myself.
My first experience with trading goes back 30 years ago and at that time the tools like we know them today and the real-time information was not that ready available. At the age of 17 I got passionately interested in financial markets and a friend of a friend showed me an expensive charting program. It was financially out of reach for me and at the end I started writing my own charting software. A few years later that software was commercialized and I created my first company. I graduated as a software engineer and my first job was to work with a stock broker on the IT systems. Three years later I left that job and have been self-employed since then. Mid 90's i sold the charting software and started developing software in the payment space.
Some time ago, a personal friend (who was one of the early-days customers who bought my charting software in the 90's) asked me to make an analysis of the tools available for trading futures. There is a huge amount of information and there are numerous tools out both free and commercial.
The result of the analysis was an inventory of what is needed:
- trading platform
- some add-on tools to generate signals
- a broker account
- a data feed
- preferable some redundancy on infrastructure (internet connectivity, power and equipment)
The next step was implementing this into a working solution.
It all looked very simple and I was rushing forward to trade with the new system. Very quickly it resulted in loosing a bit of money. Various mistakes that are all well documented on futures.io (formerly BMT) by various people. Back to SIM trading for a while and studying and reading was the result.
I feel that one chapter is closed now and a new chapter starts. Having a good understanding of the tools that work and their limitation. Understanding the risk/reward and being able to correctly asses a trade before entering it. Able to approach a trade with the right psychology (something that was omitted in the first analysis as it was wrongly perceived as a puur technology play, but very important).
This journal will be about the new chapter although i might post a bit more on the first chapter's lessons learned.