Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
Daytrader999- We have been told the end of March. It is extremely hard to get a definitive date when dealing with programming but updates we receive seem to show that we are on track for meeting the end of March deadline.
And all SC users thank their diety of choice every day for that. If it were legal for me to sell my lifetime license of NT I would be so happy to. I do recall SC having about a serious one-week learning curve. But after you learn it, seriously, there is not ONE thing NT does better. Don't want to muddy the waters here, I'm just amazed at how people are reluctant to get out of their 2x2 NT box and explore freedom with a platform that lets you do pretty much anything you want, and 10x what NT does, faster, cheaper, more stable, more updates, less memory.
I personally offer my SC expertise for anyone having learning curve issues with it. If I switched back to NT now, I would also have a learning curve I'm sure. It's simply what you're used to.
Today I continued to SIM trade in order to continue getting a good feel for CL. I also went off on a few tangents and tried some other things.
First off, I can say that I made a good bit of money trading today. +$1,894 net P/L.
Things I'm not happy with:
-I didn't cut losers as quickly as I should
-I got away from MY methodology because of outside influence
-I added to losing positions more than once
Why this near break down in discipline? It certainly has something to do with being "ahead of schedule" with required P/L for the combine... without thinking about it, I believe I was trying to leverage my lead in a sense. This is the wrong mentality to have, and I will beat it back down starting right now. Another thing is that maybe I got a bit lazy/relaxed because I'm only trading sim. I've recently been trading quite large size, live, OPM, etc. It's almost like I starting screwing around a bit today because of a lack of a NEED to do the right things. I hope that makes sense. I need to go ahead and start the combine soon. Maybe it's a good problem to have... to need some pressure on me. It's a lot better than the opposite problem, which I see many dealing with... they put on a tiny bit more size, or just go live, or enter the combine and all the sudden the pressure changes them. Well, the lack of pressure can have an effect on your trading as well, once you're used to pressure.
I also let some people in a chat room influence me. They were quite good at picking tops and bottoms, and I thought I would give it w whirl. This led to most of my bad trades today.
I'm really not even interested in showing the trades today, but I will not omit them to hide my mistakes and I also want to keep some consistency to my journaling here.
Actually, I think I will get more individualized with each trade's review, even more than I normally do. Just to prove a point to my ego, ha take that.
Trades 1 and 2
Price had been in a range with the range low at .55. I got long a bull candle off the range, quickly stopped out (should have been a red flag). Next, I re entered the chart as price tried to bounce off .55 again. Another quick stop out.
Trade 3
Do not like this entry, I was upset for the two stopped longs, and I chased price down (bad R:R for me). So, I hung in the heat I knew I would take for chasing, gave the trade a chance to really run, but also neglected my scale OUTs... so the whole trade was stopped at +1.
Trades 4 and 5
After the +1 exit, price dipped and I got back in short. At this point I've nearly abandoned everything I know. Quickly stopped, price pulled back on the two range and I got long, quickly stopped out. It doesn't get uglier.
Trade 6
You can't see all the action on the two range because I held the winner for a long time, but you can see I entered short in the jumbled up stuff on the 250 tick, and you can also see my 4 scale outs. Unfortunately I scaled out of the last position before a significant continuation in the down move, but that's life.
Trade 7
Oh boy.... this is ugly. Had a $1,200 MAE on this trade... Entered short.... the trend broke to the upside, had a chance to scratch at BE, and didn't do it. Added to the loser at the top of an upswing, then got out at BE of the average price for the position. Not worth $1,200 risk.
Trade 8
Nice trade here, I'm out of the heater short in a developing uptrend, so now I'm free to actually trade with the trend.
Trades 9 and 10
Same trade as 8 for #9, got stopped out of runner, but realized I still wanted to be in the trade, so I scalped in another entry for trade 10.
Trades 11 and 12
Attempted another long off the trend channel. I should have exited this trade quickly, and I did not do that. When I did exit, I reversed to long. Again, not a good trade. Not waiting for actual setups with my method on the re-entry trade. I hung in the short for 15 ticks of MAE, then took a few ticks profit as it bottomed out.
Trade 13
Not good. Shorted, added as price went against me, added again, got out at BE. Another 15 ticks of heat for BE.
Trade 14
Nice pullback entry after the strong leg up, failing to break down after an attempt to go lower. Profits near previous swing high.
Trade 15
The mac-daddy of the bad trades today. $2,720 MAE. Eesh. Pretty self explanatory, got short (with no entry method from what I usually use) added 3 more times as price went against me. I got lucky. Price came down just as hard, and I actually let this one turn into profits instead of thankfully stopping out at BE.
--------------
That was it for me for today. A roller coaster of a day. I let some people in a chat room influence what I do to a certain extent, and I thought it looked like fun to try and pick tops and bottoms with zero confirmation.
Something I've been working on lately is monitoring MAE, MFE, P/L type bar graph. I got the idea from FT71. This version is of each 1 lot or 2 lot executed. It is not grouped by ATM. So each bar is not a trade in itself, it's just one part of a trade, you can see they typically group in bunches of 3 or 4 to make up a trade.
You can see that there was something CLEARLY wrong with what I was doing today...
I hope they will include FESX soon, I have seen mentioning of adding EUREX exchange soon. Or am I mistaken? FEXS is great on commissions: only 2.5 usd round turn while one tick is 10 euros (13 usd). Moves nicely too.
The relevant CUMULATIVE stats for the Combine are now:
Winning Days %: 83%
Win %: 56%
win:loss ratio: 2.0 ($668 to -$331)
winner time held: loser hold time: winners held longer
net P/L: +$7,615
max DD: -$2,720 (unrealized MAE actually), End of trade max DD: -$2,035. Amount ever below initial balance: -$480
(One thing I called topstep and asked about today was max DD... They confirmed that their max DD is not what I would consider an actual maximum drawdown. It's simply a rule that your account can not go more than, in my case, -$4,500 below it's initial STARTING BALANCE of $150,000. ) So they use the term a bit wrong, but that's ok, as long as we understand the requirement.
It seems to me that TST may in face be ok with traders taking the method of building a cushion, then taking more risk.
I also wonder if I had a day like today in the combine... if they would even notice the actual intra-trade risk I took, and maybe not even pass me/fund me at the end of the combine, even if I met all requirements??
As far as how this would be tracking towards successfully hitting the P/L targets for the combine, I made a graph. The steeper (blue) line is the pace of P/L you have to maintain to pass the combine in the 20 day minimum. The less steep (green) line is the pace of P/L you have to maintain to hit the P/L requirement in the maximum 40 trading days you could use if needed. My daily cumulative P/L is plotted in red.
I was having a conversation with a non-trading friend, and explaining them things about my journals here on futures.io (formerly BMT) and such, and they got me thinking about how helpful it could be for someone to see me trade, and hear me talk out my thought process live.
Join me as I continue to sim trade CL and prep for the combine. I'll be starting at 7am CST.
I think you may have to click on the audio button once logged in in order to hear me. I'll have your end muted, but feel free to chat if you like.