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)
Thank you sstheo for sharing this journey, you are encouraging many trader here and I am one of them, a month ago I started trading the MES using NT and Dorman Trading and I find this thread really helpful.
We will appreciate so much if you can share with us more info about your trading techniques.
Great question. And you have caused me to really think about my schedule and commitment again. For this I thank you.
I am self-employed as a real estate broker and I am able to schedule most of my appointments for the afternoon and evening. But I do morning appointments when necessary as the trading is secondary. The market opens at 7:30 am my time and I usually trade to about 9:30 am.
This being said, during the first two hours of the market open, I am also doing research to help two groups of real estate investor clients. For the first group I am looking for distressed properties for them to rehab and resell (aka "flip"). For the second group I am looking for single family and multi-family residences for them to buy for rental purposes. Last week, for example, I actually had a group of investors from California on Tuesday and other group from Chicago on Saturday fly out and meet with me to go see potential rental properties. I had researched most of the target properties between 7:30 and 9:30.
The two activities actually work well together because (1) as a scalper I am not in a trade 100% of the time, but I can easily watch the market for setups each few minutes, and (2) I am doing a lot of small tasks with the real estate that allow me to stop what I am doing easily and give time to the market when those setups come.
But your question begs a deeper issue perhaps-- What are the outcomes in each of these chosen activities and could I be more effective if I focused 100%? The answer the the second question is "of course." Focus is the key to success in all of life. I could be a better trader and I could be a better real estate agent. I readily admit that both outcomes have suffered a bit because of the other. Perhaps I would be in the top 5% of realtors instead of the top 20% in Utah. And perhaps I would not be writing a journal about taking a micro account from $1000 to $5000, but about taking a full $100k account to $500k! LOL.
One of the best traders in our chat room is a former institutional trader. His father, who in his 90's is still trading and loving it and doing well. He says it is great "Alzheimer's prevention." I also know lots of older real estate agents (some should have retired long ago!). So I think I can keep going on both for many years. But if you made me choose one over the other right now, I would choose trading. With my MES and Leeloo funded accounts I am beginning to be profitable. Several of the guys in the room are averaging $1000 to $2000+ per day. If I were doing this I might let the real estate slide a bit. LOL
But until I reach that level of proficiency, I will keep up the real estate too. I still have a mortgage to pay...
I have taken a short break from my own live account, and I am trading in the CME Micro E-mini challenge. This was set up to give some exposure to the new micro contracts, and it seems to be working.
Out of 1400 entrants, about 500 are actively trading, and I finished out the day in the number 11 spot. (I was number 7 for a moment today.)
Look at how many trades some of these guys take!
My goal is to finish on Friday in the top 10. I could still pull it off. The top 3 spots earn live cash.
I agree with some other FIO members that this contest may teach some bad trading habits, but we can overlook that for a week. (It would have been better had they been looking for "risk adjusted returns.")
I will share them as I see them or use them. Today was a classic drop.
The stop run cascade. Today we finally saw a break of a long bull run since the Fed announced a rate cut was coming. Once this bull run finally ran out of steam, the bears attacked. With each support level that was broken, more selling came in as the bulls had to sell to get out of their positions. So the bears and bulls were both selling! And it picks up speed until both groups say "enough!"
Below is the ES over the past few days. The horizontal lines are support lines placed at opens, closes, highs and lows on the daily chart. Each one hit triggers a rush to sell as explained. The tighter the range of the previous few days, the faster the drop (or pop if reversed) can occur.
This type of action can happen on any time frame. Just determine where the stops are being placed.