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Behind the Eminis there is a lot of leverage - and therefore potential emotions.
Last weeks I traded the MNQ.
I chose the MNQ because the NQ is the instrument I know best.
I am mainly a DOM-trader. That is to some extent a curse.
To collect some value-adding knowledge takes some years...if you donīt have a profitable mentor.
As a beginner, other, slower markets like interest rate futures or the ES, felt tooooooooooo slow.
I wanted fast results...That was an error.
But as said, the learning takes a long time and that is why I am with the NQ and for that reason it also makes also no sense to change the focus on another main market.
When it comes to the MNQ the problem is that is feels different than the NQ and the moves on the DOM are even more brain-damaging than with the NQ. Itīs too jumpy.
Also looking at two DOMs for both instruments was too confusing.
The costs are too high for my trading style.
I know change back to the NQ. Trading it in SIM.
Furthermore I focus only on that one instrument instead of 3 - how many professional football players are out there which are professional tennis stars and soccer players at the same time???
Like @wldman suggested I am going to build a stock portfolio, too.
what else I learned - besides not trading drunken:
- reliable software/technology has a bigger impact than I thought first
- cost structure, as long as it is in the "common" range, is not the crucial driver of profitability if you do it right
- your trading style is not the crucial driver of profitability if you do it right
- the instrument you trade is not the crucial driver of profitability if you do it right
- it is pretty obvious when you should trade...if not: one needs more practice
- doing "business" every day in the same market holds more risk than opportunity
- spending all the time on one instrument could work almost like magic
- itīs a game...and two kinds of people most probably win it:
the one how has the most money or
if this is not the case, the one who could wait the best
Itīs almost impertinent how small edges are these days.
Netting (after commissions) only 3-6 ticks on average.
6 ticks is quite good.
I also found things giving more, but generally such patterns decay quite fast.
Start looking for an edge with a swing trading strategy. They exist. They don't require staring at the market in real time all day. I felt the way you did at one point and decided I'm not going to settle for mediocre strategies anymore. I stopped watching the charts and reading the news everyday, took money out of my account, and worked on my edge for a couple months. I found it. It's worth it to ignore the market for a while and work on something that makes the returns you desire with a trading style you are comfortable with.
Interesting. Once I pinged several times servers in Chicago and others where IQFeed is.
On normal days it was between 130-170 sometimes even more.
Saw already 220. So, in really heavy times it could even be more.
Last few years I compared data feeds, DOM`s and combinations ...of course also next to next.
I accumulated 1000īs of hours starring at DOMīs...
It is not about theoretical physics where an electron needs a specific time to travel a specific way and the human eye processing data faster or slower compared to that in a theoretical world
In the real world when data travels from Europe to the USA and back there could somewhere be a bottleneck.
When TT is using a dedicated infrastructure but Tradovate using an Amazon server there could be a bottleneck.
If IQfeed is transmitting every tick for bid and ask and trade and all the changes per level of depth there could be a bottleneck...
When your software does a lot of calculation or your actual software setting, be it by the software of its own or the volume of data it receives, there ...yeah you know...
And then, of course, there could be several bottlenecks at the same time.
So again. I do not say that the one data feed is always several seconds behind another feed or wrong.
In slow markets or market periods, there is no issue.
If your edge is anyway that huge -no issue.
If your trading style is not performance orientated - no issue.
If you are not a nickel nurser like me - no issue.
Perhaps there are more reasons but I am more in the mood for coffee now...
About 12 years of trades. The first year of trading was full time. That was my first profitable year. 2007/2008. I was only trading the S&P at that time.
I've traded off and on since and been profitable off and on since. I gave it up and came back after blowing accounts. My problem is that I've never stuck with one way of analyzing the market and would always look for a stronger edge with new tools and rearrange my charts all the time. Look at different time frames all the time, etc. Only over the last few months have I come upon the swing strategy I'm speaking of. I have backtested with data from 2012 to current and nothing has changed with it's effectiveness. I am live with the strategy now, but I haven't accumulated enough live trades to have reliable stats. It's not like one kind of trade, it's actually a collection of trades that occur in a specific sequence over and over. I just keep finding more variations around the same concept. It's been a major paradigm shift for me. Hourly bars are my core time frame. Only a few moving averages and different volume-related indicators being used.