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Hi everyone,
Many many moons ago I was a licensed bond broker, and then a licensed and registered financial advisor. Both paths left me disgusted and I moved on career wise. Life has taught me a lot. I’m now retired and I’m getting back in the game. One for me personally and two to be a better provider in God’s house. Looking forward to this next chapter and fellowship.
I am returning to trading after a 15 year hiatus. I used to trade ALSI Index futures (South Africa) until 2004. My best friend is a full time private trader, and in late 1990s he was very successful. His account grew spectacularly, he bought a house in an affluent area of Johannesburg and set up a brokerage company there. My experience with trading was buying a few stocks on JSE, nothing else.
So, I got interested in trading futures and did some research. Eventually I figured out that mechanical trading is the most suitable for my mental makeup. I bought Metastock and designed a simple program. We called it MadMax. I don't remember exact parameters, but it was simple. Buy if close is higher than yesterday's close by some percentage (I think it was 0.7), sell accordingly. Trailing stop of low/high of last three bars. Funniest thing, in couple of months my strategy was performing very well. To the point that my friend decided to trade his clients' money with this system.
Next thing - 9/11. We were appropriately short and made a good profit. Then... It's like in that joke when a guy brings his TV set to the technician. Technician: "What's wrong?@ - The guy: "I don't know. I was sitting watching TV, picking my ear with a small nail. Then something clicked and the sound disappeared..." So, something clicked. The crash of 9/11 ended up in a spectacular V-reversal. MadMAx gave a buy signal, and from there I (we) decided to wrestle the market tooth and nail. The market was going up, we kept selling. I also kept increasing the size. SO the account went from 100,000 (ZAR) to 350,000 and back to 100,000, a which point I decided to stop stupid shit.
Some months later I started trading volatility expansion by Larry Williams. By then I switched to TradeStation i2000 and was able to code intraday entries. For those not familiar with it: buy at open + yesterday's high-low * k, opposite for the short. K was 1.0 for longs and I think 1.5 for shorts. Exit on low/high last three bars. Guess what, it worked like a charm. My account, again, went to close to 300,000. Then the system stopped working, and I gave it back. Again, by increasing the size after every loss. Back to 100,000.
Since then I didn't have any spectacular account movements, but some interesting thing did happen. At that time I convinced my wife to quit her day job and become full-time mom. In exchange I promised to pay her a salary of 10,000 (ZAR). It lasted for about a year, and every one of those payments came from my trading account. It would go up and down about 20,000, and every month I withdrew 10k and transferred it to my wife. At the time I didn't realise the significance of that, but later it became clear that taking money out of the account (as opposed to trying to build it to level of capable buying the Universe) is a good thing.
Anyway. I am getting back to trading. I still feel better with mechanical rather than discretionary trading. I want to trade Forex, mostly because of a good diversification opportunities, flexible time, no gaps and low entry (CFDs). I haven't used EasyLanguage for a long time, and it feels completely alien. But then again, I will be fine. Most good systems are pretty simple. I have some programming goals in mind that are ambitious (for me) - adding to the existing positions, for example - but that's down the track.
Newbie futures trader here. My background is software engineering. Pivoting to trading (hopefully :-))
I am exploring different approaches for futures trading. Any tips are appreciated.
I test drove Tradeviews, TradeNavigator and Sierra Chart. Settled on Sierra chart as my main charts tool.
If anybody has any question regarding programming free feel to ping me. Excited to be here.
Welcome! The best way to get started is to start reading posts, giving people a 'Thanks' when you like their posts or comments, and participating in discussions. Many people like to keep a trading journal here, which is what I do.
Welcome! Pivoting to trading...hahaha, good pun. I find it funny because I'm working on pivots right now.
I use TradeStation as my main trading platform, mostly because it is our legacy application (and we are algo traders in our shop), but I use Sierra for analysis. I love the speed and stability, but I do not execute trades on Sierra. We also just acquired MultiCharts licenses and after learning it, we will start to migrate from TradeStation once we find a suitable broker. It is a 64-bit dream, compared to 32-bit TradeStation, which both share a common heritage.
I keep a journal here if you're interested in reading ramblings of an algo trader/developer.
Welcome! I loved reading your short history of trading. Most people would disagree with your withdrawals, but it works for you, so that's pretty cool.
We have been using TradeStation for 10+ years and primarily trade our algos, but we are starting a slow migration to MultiCharts (MC). MC uses PowerLanguage, which is a derivative of EasyLanguage and about 99% compatible. We are leaving TradeStation for long list of reasons, but my wife/trading partner is raving about the speed and stability of MC. Add to that the choice of data feeds and brokers, and we think it is a great alternative to TS.
Just on boarding...Northern California based, smaller farm (now wine) community. I've been doing some Forex trading with moderate results, frankly with no structure...lucky to get out with my shirt still on! I've now the time and opportunity to focus on developing better habits, game plan and less chasing around. Yeah, it's truly daunting, feel I get pulled from trend to next shining object. I'm starting to paper trade and chart results, I've found some great templates and hope that will help create some order (and commitment) I think it'll help having a community, shoulders to stand from and grow. Tendency to over analyze data, not pulling trigger. In time, plan to be more decisive with a confident approach...