Try to get Fiber if available and not expensive or else cable should be fine. It really shouldn't matter for normal operating connections and for discretionary trading. Of course, speed can matter but as a retail trader you don't want your results dependent on something like that. The one thing you might not want to use wi-fi because it can be less reliable but even wi-fi when working shouldn't matter.

You can always buy a server near exchange if you automate. As long as you do not a bad connection then these sorts of things really aren't important.

John47 

Good morning, traders. Question(s): What kind of internet connection are traders using these days? When I had my home office years ago, I had a Speakeasy T1, backed up by a normal high speed home internet line. The T1 was around $350/mo and had no latency, and Speakeasy guarenteed me it would not be down more than a few minutes within a month or I didn't have to pay. Wondering what the independent professionals are using these days. I think I have a cable connection now.

Thank you all for the replies and info.

Speakeasy quoted me $85/mo for 50mb fiber connection. The salesman claimed "lowest latency available". If I sign up for 3 years no install fee.

Something like that could be an option.

John47 

Thank you all for the replies and info. Speakeasy quoted me $85/mo for 50mb fiber connection. The salesman claimed "lowest latency available". If I sign up for 3 years no install fee. Something like that could be an option.

That seems to be a good price... it's a bit more than we pay for our 25mb connection, but we're quite rural, far out in the sticks so I'm sure there's some infrastructure to be paid for there

Ok. So I'm thinking I should post here everyday that I trade. I'm thinking I should do this for accountability.

Long story short, the amount of things I need to get in order to actually create a trading business is going to take awhile. And as always, even though I have set aside my mornings for the market, I still have two other businesses to oversee plus the rest of the things in my life that are important and take up time.

I've been paper trading for awhile and I believe it helped me a ton. I did my best to trade the account as if it was real money and I think the exercise was very useful. Lately, however, I feel I've gotten about as much out of it as I can, so I've decided to start trading the M6E to continue to develop and work out any issues that make come up, and establish a routine of creating a plan and then executing that plan.

As mentioned, I'm hoping this journal will help create accountability. I spent years knowing that everyday I trade I would get a phone call or email at the end of the day from my backer....."How'd ya do?" Or more often....a brief description of how he made 10 or 15k before asking me what I did.

His approach definitely wasn't optimized but I do think accountability is important. So I'll post a chart of my executions and a quick discussion.

Today:

Ok this may sound bad, but didn't make the decision to actually make a trade today until shortly before my entry. Anyway...I did my research last night and had three scenerio's...revised them this AM after the break during the european trade.

Was really hoping to get short, but as I mentioned that trade was over by the time I was ready. I had 1.2346 to 1.2370 as an area where we could find buyers and possibly reverse. The market ended up consolidating essentially between those levels and I was able to pay 54 on 2. My stop was 12 ticks, I sold 1 at 63 (+9) and 1 at 74 (+20).

I'm pretty exhausted so I'm being brief but I hope to format these entries better over time. I invite any and all constructive criticism or discussion.

The blue mark is my entry the red are the scales.



This was my first futures trade on the CME since January 2010.

Welcome to the forum! I'm sure you'll find plenty of likeminded individuals here to bounce ideas off of. To chime in on the internet discussion--one of the things that internet companies will try to sell you is high bandwidth internet. There are plenty of tags like "Perfect for the Modern Home" or "High Performance Gaming Internet", with speeds in the hundreds of Mbps.

Traders really don't need these speeds. I should clarify this though. If you plan to watch Netflix, stream music, run CNBC through the internet connection while you trade, and more, then you need the bandwidth. If your internet is going to be for trading during trading hours, and play during play hours, you will be fine with something in the range of 50 Mbps or likely even lower. The CME sends your computer market data which is just a handful of numbers. Netflix does the same, but Netflix sends many thousands more numbers each second. This can hog up your trading connection which can present a huge issue.

Trading needs low latency. This is often called ping, and you can test your current internet ping by going to speedtest.net and running the tests there. If your ping is high (+200 ms), the quotes you see will be significantly delayed. If your ping is around 10 ms you'll probably be fine, unless you're pushing serious size like The Flipper!

I hope this helps, and I'm excited to see your journey!

Quoting 

Ok this may sound bad, but didn't make the decision to actually make a trade today until shortly before my entry. Anyway...I did my research last night and had three scenerio's...revised them this AM after the break during the european trade.

What I hear with this "may sound bad" is some conflict. The conflict is your desire to control risk via process and balance that with taking opportunity. I recommend defining your principles. Sometimes you have to trade against the plan and this is difficult. However, it is understood in the form of that the plan contains some information but may not be complete. For example, let's say you had a major level marked and you wanted to sell the market and cover at the level. That's your plan. Next let's imagine you see the market made a fast move down overnight trading at that level and the "tape" is supportive. You now see potential for a significant long trade.

What you have here is an opportunity and a risk. The plan said to go short and cover but the plan wasn't complete and the market didn't behave precisely as anticipated. You still have some information and a potential trade opportunity. It is for these sorts of reasons that it is best to take a principled approach and stay fluid. If you start to beat yourself up for not following the plan then you're taking yourself out of the market feedback loop.

That's one sort of deviation from the plan. In that case, you are still using the information in the plan. There are a few areas where you should have some rules though. You should have a daily loss limit and it needs to be sufficient. You should also determine your max contract size. You might also want to define some loss limits where you go back to sim and/or for scaling up. Some traders suggest not to focus on the profits. I'm sure there is a reason for that. But, I think you should set yourself a goal so you can see how you are doing. Just keep in mind that a high return in futures is easy to make but easy to give back too.

As a critique, why did you open 2 contracts? Was that part of your plan? I'd advise to stick to 1 lot until you demonstrate yourself in the live account. Also how did you choose your stop loss ? Did you determine that before you got into the trade?

For futures trading especially if you are discretionary, I think you need both a good R and a high win ratio. A high win ratio (55%+) is important for both equity curve stability and also for most people's psychology. But, it is not enough. You also need a good R per trade because it is difficult to maintain high win ratios. If you rely only on the win ratio then you run the risk of a small change in the win ratio really changing your profitability. There are really 3 factors at work against each other and they are win ratio or probability of profitability, R or risk/reward, and robustness. Robustness will tend to work against the other factors as it is typically associated with complexity. Complexity is not always good though. That said given the non-stationarity of markets and the variance that discretionary traders may use, I think it is difficult to figure out these factors.

Have you examined or thought about whether you could make your old edge work or a variation by looking at shorter or faster time frames? I know I can generate up to 50 to 100 trading ideas over about a week when I am really zoned into the market. You might want to start to try to track your trading ideas so you can review and implement the ideas either via systems or as discretionary setups.

John47 

What kind of internet connection are traders using these days? When I had my home office years ago, I had a Speakeasy T1, backed up by a normal high speed home internet line. The T1 was around $350/mo and had no latency, and Speakeasy guarenteed me it would not be down more than a few minutes within a month or I didn't have to pay. Wondering what the independent professionals are using these days. I think I have a cable connection now.

I have 120mb Comcast Cable, 45mb AT&T Uverse, plus a Verizon Wireless Hotspot which thankfully I've never had to use. Double redundancy with three different providers. In reality the few real connection problems I have had, have always been on my brokers ISP end. Kind of obvious but don't trade anything latency sensitive over WiFi at home.

artemiso 

The decisionmaking here is quite similar to what you'd do for home internet, except you have an added requirement of a good service uptime SLA. Any business service except from Comcast should be decent.

I now use my AT&T Uverse connection the most. The comcast connection is a bigger pipe but it has a greater latency and drops a lot more packets than AT&T. I'm fed up of having this conversation with comcast with some indian call center. I have an application (pingplotter) that monitors my connection to my broker. With comcast it will regularly show I'm dropping 1-2% of my packets in a 30 min window. Comcast show the connection as up and active though and plain and simple just don't care.

artemiso 

I had downtime on issues on Comcast Business (coax) before which aren't too different what you'd seen on their residential services, so it seems the only benefit of I'd recommend against them.

Think you missed some of your sentence there. If you were about to say only advantage of comcast business over residential is they get out quicker - but the service is the same - I would agree.

lax99 

Welcome to the forum! I'm sure you'll find plenty of likeminded individuals here to bounce ideas off of. To chime in on the internet discussion--one of the things that internet companies will try to sell you is high bandwidth internet. There are plenty of tags like "Perfect for the Modern Home" or "High Performance Gaming Internet", with speeds in the hundreds of Mbps. Traders really don't need these speeds. I should clarify this though. If you plan to watch Netflix, stream music, run CNBC through the internet connection while you trade, and more, then you need the bandwidth. If your internet is going to be for trading during trading hours, and play during play hours, you will be fine with something in the range of 50 Mbps or likely even lower. The CME sends your computer market data which is just a handful of numbers. Netflix does the same, but Netflix sends many thousands more numbers each second. This can hog up your trading connection which can present a huge issue. Trading needs low latency. This is often called ping, and you can test your current internet ping by going to speedtest.net and running the tests there. If your ping is high (+200 ms), the quotes you see will be significantly delayed. If your ping is around 10 ms you'll probably be fine, unless you're pushing serious size like The Flipper! I hope this helps, and I'm excited to see your journey!

Thanks for the words. I've used the speakeasy speedtest before....speakeasy is actually who I had my T1 though when I had a home office years ago. I remember it being "slow" but no latency.

I ran the advanced test and I'm getting 17ms for the ping. I'm guessing that will be fine for the micros, but I'll upgrade before I move beyond this product.

tpredictor 

What I hear with this "may sound bad" is some conflict. The conflict is your desire to control risk via process and balance that with taking opportunity. I recommend defining your principles. Sometimes you have to trade against the plan and this is difficult. However, it is understood in the form of that the plan contains some information but may not be complete. For example, let's say you had a major level marked and you wanted to sell the market and cover at the level. That's your plan. Next let's imagine you see the market made a fast move down overnight trading at that level and the "tape" is supportive. You now see potential for a significant long trade. What you have here is an opportunity and a risk. The plan said to go short and cover but the plan wasn't complete and the market didn't behave precisely as anticipated. You still have some information and a potential trade opportunity. It is for these sorts of reasons that it is best to take a principled approach and stay fluid. If you start to beat yourself up for not following the plan then you're taking yourself out of the market feedback loop. That's one sort of deviation from the plan. In that case, you are still using the information in the plan. There are a few areas where you should have some rules though. You should have a daily loss limit and it needs to be sufficient. You should also determine your max contract size. You might also want to define some loss limits where you go back to sim and/or for scaling up. Some traders suggest not to focus on the profits. I'm sure there is a reason for that. But, I think you should set yourself a goal so you can see how you are doing. Just keep in mind that a high return in futures is easy to make but easy to give back too. As a critique, why did you open 2 contracts? Was that part of your plan? I'd advise to stick to 1 lot until you demonstrate yourself in the live account. Also how did you choose your stop loss ? Did you determine that before you got into the trade? For futures trading especially if you are discretionary, I think you need both a good R and a high win ratio. A high win ratio (55%+) is important for both equity curve stability and also for most people's psychology. But, it is not enough. You also need a good R per trade because it is difficult to maintain high win ratios. If you rely only on the win ratio then you run the risk of a small change in the win ratio really changing your profitability. There are really 3 factors at work against each other and they are win ratio or probability of profitability, R or risk/reward, and robustness. Robustness will tend to work against the other factors as it is typically associated with complexity. Complexity is not always good though. That said given the non-stationarity of markets and the variance that discretionary traders may use, I think it is difficult to figure out these factors. Have you examined or thought about whether you could make your old edge work or a variation by looking at shorter or faster time frames? I know I can generate up to 50 to 100 trading ideas over about a week when I am really zoned into the market. You might want to start to try to track your trading ideas so you can review and implement the ideas either via systems or as discretionary setups.

Thanks for the response. I think you're dead on with attempting to "control risk via process vs. balance opportunity". Thats why I decided to start trading micros. I was trying to decide on a product, ES or ZN...trying to decide what comp to buy for charting, what to buy for execution, what connection to get, what my execution hours should be, trying to re learn the quirks of IRT. And I was/am very dedicated to putting the pieces together correctly to build a sustainable business....that will all take time.

In the meantime there won't be anymore sim. As I mentioned it was a valuable exercise but I don't think I'm getting anymore out of it. The micro's work well for what I need to establish now....creating and executing a plan each day.

I've decided against trying to implement my old edge. I was a high volume Eurodollar scalper, trading in the spreads and outrights. My edge was a pretty unique combination of order book scalping for ticks combined with butterfly and spread trading. I've decided against it for two reasons 1.) by all accounts of the many friends I still have in that market, the trade has become dramatically less profitable with the current interest rate situation and 2.) The volume of trading and R:R absolutely require either a seat....and the seat I had/would need is the Green Seat, the IMM seat, the second most expensive, currently 241k (sold mine for 500k in 2010 hehe)....or to be with a prop shop of some kind. I have the network to trade prop again if I wanted to....but no way am I splitting profits again, and I'm not open to spending any significant amount of time in Chitown for work at the moment.

The seat situation is a big part of what draws me to the ES....42k for an IOM seat is very reasonable.

Two trades today, 1 winner, 1 losers, and several mistakes made.

I circled the first mistake on the chart. Pushing below that level and finding buyers was a setup I had planned for. I honestly just didn't have my shit together to trade when that was going on, and I missed it. This is why establishing my daily routine and execution hours are as important as anything else right now. Perhaps more so.

Second "mistake" was on both of my entries, I didn't time either very well. I think I just need to continue on with what I'm doing until I have 30-50 trades as a 'body of work' and then evaluate what I can do to improve. 3 trades isn't enough to draw any conclusions.


Nuts volatility in the Euro after the FOMC. I've never touched the currencies so this is new to me. Now that Euro has broken through that ~.12327 ish range I think there's a high probability we trade to around 1.2283.