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One word to describe these past two weeks: difficult. Looking at the profiles since late last week, a lot of them are messy nonsense. Seems that the market doesn't know where it wants to go, and I feel like I'm fighting for my life to come out green recently. Here's a great example from Tuesday:
No real high or low volume nodes, just a chunky/choppy profile. Today's looked the same. The market really does seem to have a paradigm shift every few months. Jan-March was straight move up, April/May was a miserable grind sideways, June/July was more straight move up, and now August is the market figuring out if we're still in a downtrend. Hoping September will be better as volume picks up.
Turning to performance, after reflecting on this past week, I think I did pretty well.
Now that a month has passed, I can finally look at the past 4 weeks in review in this eval. Note the number of trades is inflated due to how the software counts micros:
Things I'm pleased with: Killing bad trades early and managing my emotions. With increased opportunity and precision due to reading order flow I've found it mentally easy to kill a trade on the first sign of weakness. I do still get very irritated with the markets at times, but refuse to deviate from my plan. As a result, I can still perform even when I'm in a bad mood If I get really bored/annoyed like I did today, I find it mentally easy to just switch to SIM and do the damage there. I've started to really get a feel for how the auction works and have been "calling" moves in advance based on expected inventory readjustment.
Things that need improvement: Holding trades longer, as always, and being less afraid to jump in. Sometimes I'll wait for too much confirmation and let the trade run away.
And with that, this thread more or less comes to a close. There is $500 left to go in this account, I will try to get it most of the way and stop. I'll continue to pay the Apex monthly fee in case I ever decide to go back to prop trading. For me passing a prop account is more about proving to myself that it's possible than anything. Don't even care about the money, I just wanted to prove it. I will begin moving money around to ideally have my EdgeClear account funded after labour day. When I get it funded, I will start a new thread or rename this one. I'm not quite sure what the rules are regarding that on FIO.
One last note: All this was done with 1-4 micro lots. Usually 2 or 3. Hopefully making more is as easy as scaling up, but I think that's some months down the line.
Cheers and thanks to everyone who kept up with this.
I have to update this every so often so people don't think I blew up. I have a small chat with some buddies that I hang out in daily, been just over a year now. So by the end of the day I don't have the energy to post here, especially with everything else I have to do in a day.
Last week I made a post on Reddit about going live, and caught shit because I took my eval within $150 of completion then erased the majority of my progress it out of boredom on Labour Day. Didn't think it was a big deal since I knew my personal account would be ready that week, but some people took it to heart. Apparently my stats aren't good enough to be consistent, and "if I can't fund an account and pull money out of it, I'm not good enough to go live".
Alright then... I made back all the money I lost and passed the account last Wednesday. Paid for the PA Thursday, started it Friday. Here's where we're at so far a week later:
+$550 after commissions.
I found the PA very easy to trade knowing I now have my personal account as a backup. So I've been trading very aggressively in the PA to see how far I can get before I either get paid out or take it to zero. So far been doing pretty well, although with extra risk comes a higher chance of blowing up. Made $90USD in my personal account last week before I put it on pause to try to get paid out on my PA. Always been my goal to get paid out as a fuck you to Apex and as a way of tying off my nearly year-long saga of trying to get funded & paid out. We'll see what happens.
Took my best trade of the month overnight going into Friday. Wrote an entire thesis regarding why I thought yesterday's high was the high of the week and we'd see Thursday's low today. Only took 45ish points off the move and called it a day before the RTH session started. I could post the entire writeup here if anyone is interested. Here's the gist in one image vs what happened today:
Today was a very bad day. Overnight trading went well, lots of profit in SIM as I've been refining my strategy further this week and taking test trades. The testing has been going very well. In addition, I turned a small profit in the PA. Open comes, I get pulled away from the computer and miss it. My usual morning trading time period comes, and I get pulled away from the computer again. This is something that has happened a lot recently and it has been seriously annoying me. Something keeps coming up which forces me away from the computer, and I come back and notice all the missed good trades. For whatever reason today was the day where it finally got to me, probably because I've been pretty exhausted otherwise and because although I had to step away, it didn't really end up being for a good reason in the end. Not only that, but I did get to quickly throw on a SIM tester trade which executed flawlessly, one of my best executed trades of the month, tagged the bottom and watched it fly to my TP in <10 seconds.
So 11 comes and I can tell the market is chopping. But I'm annoyed and throw a trade on. Obviously a loser. You can imagine where it went from here, we've all experienced it. Two hours later, I've wiped out all my profits since the 8th. Fortunately I was lucid enough to stop myself before I lost all my profits and went red.
In the past, I usually get mad about my bad trading or the market not working out for me and go on tilt. This was not the case today. Quite frankly, I wasn't mad at the market at all. I knew why it was behaving as it was, I knew why my trades were bad. I was just so upset about something else that I took it out on my PA account.
The Bad:
Most my profits are gone. Went from about +$650 to +$115. The most on tilt I've been in a very, very long time. I was absolutely livid. I'm generally a very emotionally composed person but not today, I guess...
The Good:
Well, I think there was a lot of good. I'm glad I went on tilt in my PA and not with my own cash because quite frankly it had to happen eventually and I need to know how much I can control myself.
I maintained my standard position size, which allowed me to take a ton of terrible trades without nuking the account. I consider this a drastic improvement over newbie me who would have just throw a few minis on and hail mary'ed the thing to zero
I was still killing my bad trades quickly (I was just taking too damn many of them). In the past I would take an overleveraged bad trade or two and hold it until my eval/PA blew up. Fortunately today I was still lucid enough to kill the bad trades
I was still somewhat following my strategy, and would have very long gaps between bad trades and was still analyzing the market. Previously, I would have just picked a direction and sent it.
I took a trade with double leverage and when it went south I pulled the plug. Turned off my computer, threw my phone out of reach. I did end up taking another trade later which I killed at break-even and stopped entirely. In the past, there would be no such thing as "stopping" either the eval/PA hits zero, or I make it all back. I was surprised that I was able to exercise that much self control.
I think the "good" came about as a result of me knowing I have an edge and trusting it. When I was newer, I was prone to the "man if I miss this trade, who knows when a good one will come, oh great now I'm in the red, time to go on tilt..." line of thought. These days, I find that when I'm on tilt there is still a voice of reason telling me "well I'm still keeping my standard position size & risk tolerance, I can make it back later" which keeps me from going completely off the rails.
So, there's my confession. Worst case I get unlucky over the rest of the week and take out the PA. More likely I have to grind all my profits back. Best case my refined edge comes in handy and I can translate my SIM performance to the PA and make it all back and then some by Friday EOD.
I'm not sure what it has been like for you guys, but things have been very, very difficult since my last post. I lost my PA probably not too long after I wrote that up (I don't remember exactly when). I made about $200 in my small personal account in September and lost it in a day early last week. Lost a couple evals. It seems that all the patterns I've relied on for 6+ months have evaporated into thin air. Not only that, but the volatility has made NQ downright untradable. Put a trade on, watch your stop get run through in seconds, bang your head on the table... One second you're fine, next you're down $200. If I widen my stop, I'd have to widen my TP too, and it seems to never want to hit my TP's without swinging back to my stop loss first.
I've watched a couple of my friends get thrown around, one of my closest long-term trading buddies seems to have finally quit last week. A few small-time YouTubers I keep an eye on have also posted big losses and/or disappeared. I was certainly ready to quit once or twice, but I decided to regroup and keep pushing. I don't have much to lose by doing so...
Last week I finally caved and decided to move to ES. I had switched to NQ exclusively and avoided ES since last winter as I was enjoying NQ's volatility and how easy I was finding it to play off the psychology of the people trading it. But with volatility so high, now is the perfect time to move back to ES. I tested it out and made something like $1k in an afternoon with 1 or 2 contracts in SIM scalping the DOM. Caught a couple nice trades after that in an eval I started last Friday. On Friday I went to scalp the ES DOM the same way I scalp the footprint on NQ and was getting every trade wrong. It was driving me mad. Was -$600 on the day in my eval. Finally I decided to inverse everything I did, and took the account all the way in the green and just short of completion.
It seems the mistake I was making was that I was expecting price to bounce off high volume nodes instead of travelling through them and accepting or rejecting the LVNs that separate them. I was making this mistake today too, but eventually started playing the trend using the edges of HVNs and things went pretty well. This is kind of hard to explain over text, but anyone who scalps the ES DOM with the volume profile as a reference probably gets what I mean.
Since I'm now used to the DOM, I decided to try and decipher bonds this weekend. I've tried before, but I was using charts exclusively and had no clue how to trade it. Watched some videos, opened up the /ZN, /ZB, and /UB DOMs along with some small charts with key references marked and decided to trade /UB. Maybe the market is teasing me, but I absolutely killed it. I will need several weeks to confirm if I have an edge, but bonds feel like they make sense, and they don't make my blood pressure spike the way NQ does. It seemed a bit too straightfoward today: trend up, failed auction through the high & dump, reverse back through the highs.
(Today's /UB trades on the eval).
(In SIM)
I also traded ES and did less well as I'm still getting the hang of it. I did get a little frustrated mid-day and took some bad trades. That said, I was able to take my 100k static to the finish line. Looks like I'll be going "live" again this week.
My scalping brackets seem to be working well, I will adjust them as needed. For now, I'm just glad that I found a way out of the rut I was in a couple weeks ago. I will be spending plenty of time practising with /ES and /UB, and watching others trade it to hone my edge.
Lost my PA today, but uncovered something seriously shady...
Hi everyone. Long story short: first day on PA, traded /UB, hit max loss, whatever. That's not what this post is about.
I've been trading with Apex for nearly a year now. Pretty much just NQ. As you know, I recently switched to ES and bonds. I got destroyed on /UB today. However as I was trading, I noticed something... Apex's simulator was putting my orders at the bottom of the queue. I have no idea if this is a Rithmic simulator thing, or if Apex decided to do this on purpose, but this puts you at a HUGE disadvantage. I would go so far as to say that it makes scalping bonds literally impossible through them.
I had a feeling something like this was going on a while back, but when I Googled how Rithmic's simulator works, I found a post by Rithmic on their forums stating that it tries to approximate what your fill would be live. Okay, fine. So I forgot about it. I traded NQ back then, so I didn't really notice anyways. Yesterday as I'm trading /UB, I noticed something very strange. I've been sitting on the bid for a while, but I'm not moving up the queue. On the contrary, on the DOM I can see myself being placed to the back of the line every time a new order comes in. What? If I to go to chase a move, my options are either to cross the spread (and immediately be down 1 tick) or move my order up (but still be placed at the back of the queue). I wasn't paying close attention and wasn't certain if I really was being thrown to the back, so I had a buddy of mine open his Apex evaluation account and sit on the bid on /ZN. First he's around 2900th in line. Then he moves up to around 2840. Then, suddenly, he moves back to 2900 and then 3200th. Despite 350 contracts being stacked on the bid after his, he got placed BEHIND them.
If you're sitting on the bid and are 5th in the queue, someone throwing 1000 contracts on should offer support, as they'll need to get filled for price to drop a tick. Instead, they're RESISTANCE, as you don't get filled until they've either been filled first or pull their order. So you start 1 tick offside (and are likely to end up -2 ticks).
So while I may not be a great or even good trader, I was not imagining things when it seemed that every trade I opened started in the red and it felt like the market was working against me.
This affects everyone who trades with Apex. If you scalp ES (as I sometimes do) or any other highly liquid /slower moving product, you will be at a disadvantage limiting into and out of your trades.
When I opened my live account with EdgeClear last month, I immediately noticed that I was getting better/faster fills on MNQ compared to Apex. I dismissed it as them having faster servers or maybe me just imagining it. Now I know that's not the case. I was quite literally getting better fills.
Between this and what I feel are Apex's generally shady business practices, this left a bad taste in my mouth. Last week I went to purchase an eval for their 90% off sale for $20. They were having credit card processing issues (I wasn't aware of this) and I expected the coupon to be added automatically, yet it wasnt. I got charged the full $200CAD. I asked their support if they could refund the difference, they told me better luck next time. Last winter I ended up failing an eval due to a glitch with RTrader mobile which put me in max size and took me out in only a few seconds (admittedly I did wait a couple seconds for it to come back instead of exiting immediately, I was in shock). I asked Apex's support if I could have the account reset due to a software glitch, they told me tough shit.
So to find out that they're giving me bad fills has been extremely upsetting. If anyone would like to test this for themselves, go ahead and open up the /ZN DOM in an Apex evaluation account and sit on the side with more contracts. You can watch yourself get sent to the back of the queue in real time. Meanwhile, this is what you SHOULD be seeing:
(Notice how I'm 529th in line out of 1403 contracts)
This is unacceptable. From now on, I think I'll just trade /ZN in my personal account.
Hey sorry to hear you blew up your PA account on the first day. That to me actually sounds like a strong endorsement for companies like Apex because you got to practice but without losing a lot of money. Imagine how much worse it would have been if it wasn't a PA account and on a self funded account instead?
Indeed, Apex has saved me a lot of money. God only knows how much I would have lost in the past year trading live. I am very thankful that I was able to do this instead. I know a fair bit about the markets, but still have a lot to learn clearly. That said, I would still like to have a conclusive answer to the question of how their order queue works.
To confirm for anyone reading this in the future: I have tested and found no proof that Apex is messing with your place in queue. It appears to be accurate to a real fill with a live account. I was wrong.
I had a pretty big breakthrough on Friday/this weekend. Checked into a chat room I had joined and noticed one of the mods talking about rotations. Now rotations are something I've known about for quite some time, I had done some studies earlier in the year to help setup my brackets. I got lazy with it because I was consistent for a month+ in Aug/Sept with cumulative delta divergences. Then of course it stopped giving good signals at the same time that the market got volatile. I know I should have done a new rotations study, but kept putting it off while taking worse and worse trades.
This guy is like me, very statistics focused, so we chatted for a bit. He suggested that I try looking at rotations with tick charts (never used them before). Let me tell you, I've dove deep into this since Thursday, it is absolutely game changing. I can now see where so many of my problems were coming from, and why at a point a couple weeks ago I was able to straight up inverse myself and turn a significant profit.
At some point over the past month amidst my frustration, I started buying the extreme ends of moves. Quite possibly the dumbest thing I could have done. When the market was already mostly done with a rotation, there I was hopping on and then getting irritated when price would immediately reverse and stop me out. Of course it was, I was trading in reverse. No wonder inversing myself was working so well, I was literally buying pullbacks by doing so... What else was I doing? Chasing price, which put me even further on the ends of the rotations. I was pulling my stops in out of fear, which was giving myself even LESS of the rotation to work with, almost guaranteeing that I would get stopped out. And I did, over and over again until I wanted to throw my monitor out the window.
Consider this: the average rotation on NQ Friday was around 24.50pts. The average impulse was around 55.25pts. Lets say I was trading with my usual 15/25pt bracket. Price moves up 10pts, I try to hop on. I miss the entry and chase it a few points. Now I have about 10pts left in the move and a potential 15+pts against me. I pull my stop in to 10pts when it moves a little in my favour. It starts to move against me, what's going to happen? I'm going to get stopped out.
No wonder my most profitable period was when delta divergences were working. I was top and bottom ticking the edge of rotations combined with general good trade location due to my accumulated knowledge about the market and good risk management. I was waiting for a divergence at the extreme ends of impulses and fading them, putting me on the right side of a strong pullback. It makes so much sense now, I feel dumb for having to write this out. I redid all my brackets and keep a tick chart with rotations up along with my other charts. Started a new eval Friday and scalped ES with it, still figuring it out and making mistakes (like 2x ES when I was doing poorly lol) but did great. Did lots of backtesting over the weekend, and have been forward testing in SIM/my eval this evening. Things are looking very good so far. Hopefully I'll have a positive story to share with you guys next time I post.
If I get really bored/annoyed like I did today, I find it mentally easy to just switch to SIM and do the damage there. I've started to really get a feel for how the auction works and have been "calling" moves in advance based on expected inventory readjustment.