DSchenk

Anyone cracked it yet?

So far there's no strategy here...only some numbers and charts on a sheet We found out when certain indices are most volatile and therefore best to trade. Question is now, how to capitalise on this volatility... I don't have an answer to that one yet, but will make sure to launch a £1000 trading course once I find out

I'm back in the game! Straight back in with a 10 points loss over 11 trades. Will keep my updates a bit shorter now. Overall short biased today with 9 short positions and 2 long ones. Lost first 3 trades to hit almost max loss of 20 points on the way up from opening level to Pivot Point. Then worked myself half way back. Things got a bit better once we saw that rejection at the Pivot Point and was able to catch a few nice moves on the downwards trend. Turned out at 10.10 am would've been a nice long opportunity, but had already finished trading by then. Was trialling today trading on a 1 minute chart after losing the first 3 trades. Might be better suited than the 5min chart for my trading style. Will trial again tomorrow. Is anyone trading the FTSE on 1min or 5min chart and can tell what's more useful? Also had to top up my account again, cause was running out of margin to trade the FTSE and NASDAQ. This is my 10th account now - maybe also my last...we'll see

Best is to put all login details and passwords for important accounts like trading accounts, bank accounts, etc in a secure location, which your wife and kids can access in case you cease to exist

Also not going to trade until next Tuesday as out of the country. So catch you all next week again!

Wasn't able to trade this morning as going to the airport. And then the FTSE does this... 60 Point move in the first hour alone. You've got to be kidding me Someone is planning this - who are you?

@nit2wynit That depends on how you define "sustain". As you see from the analysis, on average the FTSE makes 34 points in the first hour. If you are able to capture 20 points out of this with a £2k account, that's £100 profit per day /per 1 hour of trading. (qty traded: 5). That's 0.5% return on equity. Now that's month 1. Month 2 you are at £200 per day. Month 3 at £400. (in theory, if you don't have any losses and make consistently the 20 points per day) I have yet to find someone who is doing that kind of performance on stocks with gap-and-go setup or similar. Surely, once a month you may be able to hit a home-run with stocks and make 20%-100% return on equity on a single day, but what about all the other days? Are you able to not trade these days or trade and not lose? That's the tricky part

Thanks for the feedback. I had a go at trading NASDAQ a bit and boy, I have to say, it is on a whole different level to FTSE. More one for Adrenalin junkies. 20 Points, 40 Points even 60 Points in a matter of 30-60 mins can be monitored frequently. Not sure what the best risk management is on NASDAQ yet. On FTSE I'm using: risk per trade 5 points profit target 5-10 points per trade daily max risk: 20 points (4 red trades - I'm out) daily profit target: 20 points FTSE Median ATR in first hour of market open is at 34 points and 2nd hour is 27 points. On NASDAQ it looks more like: risk per trade 10 points profit target 10-20 points per trade daily max risk: 30 points (3 red trades - I'm out) daily profit target: 30 points NASDAQ Median ATR in first hour of market open is at 43 points and 2nd hour is 42 points. Doesn't look like much on paper, but you can feel the difference when trading.

Yep, does look bearish today Mercury. I'm starting the new month and Q4 green, although it has been a tough fight today. First 3 trades went into the red, then I had to fight my way back and ended the day up 3 Points. 3 Points up are better than 10 Points down, so I'll take that as a win. 9 Trades, 4 Wins, 2 BE, 3 Losses Trade 1, Long, Loss, Down 8 Points Expected a bounce off VWAP; entered long, got stopped out Trade 2, Long, Loss, Down 14 Points Expected a bounce off Pivot; entered long, got stopped out Trade 3, Long, Loss, Down 18 Points (almost daily max loss hit) Tried again the bounce off pivot. Again got stopped out Trade 4, Short, Win, Back to down 12 Points I was accepting the break of pivot and went short. worked out, however got stopped out in profit zone on first candle to make a new high. Could've been more profit in this one Trade 5, Short, Win, Back to daily BE Went straight short again, worked out as well. and covered profits on daily BE. Trade 6, Long, Win, Up 1 Point Was supposed to be a quick scalp in the heat of the momentum. Secured that point Trade 7, Short, BE Stopped out at BE, probably set to BE too early, but didn't want to risk going negative again. Trade 8, Short, Win, Up 3 Points Went straight back in short and this time got the 3 points. Trade 9, Long, BE Tried one more trade even already well over the 90 mins mark. Rejection at mS1 from the bottom side and then stop out at BE. I'm calling it a day.

For me, this means, I will keep trading FTSE in the morning at 8-9.30am Additionally, I will start trading NASDAQ at 2.30pm-4pm. Occasionally, I will have a look at NG and Crude in the afternoon as well and see if somethings going on there (especially on Mondays where those seem to have the highest median ATR in this group) Would love to hear your feedback! Who thinks this is all utter rubbish, please let me know

Now to the interesting stuff. Breaking ATR further down by time of day. NASDAQ below. Key Takeaway: Trade best between the hours 14 and 15 (first 90mins after market open 14.30-16.00 as expected) Again Median should give a better indicator than Average as it removes extreme values, so we're gonna focus on that for the comparison Same chart for the other tickers: Key Takeaways: Indices are best trades in the first 90min after market open or in the last hour before market closure Gold can be traded throughout the 24h-day with spikes at market open Asia, Europe and US GBP/USD ATR remains high during entire EU market hour session (8.00-16.00) with peak at hour 15 Natural Gas and Crude Oil seem to follow US market hours, but have a very steep curve. They only really seem to move between 14.00-16.00 Now to the comparison, again with normalised ATR values. Trade Gold at night (if you fancy getting up at 2am) Trade DAX or FTSE between 8-9.30am Trade NG, Crude or NASDAQ at 2.30pm-4pm Trade Crude at 7pm-8pm and NASDAQ at 8pm-9pm (if you still haven't got enough)

First I looked at breaking down ATR by day of week. Example for NASDAQ below. Takeaways: Monday seems to be the most volatile day with ATR max spiking above 400 However looking at the average, it appears to be quite flat over all 5 days, ranging around 120 The Median might be the best KPI to look at as removes extreme values from the calculation. If looking at the Median it turns out Monday is actually the day with lowest volatility (Median ATR at 80), while Thursday is the day with highest (Median ATR at almost 120). (Even if the max values initially suggest the exact opposite) Charts for the other tickers below, without further explanation. Now looking at overlaying the Medians of the ATRs of the different tickers giving the chart below. I had to normalise the ATR, because when Gold moves 20 points it's not equal to NASDAQ moving 20 points, because of how big you can size in. Trading Gold, for example, can be sized 6.1x as high as NASDAQ, hence the ATR is multiplied by 6.1 as well (this is because margin factor and price are different for each ticker). Best ticker to trade per day: Monday: US Crude Tuesday: US Crude or DAX Wednesday: US Crude or Dax Thursday: NASDAQ Friday: DAX

Ok everyone, pulled some data. Will split up in several posts. First of all, here is the selection of tickers I examined in more detail. I scaled down the hypothetical account size to £300, as this reflects a more real life scenario than the £10k for me right now. Also for beginners £250 is the minimum you need to top up your SB account, so £300 is kinda where you have to start. Few of the top tickers fall out of the list now, because you need more than £300 to trade them. So, I will be focusing in the following analysis on: NASDAQ, Natural Gas, US Crude, Spot Gold, DAX, FTSE, GBP/US

Nice analysis @Mercury So far we're looking at a spot landing at the daily pivot and reversal from there up until mR1 (pretty much spot on as well) and bounce straight off there again. I like Pivots - why do I keep loosing money

Morning everyone. Horrible start in the new week for me. Hope you had a better one. 6 Trades, 1 BE, 5 Losses Max Loss hit Trade 1, Long, BE It all could've started so well. Spike down on market open. I enter long for a VWAP reversal. Trade played perfectly and swinged back. I had 16 Points unrealised profits after 2 mins on the day. Failed to take profits and sat and watched how it all went to thin air. Exit at BE. ****!!! Trade 2, Short, Loss, Down 4 Points We're making new lows, so I though we see a rejection at mR1. I enter short, get stopped out right above mR1. Trade 3, Short, Loss, Down 10 Points Still looks like a rejection at mR1. So I enter again - and get stopped out again. ****!!! Trade 4, Long, Loss, Down 14 Points I decide to wait and watch a bit. We see a move back up to daily highs, then a pullback. I enter on the pullback, but get stopped out as the pullback extends to a retreat to 9EMA. Trade 5, Long, Loss, Down 16 Points Missed the nice bounce off 50EMA with move back up to daily highs. This time I play the 9EMA bounce. Get stopped out. Not my day apparently. Trade 6, Short, Loss, Down 22 Points, daily max loss hit One trade left in the daily budget. As we break VWAP I enter short. This time been right about the direction as we can see on the chart in hindsight, but get stopped out anyway. Margin of error 0.5 points. Really not my day.

Threads seem to escalate quickly recently... After considering this question over the last week since I posted it here on the forum, here my conclusion. I'll stick with trading by myself. Rationale: Can use a spread-bet account, meaning don't need to deal with taxes Don't need to pay administration fees, facilitation-fees or desk-fees, etc. Can trade whatever, whenever I want it and not bound to company policies, etc. aka "be your own boss" Don't run into any scams potentially On the negative side of trading by oneself we have: Higher risk of burning through accounts quicker because you need to be your own risk manager higher risk of never becoming profitable if you're not able to figure it out by yourself Cons outweigh pros here for me at the moment. Doesn't mean I wouldn't accept any offers from Goldman Sachs if you're reading this and happen to have any available

Hi @Volcano7 Try this. a1=ExponentialAverage[30](close) a2=ExponentialAverage[15](close) a3 = low*0.96 a4 = high*1.04 if a1 crosses over a2 then DRAWTEXT("BUY", barindex, a3, SansSerif, standard,15)coloured(0,0,0) endif if a1 crosses under a2 then DRAWTEXT("SELL", barindex, a4, SansSerif, standard,15)coloured(0,0,0) endif return Looks like this (although using EMA9 and EMA20 in my charts)

Haha, nice reversal indeed. Not holding anything here, just jumping on intra-day moves

Ahm, think Mercury said it yesterday morning

Frustrating day for me, although managed to keep break-even in the end. 0 points profit are better than 20 points losses, right? Lots of opportunity in the market though, just wasn't playing on top of my game today. 6 Trades, 4 Wins, 2 Losses; overall BE Trade 1, Long, Win, Up 2 Points At market open it was looking like we stay above the VWAP, so I was getting ready to place a long order. I was about 3 seconds too late, cause I was just busy setting my entry point as the FTSE broke out at the top and surged like it was on steroids. I was like god-****-it. What to do now. Wait for the move to finish, form a flag or still jump in? I decided to try if I can scalp a few points in the move up, which I did, but only got 2 points out of it. Trade 2, Short, Loss, Down 4 Points After a big green 5min candle, we often see a little pullback straight at the open of the next candle. So I went short at the open of the next candle for another quick scalp. Failed to take the 2 points though, which would've been possible and got stopped out at making new highs. Trade 3, Short, Loss, Down 12 Points This was the worst trade of the day. I became frustrated cause I missed the big move. Went short again - classic revenge trade. Obviously got stopped out. I'm taking a few deep breath saying to myself, you can either call it a day now or try to fight back and might get back to BE. Decided to go with the latter. Trade 4, Short, Win, Down 10 Points Short on R1. Target was above VWAP, but reversed already at 9EMA. Got out for 2 points profit on move back up. Trade 5, Long, Win, Down 8 Points Entered long on move back up after 9EMA bounce. Reversed again at R1. I got out at another 2 points profit. Trade 6, Long, Win, BE This time it reversed until the VWAP and showed signs of a reversal from there. I go in long. Trade works out and I can set my stop loss at daily BE. Stop loss gets triggered after bounce off R1 again and retracing to 9EMA. For a moment I'm thinking entering long at a potential bounce off 9EMA, but decide against it. Felt the luck was not on my side today, so didn't want to push it. In hindsight that long at 9EMA would've worked out perfectly and if held until 11am would've given me the 20 points daily profit target - what can I say...spreadbetting is not for fools

I'd rather wait for the twist and turn to play out and then re-enter at the bottom Another point is, as I'm not having a lot of equity in my account at the moment, I'd rather use that equity to trade other assets in the afternoon, than keeping it in a potentially low volatile FTSE But get your point. In hindsight it would've been good to just keep it in the FTSE yesterday, then would've been up now about 120 points. But would've, could've, should've ... you never know

Cheers for the comments guys. In regards to @andysinclair question: You can pull a lot of data via the IG API, check API documentation here: https://labs.ig.com/rest-trading-api-reference You need to be prolific with VBA coding though. In this example I did the analysis half-manually - and only used a quick screener I set-up in PRT (ProRealTime) to pull the assets with the highest ATR compared to their price, to get a quick snapshot what we're up against here - then pulled spread, margin factor and true range from PRT charts/IG online platform. As the methodology in theory seems to make sense, next stage is to drill deeper. I'm planning to take the top 10 assets based on the above data-set and break them down by day of week and hour of day. Rationale behind this is to a) know the best asset to trade at a given time of day. Assumption is first hour after market open of the respective asset, but would like to confirm that. (e.g. FTSE 100 8-9am; NASDAQ 14.30-15.30; ...) b) being able to derive a daily target price based on the predicted true range on a given day. E.g today is Friday. Usually on Friday's the true range is smaller, so target would be smaller as well. Goal is to quantify this. I'll update this thread once I have more insights.

I write code in PRT, but don't live in Australia. What is it you need - maybe I can help

Wow, this thread escalated quickly 😀 We should've known if the thread is called 'holy grail' that it won't be too serious inside 😉