DavyJones

July 17, 2020

14 minutes ago, THT said:

I remember testing Elders Impulse system back in 2010 ish, never used it - good post

This is the problem I have with a lot of these guys, they just rehash the same system and spend 3 chapters as to why its so radical from others

Impulse Trend Direction is just MACD rising, EMA rising, entry on pull back

Robert Miner from "High Probability Strategies Book" has a similar one but he uses rising Stochastic rather than MACD and then claims "it's the most powerful strategy in 20 years" .

No matter how they spin it's just fannying about with a pile of moving averages or rate of change of price . Maybe its my maths background but when I read this I think, 'how many years did these guys go to school? 2?'

tbh I don't even understand why they are called momentum, it's just rate of change of price, i.e. acceleration , I would have thought that you should take volume into account to be classified as momentum,

e.g. like a train and a car both accelerating at the same acceleration rate. Which one is going to take longer to slow down , Apple's share price rising fast by 10 shares a bar is not the same as rising the same price as 200k shares a bar

July 17, 2020

4 minutes ago, Ed365 said:

great post and very true i have been trading more or less every day during lockdown i have two suggestions for utube traders to follow both are free and want no money no scams no subscription fees etc , first is brian watt also known as mr yen this guy has terminal cancer is a mean regression trader u can watch previous shows from channel , very good over 3 months he has not had a loosing trade he is v opinionated and wont be to everyones taste ,based in usa so starts 1400/1430 uk time second one is :trades by matt : bases in usa also excellent free and has several help videos , very calm the opposite and very different trading style of brian watt , check them both out i assure you you will learn from these two guys .both are also on twitter , @realbrianwatt and @tradesbymatt, good luck

cheers for the recommendation !

July 17, 2020

Here are two examples of what I do every morning, After the trade closes, the next day I take screenshots. Its quite easy once you have a Template set up in Pro real time (10min job) . The text boxes, time frames are all saved so it's just a matter of updating the text. I also make notes (a line or two) on each trade, the minute I place it and again after it closes , as I know I'll forgot quickly when I took the trade

(1) The Silver day trade, My strategy was a long rising EMA / MACD.
The set up was decent enough, I think but I never put in a limit and I didn't move the stop as soon as the trade was making money (IG min stops are often quite wide)

(2) The SRGY trade - 3 /4 bar play off market open
I saw this off youtube and twice before it worked out well before I but thought it was just potluck , however I decide to give it another go . As you can see it was about 4R I think and exit timed well. For me because I am retarded I need to write these things down as in real time on 10 min charts , it's hard to think about everything and i miss obvious things. As I had tried this strategy a few times before I remember one thing was becoming clear. The the 2min charts were pointless,. I could never even make the spread back, (hence adding thet green Bid -ASK horizontal band to PRT )

anyhoo, in 3 months time I hope to be a bit wiser

July 17, 2020

28 minutes ago, Monobrow said:

This is an amazing post and perfect for me as I am just starting my journey - also from a banking and finance background. I posted something here earlier, but do you use a news feed? if so, which one? if not, why not and what are your thoughts?

Good luck with the next stage of your journey.

For investments (share dealing ) I do, e.g I bought easyJet months ago and will sell next week as I think its no longer worth holding and prices have stabilised.

Others like Zoom are just riding on hot air and the minute it drops I will sell immediately, the fundamentals of that company are shocking and its riding purely on speculation in my view

And then I hold shares like Coca Cola where you can safely put them in the box and ignore for a decade

For actual day / swing trading I don't read news. I did at the start but I found the problem was that there was just so many moving parts that its was a mess, I was **** about face, jumping back and forth 2nd guessing myself all the time I majorly cocked up twice, once with Hertz and then again with wirecard. I got caught out as although there was a massive sell off and a bounce back, I bought at the wrong time and got hammered, I sold out at a 70% loss whereas if I held a few days it would have made a50% profit. I am staying out of that game for good now.

I am trying to take it from the group up, understand price action, strategies, entry exits , limits stops order types etc, Then I will take it up more by adding news feeds, deeper analysis, market sentiment and so on.

As for news specifically I think it's worth having twitter or any decent news feed, for major or catastrophic events like bankruptcy, political, company news. One must remember that every indicator we look at has some form of averaging and smoothing going in. A sudden news release and it completely trumps anything in the charts. An indicator can't react fast . In this way I prefer IB platforms TWS rather than IG (I use ProRealTime) as the software has decent news feed. IG's PRT doesn't but the problem is you can't spread bet on IB.

July 17, 2020

4 minutes ago, RANZ said:

Maybe you need to read about Jim Simmons. In my experience too quant trading is the right and only way to make any money if possible.

Please note Jim Simmons never revealed any of his trading strategies but he is considered better than George S and Warren B.

cheers man, I don't know about him, What do you mean about "quant trading", can you recommend a book.

Actually I was a quant for a long time, have a Maths PhD but my mistake before was ignoring markets and focusing purely on the numbers and theories. We strongly believed in efficient market hypothesis., the rational investor and random walk theory but in recent years I realized that people do not act rationally at all and there are opportunities to be had.

Although I am still in my early days at this so as time goes on I hope to have broader experience

July 17, 2020

I thought i summarize my experience so far day trading in case any newer folks are interested

Day trading is much harder than swing trading and especially at those lower time frames.

From 100+ day trades so far I am certainly no expert and I like being honest, I am on average losing but I learnt a lot. My thoughts so far are:

1. Forget 95% of youtube, it's full of turds just trying to market courses, **** out their channel. Same with forums, no matter what topic it is (fitness, languages), a lot of people lie their asses off and pretend they are experts but in fact know jackshit about it. Even the supposedly guru's are full of sh@t. For example the guy who wrote that best seller "Trading for a living", Dr Elder. He came up with his own "impulse system" and brags about it. It just MACD and Moving average, nothing more . Aslo on their own private forum (which I was on for $60 a month) the group consistently underperform the S&P and even their best Gold start traders barely out perform it. Everytime you asked a question you got told, "buy this extra course for $100's Its the same with Anton Kreil, $15k for a course? I have no idea if he is good or not but its seems to me that it's the easiest thing in the world to prove your validity. Publish your trading accounts, get them audited by an auditor, show tax statements, do live streaming etc If I was building a business as a trainer that's what I would do.

2. Having said that there is a lot of useful information that if you look at it objectively it can be great advice. Keep a word document and write down your own points. Ignore every cherry picked chart they show you (apart from the educational content), use your own, scroll back a 500/1000 bars and then start looking at the extreme right hand bar, moving forwards bar by bar and ask yourself "ok what will I do here", you will soon find out that even if you got the direction right, spreads, commissions, trend reversed too quickly, stops etc killed it . It will paint a very different picture than what youtube baseball-wearing-cap-on-backwards hipster is telling you.

3. Day trading is a job, not a hobby and a difficult one, you need to put in the hours, research, do your homework, keep a trade journal take notes and analyze what you have done etc

4. You are essentially trying to make cash like flipping a coin over the long run with one side weighted in your favour.

5. Forget working on hunches or "I think the stock price will go up / down" You are doomed to failure. A proper system is the only way

6. Risk Management is the most important concept by far in my view. The generally advice is never risk more that 1 - 2% on a trade. I personally think that is too much . I would keep it at 0.5% max until you work what you are doing. 8 losing trades in a row at 1-2% and it starts to hurt and self doubt really creeps in.

7. Demo always seems like a good idea but in reality it never worked for me. I put on trades forget about them, have no psychological connection to wins / losses. You need to use real money, even if it's just the bare minimum to see those losing ££ . I have put on 4 trades over last few days.All 4 were up 2 x Risk but because I am a total **** I didn't cash out and all hit stops resulting in 4 losses. It was only £80 between all 4 but the fact I got greedy (yet again!) annoys me

8. If your profitable with a year you're lucky. My aim is to just break even by christmas to see if I can sustain a modest living in this. I have income from other sources anyway.

9. The reality is that its a heck of a difficult job to make money day trading., Brokers like IG, and all the others make money by continual flow of clients coming in losing cash and eventually leave, hence the large marketing. I don't blame them, it's a business model, not a hippy self help group, but just be realistic.

10. Most news, ideas is **** and pointless. I worked in investment banking on the trading floor for 15+ years. Every Monday we had to come up with a trade idea for clients , Derivatives / inflation, bonds, 90% of them were sh@t, I know I wrote them, we just had to do something. It's the same with market news, broker webinars etc, trading channels / ideas etc, the staff are tasked to do something. More noise, more videos, more website hits, more trades = more commissions / sales.

11. Don't jump around from stock to stock, to FX, to crypto. I believe if you are not making money in two or three the problem is you, not the asset. They all have their own personalities, e.g. Coca cola barely moves, Tech stocks jittery as hell, respond to news, others hardly at all, so you need to spend sufficient time on see what influences what.

12. as above, don’t jump around with different trading strategies, 200 different indicators etc. You need to limit all the moving parts and focus

13. Best way I found to improve, (so far) , For every trade, I immediately write down why I entered the trade (note 5) , for example

Long MA Strategy
(a) Rising 200MA
(b) Rising 20MA ,
(c) 20MA crosses over 200MA
(d) price near 20MA

seems like a winner on paper but I still kept getting stopped out. Then afterwards write down what happened, e.g. after the trade exit I put screen shots of 3 time frames (daily hourly / 15min) into a PowerPoint and detailed where I went wrong. Several things became clear such as
- 2min charts was pointless, you would never make the spread back
- The risk / reward (1:2) was to high, a 1:1.2 would have paid off > 50% of the time .
- I was fannying around with stops, for no reason. etc
- I'm putting on trades because I'm retarded, e.g. long trade, on a bearish trend in larger time frame

The point being, you start to learn about your technique and they way you trade which no book can possibly know.

Heck it's boring but I am starting to see patterns about the way I trade (= c@ck up). The best traders I saw in banks were the OCD ones. The wannabe Burberry wearing chavs all got pushed out or sent to Starbucks to pick up the coffee

The million dollar question:

can you make money? At this stage, I am still undecided. I think there is light at the end of the tunnel but its going to require work, a plan and mental commitment for sure.

Anyway, long post but hope it's useful for some folks

(apologies for the obscenities!)

July 17, 2020

On 07/07/2020 at 17:59, dmedin said:

These miserable-looking c&nts seem to be suffering enough already

that photo gave me flashbacks,, 15+ years going into the financial district with the masses of people on the subway. Depressing as f@ck , listening to all the cringy talk like 'implementing strategies', 'low hanging fruit', 'providing excellence'.

Got hacked off with it as I thought I might go postal, went to Asia years ago and never came back . Life is too short. Sun, cheap lifestyle, beaches and no politically correct BS talk or having to acknowledge the 472 different genders we have now 😄

July 16, 2020

23 hours ago, jlz said:

The author of the course mentioned that you can get it for free on your first trade in these brokers. I guess we could do a hit and run to get it.

"By opening a trading account with PRT-CFD or PRT Interactive Brokers, the training is offered from the first order executed on the account."

thanks dude, I spoke to Nicholas and the sales manager at PRT London yesterday

To avail of the training and the pro version of PRT , one must open a NEW IG account through PRT directly. a lot of IG customers have already done this according to PRT . Now the somewhat astute of you here might think that it's pointless as I already have an IG, i.e. what's the point of opening a new one (via PRT) and then asking IG to transfer my holdings to this new account and close down the old one. IG are still the dealers and PRT just the software providers, they do not act as dealers. It just gives PRT staff, and IG staff extra work, with the end result being back at square one . I suggested that I email IG and tell them what I wanted to do so PRT can get their commission or however they get paid

However we live a world where laterally thinking is a hindrance and "computer says no" 😕

It makes zero sense to me, I was going to go and do it yesterday but I realised that I can only open a CFD account with PRT but I only ever use SB, CFD commissions always seem too much and there is a minimum charge

July 16, 2020

13 hours ago, THT said:

Yep I have positions open overnight - I trade from daily charts though so just use the futures contracts not the DFB - worst i've been caught by is about 2R

I see, smart move. Hertz cost me big time.

trading from daily is a lot safer as one is not so leveraged. My mistake was working from 15 min charts, stock proceed to do nothing all day but the next day it moved a 1 - 3 standard deviations of the daily. Naturally that equated to a magnified loss on a smaller time frame

July 15, 2020

@nit2wynit

thanks, yeah I think day trading at the open is a heck of a difficult thing. Moves too fast for me or by the time a find a big mover the best ifs over Catch 22 really, how can it be big until it actually happens . Maybe premarket orders and L2 pricing I guess

July 15, 2020

1 hour ago, nit2wynit said:

Day Trading is a smaller time frame. In and out in minutes on small moves. The problem with SB and Day Trading is the small moves can often be the Spread so getting in and out is almost impossible. However, the benefit is of course, it's Tax Free. What this means is we must get out sooner than you would than if you were actually Buying and Selling shares. It's the Spread that is creating the issue with Day Trading and Spread Betting, especially when we're talking about Scalping. It means we need to take extra care on choosing our trades. They need to be able to run longer and wider to cover the spread OR we simply need to realise we must accept a lesser profit and adjust our PL ratio. If a trade moves 10pts or 10% or whatever, but the spread is 7pt, then we're not going to make much on it unless we're in very early and exit as late as possible, thus being longer in the trade allows for more chance of it reversing.

I made a post about this a while ago. I really struggle to see how you can make money day trading with stocks, unless as you say adjust P/L ratio, hope for larger moves or very confident of the direction. I find a 15chart is about the shortest I can use for (5mins for entry, hourly for trend ). and realistically the trade will run for hours all of which time odds are going against you for a reversal.

Indices, oil, gold I have had better luck but again only

If swing trading you have the whole overnight risk issue and share dealing doesn't allow short selling

Side note: Advantage of a trade journal and screen shots. It highlighted this as the major stumbling block!

July 15, 2020

44 minutes ago, Imymalik said:

Hi guys can someone please explain how I short a trade on my IG account ,the sell button is never highlighted.

Thanks

Spread Bet or CFD is the only way as far as I know

July 15, 2020

1 minute ago, Caseynotes said:

I've not used them either but yes they are guaranteed but there are a couple of snags, they need to be placed with the trade entry and they can be very wide esp if market is very volatile and you can't put a normal stop in closer to the price as well.

Not sure if you can cancel them at any stage and then put a normal one in.

thanks, I was concerned about if I use them will they take precedent over a normal stop and just charge me the premium every time, when a bit of slippage would be acceptable.

July 15, 2020

Biggest mistake I made was forgetting to close out a trade and waking up to a massive loss (30xRisk!) due to over night news. (Wirecard)

However more often that not I have seen trades that I closed out just before market close that if had I left until the next day would have been real winners (10R) It seems like if I used a Guaranteed stop to prevent the above happening it would have paid off in the long run. I am not sure though.

Any thoughts

(PS: I assume a guaranteed stop would prevent this over night risk, right? I never used one )

July 15, 2020

41 minutes ago, Caseynotes said:

I'm reminded reading years ago on all the testing that is done on a new indicator to determine the best default settings, most have 2 or 3 adjustments so the computer runs needed counted in their thousands to show finally which settings were optimal.

Plenty of user scripts on ProRealTime for this type of testing, might be useful for anyone interested

July 15, 2020

15 minutes ago, dmedin said:

Analysing stocks is really difficult. I don't know how people did it in the old days (before computers). It's hellishly difficult to get something that works half-reliably for all stocks.

Edwards and Magee's book is insane - equivocates everything. Causes more confusion than anything else.

I tried fundamental analysis for years and its was pointless from a trading perspective (well for me anyway). long term investment sure . It takes ages and market just doesn't do what it says on the tin.

I see that many pro traders just focus on a few stocks for their whole career, maybe that's the way to go. Hard to know

Although it seems that everything is equally difficult. I never try FX as I know diddlysquat about that.

I have given up reading books, sick to death of those cherry picked charts and all the fluff like "trade at the start of trend" How the *** are you supposed to know with any degree confidence that a trend is starting ? The $64,000 question which they all skip over.

Also the other usual one is that "markets only trend of 20% of time". I could never understand that. Change the time frame and you can find trends everywhere.

July 15, 2020

2 minutes ago, Caseynotes said:

good points and sound advice for others to take note.

with regards to the actual stop loss only testing will give the answer. yes getting the direction right is easier than timing the entry and setting the profit target, some markets lend themselves better to chart structure targets than a R ratio. In a trend and pullback the first target after entry has to be the prior swing high (up trend) which some call the 'first trouble area' and is often around 2 x the stop placed just behind the base of the pullback. If sellers are serious this is where they will strike a second time to force a reversal.

cheers.

Issue is that there are so many moving variables its hard to analysis properly, Seems like you need a hundred trades on the same stock / indices etc

I did a long trade on FTSE Cash yesterday 15min / 1 hour time frame. Rising MACD, Rising 200Ma, rising 20ma 20MA broke through 200ma 4 periods prior and continued on fro the rest of the day. Prior swing low was far too low for a sensible stop so I set it at below 20ma. It broke through the 200ma though.

Whether this is a good Strategy or not for FTSE 100 I don't know

July 15, 2020

Bit of useful information for ya all

I did 10 experiments using the barchart.com over last few months . Ran 2 equally weighted portfolio's (swing trades <1 week) 10 long positions in one and 10 short positions in another . The stocks were taken at random from their screener, only ones with med - high vol and only ones with a 100% BUY / Sell on a 'BarChart Opinion' etc

https://www.barchart.com/uk/stocks/signals/top-bottom/top?viewName=main&timeFrame=daily

Time frame 1 week, Mon to Fri Risk / Reward 1: 1.5, stops usually 1 Daily Standard deviation

Results: nothing more than random! 0.45% from memory

Sure I could have fiddled about with limits stops, portfolio weights etc but it nothing convinced me that there is any evidence to pursue expert screeners

July 15, 2020

I have finally got over that psychology issue. I never move stops now except the odd time in the direction of the trade, to lock in profits (BE). I never risk more that 0.5% on a trade and keep risk /reward to about 1:1.5

I have read a heck of a lot now and follow accepted advice. 20 trades , same strategy , sensible stop say at 1 - 1.5 ATR / 1 BB or a obvious support and resistance line

I don't revenge trade, never get over confident ,screenshot every trade and keep a detailed log and analyse every trade with notes.

*** HOWEVER The problem is quite simple, its just not working, I am on a 5th loss in a row on MACD and 200MA , trading in the direction of the trend, using multiple time frames

3 hours ago, nit2wynit said:

Personally I find that most Day Trades will only go 1:2 or 1:3 at best. The ones that go 1:3 1:4 or more become less and less frequent. However, it's important to Not move your Stop to BE too soon. I've lost as many trades as I've won doing this. If we can't handle the Fear of Loss, then it needs to be mastered most of all.

Most importantly I believe a trade should work right away. Especially in Day Trading. Day Trading requires tighter stops and a shorter game. Hoping for a 20% move on a stock that only moves 5% per day on average is a bit of a long shot.

looking at my logs I tend to agree with this now. I get the initial direction right more that 50% of the time but once i passes the 1:1 , the odds decline rapidly

I would only move a stop if the trade moved rapidly, Like a manual trailing stop.

July 15, 2020

6 hours ago, jlz said:

I can see the value of using PRT if you already know it but for someone that is starting with it I would just recommend using the charting tools that are coming with IG and TradingView plus the IG API for automated trading. That should cover most of the what is needed to deal.

Hi jlz, thanks for your reply, do you mean the online platform? That's nowhere near as good at ProRealTime (in my view). Screeners, alerts, programmable indicators, back-testing etc are all available in PRT. Charting tools much better. Its nice to have complex ways of losing cash 😂

I guess it depends on what you are using if for. Low frequency trading (>3 a week) and yeah sure there is no need for it. I get your point on just starting out with PRT, it is not user-friendly to be honest . The order-window is near impossible to find once it disappears

I used the API before but I found it very fiddly, full of bugs (would crash excel) and it seems like it's barely supported.

I think its worth persisting with PRT as once you become familiar with it, it starts to pay off. EAch to theor own of course

5 hours ago, dmedin said:

The three manuals (for PRT, Screener and Backtest) give you all the info you need and are free.

It's antiquated French software and I wouldn't pay for it.

TradingView is about 20 years more up-to-date.

I used to use TradingView but you can trade off that though right?

One concern I have about using non DealThrough software (like Trading view) is that they don't take spreads into account. This can make or break a trade, For example last two trades I got the direction right but Centra (CNA) but spread was 1.2bps but the High-Low was only 1.5,

Personally I feel its too easy to focus on the technology and not on the trading. No one needs 4000 indicators 😄

Actually I much prefer IB's Trader Workstation as they have decent news feeds but they don't do spread-bet, only CFD which is too costly. If they start offering spread bet its adios IG

Also I would like to have my share dealing and SB all one the one platform. PRT doesn't support share-dealing . I will probably move my Share portfolio over to them

July 14, 2020

7 hours ago, dmedin said:

Forget it, friend. You've started into a downward spiral and it just gets worse and worse from here.

I recommend that you quit while your losses are 'only' £1500. By Christmas it will be much more.

End of the day some people do make money. Market is just transferring money from Losers --> Brokers --> Winners (with folks putting extra money it ).

At this stage my P / L are starting to stabilize, I get that the odds are stacked against me but you never will know if you never try right? I have achieved a lot already in other areas of my life but it's always been through a lot of hard work!

I wouldn't say I am on a 100% on a downward spiral , as I have certainly chastised myself for stupid trades early on, now I am rigid on money management. But yup, you could be well right my friend, we shall see!

11 hours ago, jlz said:

Your post reminded me of this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-vj9Fb5m6M

Totally agreed, there is a lot of nonsense when it comes to finding any useful information about trading.

I spend my days back-testing any "marvelous idea" I see out there. So far I was able to prove all of them wrong at some point.

What I do now is ignore any chart these 'gurus' bring up, bring up my own chart and it paints a very different picture! Also with the amount of algorithm trading around, its dead simple to just program these strategies to see if they work. I have tried a LOT with ProrealTime and results are all almost random. Even when you see a strategy that works, the minute you change the time frame, security, window length it jumps from positive to negative quite quickly

Just listened to an interview with Tom Dante Good to see a bloke that tells it like is

July 13, 2020

Ok folks , let's be honest here .

I am pretty sick of all the BS that goes around forums and youtube people claiming they are making millions when the reality is they are sitting at home in their pants frantically checking IG every 3 seconds to see if the hole they dug themselves into getting any smaller. Up 50 quid and all of a sudden they are trading experts or nostradamus.

Me: Up 15% on my share dealing but in reality its because its a bull market and I bought months ago. Spread Betting is about £1500 loss in 2 months mainly because I am more wrong that right, rather than foolish trading. Although I did have a massive c@ck up by leaving a position open overnight and losing 900 in one go). Learnt what a guaranteed stop is after that!

My aim is just to break even by Christmas, learn a lot and by then assess if I can make a modest living from Swing / Day trading. I can dedicate most of time to this as I am not working now. Modest being 20% annually

At this stage I am doubtful. I have read a lot, made a pile of notes but I am convinced most is just hot air /fluff, authors cherry picking charts and rehashing ago old indicators to show that they are experts, or **** out their training courses

Still I will pursue it for the next 6 months and make a final decision. At least now I am sensible with stops, never more that 1% on a trade and no more losses than 5% of current portfolio a month. Thus max possible loss is 26% in 6 months

July 13, 2020

Ok folks , lets be honest here folks.

I am pretty sick of all the BS that goes around forums and youtube people claiming they are making millions when the reality is they are sitting at home in their pants frantically checking IG to see if the hole they dug themselves into getting any bigger. Up 50 quid and all of a sudden they are trading experts or nostradamus

July 13, 2020

10 minutes ago, elle said:

I just use this to help ...................... https://www.prorealcode.com/

thats the same website I linked in my original post Elle, the Advanced training videos require a fee

July 13, 2020

try prorealtime, you back test anything you like really and download other users scripts from the website

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