Recent content by 40yotrader

Since I too will be running a CTA program in the new year, I've done some research on obtaining clients. What I've found is investors don't want to be sold anything. They like to "discover" talent on their own. They're interested first in a return of their investment, then a return on their...

Rhino, I appreciate the thought. I don't plan on working with others anymore. After this year I'll be looking into setting up a CTA business at the urging of my broker. I'll finally be able to use my marketing background for something useful. I have too many systems running to do any research...

4 year update to the first day I went "live". I'm doing just fine. The experience with the journal was a net negative for me. I thought going through the process of what I did might help others if it worked out or failed. Either way someone could learn something from my attempt. I wasn't...

Finally a topic for me. I increment after a loss and have found it a very good way to smooth the account equity. A few notes after years of working with it: 1). Know your pain threshold for drawdowns before figuring the progression. If you can't stand a 10% drawdown you'll need a different...

If you control your Thoughts and Actions, you control your Destiny.

I'm a 4 year newbie and I did lose money my first month of real trading but since then I've done ok. Certainly well enough for the relatives to start calling and asking for money again. My journey was harder than necessary because noone told me the following. 1. Do your research BEFORE trying...

Don't disagree with anything you've said. I was just trying to understand where man was coming from. I'm always up for learning something new. Perhaps he'll provide a little detail on his problem with pf if someone expressed more interest in shedding light rather than heat on the subject. As...

1). Does this have to be a production system? I have some very good ones I'm not currently trading. 2). I don't understand your money management here. If I have a million dollars the amount I allocate per-contract is probably going to be different than someone else. How about just using a...

About the only problem I've seen with PF is that it doesn't take into consideration the distribution of trades. If a large chunk of the profits come from the top 10% of trades then the overall results from day-to-day trading will be overly optimistic.

Ah, I remember it well. 6/9/2006 I lost $76,227.54 which was 12.3% of my accounts on 226 r/t's in the ES. Every trade I made that day went against me and hit me hard. I was pretty ill that night and didn't tell my wife until I had recovered the full amount. Made me realize that I needed...

I've got your back.

I'm a manual systems trader. I've tried auto trading. It's not ready for primetime. The problem...the systems don't continuously calculate conditions. I've found the delay of 3-5 sec. for calculations to complete and orders to be placed to be unacceptable. Also, the NET is too unreliable to...

I've had 14 losers in a row, but my worst so far was 16 out of 18 trades. It's all part of the distribution. As long as you understand WHY they're losing and know the conditions are atypical, I wouldn't get too excited. In my case it led to a small change to stop trading when volatility levels...

I've talked to a broker that specializes in NYMEX. He told me to expect slippage of $300 r/t and not to plan on doing more than 10 contracts at a time. In effect, he told me I was wasting my time looking at NG. I've decided to abandon this market and go back and toil on other projects in...

Bert, I gave up on charts much earlier than you. I realized I had no talent for screen trading and everything I tried looked like a mirage. Fortunately there is another form of trading that you like I am totally compatible with. "Systems trading". I found the learning curve was very...