Recent content by treeHamster

I trade with smaller positions but that was a different book. I started a new one and it grows significantly slower. It used the same model for weeklies but a different goal and position sizing for the book. ChoiceTrade is...meh. If you don't have enough cash for IB or LightSpeed or aren't...

I do straight long positions. Today I ran CAT C90's from .37->.46, BBRY C15 from .17->.15, JPM C49 from .30->.37, and GOOG C875 from 2.15->2.10. Total return to the book after commissions, a sliver under 10%. Yesterday it was around 18%. My week to date performance is 28.89%. It would probably...

If you need a suggestion, then I'd say grab up one of the Asus LED monitors. Most of the good ones can be picked up for ~$150. They have amazing brightness and contrast for trading. I spend $400 for 4x21" monitors (1 LCD and 3 LED's). Gives me a total resolution of 7600x1080. If you go with...

Weeklies are about the only place you will be able to get high returns consistent enough to allow you to grow fast enough to move into wealth. However, it's not easy and takes a lot of patience. I normally sit around for an hour or two waiting for a good opening. Then I normally am out of my...

3x in 5 months is ok if he's screwing a lot of his trades up or just rolling futures and/or stock. I do options and look to double ~1/month (it'd be faster but I make lots of goof ups). Today for example, I pulled a solid 16.8% after commissions. It would have been 22% but I made a bad trade...

First of all, the glasses don't use an LED display. They use a beam splitter (the angled surface inside the block of glass that juts out) and a series of lasers to draw a picture that your eye can see. This is significantly different from an LED because lasers are even more efficient in their...

Smart phones have crappy battery life because of two major factors. The first is the screen. It uses an exorbiant amount of energy and therefore ranks in the top spot for power draw. The second biggest power draw is WiFi. Because it uses an even higher data rate and spectrum allocation than...

It depends on what you're trading and what the market looks like. If you're trading options, then you're best off in either a bull market with a VIX that is stable or slowly falling. If it's a bear market, you're best off with a VIX that is rising or stable. So basically you're best off when...

If you have an acct balance below 25k and are running a cash account, as long as you don't break the free rider rule, you can trade as much as you want. If you are on a margin account, with under 25k, you can't break the 3 trades/5 day period rule or your account will get shunted in the same...

If you're not making $20 in commissions a month for options, you should probably just go to another broker for options. I run $20/day just in my ticket charges not counting the per contract commission I pay. If you're not making $20/month in options comms, then you're not trading daily or...

That AAPL trade was a rookie mistake. I was advocating to buy the stock pre-earnings (when it dropped below $400) because the odds of downside were extremely low. However, I wasn't going to buy the options pre-earnings because the volatility crunch would ruin your position. Nah, I grabbed my...

Here's the ledger from that experimental trial: https://docs.google.com/a/holotechsystems.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuFHxYsQIP6ZdEJ0dVVHbUZNT29McXFpZDBUUXllWVE#gid=0 All of those trades are real and can be back checked in the ticker tape. The easiest would be the IBM 210C for 3/29/2012...

Oh, sorry can't help you there as I've only used their test platform. Outside of the test platform I use the Gateway and don't run the actual TWS.

Well this isn't exactly true. I started in June 2011 and made 5% of my account on my second trade (first was just a $100 test trade to make sure I understood the system that I flipped and had for less than 2 minutes). I cycled through various ideas until I moved into options where it took me...

Still like PiTrading the most considering it's only $170 for 10 years of data on the entire S&P, a ton of indices, as well as a number of stocks that are no longer listed on the market. The data isn't the most accurate as it's rounded off to the nearly 100, but to get data that doesn't round...