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Perhaps I can relate. I'm probably trading 1/4th your size and my adrenaline spikes like I'm being held at gunpoint when I enter a sizable position. If you don't mind me asking, what to you consider large size relative to your account size? Thanks for sharing, and excellent work today.

Those inter day gaps could go either way, no? Seems like a bit of a coin-flip to me. I'm enjoying your journal BTW. Thanks for posting your down days too and not cherry picking. Helps noobs like me learn.

Not a good day. However I am not too disturbed that today's losses exceed yesterday's profits because the majority was from a fat-finger this morning. Just human error, not an emotional breakdown. Not that I traded unemotionally today. My lizard brain took the reigns on a number of occasions...

After a self-imposed hiatus I am back to working my intra-day strategy for real. I will start posting more consistent daily P/L figures along with current YTD Mark-to-Market performance on my account as a whole. I have been enjoying the market action recently and I'm getting a kick out of the...

What I got from Black Swan is that short term trading is a losing strategy over time and the only way to make consistent gains is with options--one of the best ways if not the single best way to profit from randomness.

If it doesn't reveal too much I would be interested in knowing what technicals you look at to determine when an ETF is trending. How do you determine sector allocation percentages? Thanks for sharing

I'm surprised how many stories of failure boil down to psychology and lack of discipline. These are personality traits! Finding balance in your own life is important. When you have nothing better to do than stare at a price chart all day you're likely to take bad trades out of boredom rather...

Sometimes while watching price action on a chart I will see the bid/ask spread jump from one penny to something like 10 points. Sometimes it does the opposite. Why does this happen? What kind of market conditions or order flow cause the exchanges to do this? It seems to happen less on very...

Haven't posted here in a while since I haven't made any trades in my discretionary account in about 2 weeks. Waiting on a funds transfer so I can get back to trading for real. I mentioned at the top of this thread I would be focusing on RTM-style trading but I have been getting less and less...

I don't understand how you can trade an RTM strategy on anything other than an intra day time scale--trading the volatility off the open. But I do understand how you can really get screwed trading this way because positions move against you very fast and then move in your favor just as fast.

Still just practicing but not too bad a day I guess. WCRX popped way beyond its average range right off the open. This is what I would classify as an RTM trade although I could be totally off base. Everyone seems to have their own interpretation. Anyway I didn't see any news other than the...

Perhaps inefficiency is the wrong term. What I mean is prices get out-of-whack due to forces unrelated to actual supply and demand whether it's a bunch of market-on-open orders from naive retail investors or some felonious rumor. The theory is the price will revert to the equilibrium between...

I thank you for this pearl of wisdom. I will just end my day here. It couldn't possibly get any better.

What sort of technicals do you look for when choosing a good stock to RTM trade? I've found the ones the work best have an average daily volume around 1 million or so. Too much volume is not good since RTM strategies exploit inefficiency and high volume instruments tend to be more efficient...

This is pretty pathetic but my screw ups last Thursday and Friday brought my account below 25K so I can't even trade this week. I don't quite understand why but IB won't even let me open a new position whether I it's a day trade or not. So I'm just going to practice paper trading this week. I...

Thanks. I may be guilty of forcing that WYNN trade 'cause I didn't see any opportunities off the open. Should have just side-lined it on Friday.

Wow. My username says it all. Got schooled again trying to fade bullish news. This time it was WYNN. Lesson learned--don't go against multiple upgrades and good earnings no matter how distorted the price gets because just when you think it can't go any higher it goes up yet another couple...

I'm starting this journal to keep myself accountable to my goal of 40% ROC in 2011. A lurker for a some time now, this is my first time posting to ET but I've read a number of journals on this site that I found pretty enlightening which is what inspired me to do this. A programmer by...