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RE: Paying a big chunk to the house ------ I certainly agree wiuth dozu, the futures are the way to go from many standpoints, most definitely including commissions. At IB you pay $6 a round turn ----- that's 2 complete trades for the price of ONE SINGLE e-mini TICK. I can't imagine paying...

For what it's worth Hitman, I do have a rigorous post-trading routine that I follow every day: 1) I note key Support/Resistance levels on ES and NQ, chart them and then commit them to temporary memory. 2) I construct several Fibonacci grids (using pre-programmed indicators for...

There is one thing about your post I don't understand Hitman. You say you don't just want to learn about the market during trading hours, but also want to learn something while you're not trading. But nothing stops you from doing this on your own right now. I trade for 7 hours hours a day and...

jmcgraw - It was Mark Weinstein who claimed that he had just 17 losing trades out of several thousand. (And he said 9 of those were because his quote machine went down, and he automatically exited all his positions at that point.) So the claim was that Weinstein had a 99%+ success rate on his...

I used to be a nationally broadcast classical music radio announcer, and I'm not only very familiar with classical music, but I listen to it as well when I trade. I basically agree with jmcgaw's post ----- I think Mozart is ideal both for brain stimulation and brain relaxation. A battery of...

Having watched both the Qs and NQ over a long period of time, I don't think there's any question that NQ is the more reliable indicator both in terms of speed and accuracy. Sometimes the Island boys try to front-run the QQQs, giving an impression that they're ahead of the market, but they are...

Crazy ---- COMP does update every 60 seconds, but the futures are virtually instantaneous, so there can be a lag of up to 60 seconds between NQ and $COMPQ. Furthermore, futures lead even beyond the immediate updating of $COMPQ, often foreshadowing larger moves up or down still to come.

I agree completely with Dustin ----- in most cases, NQ leads the COMPQ by up to a full minute, as it takes that long to calculate the new value of COMPQ based on what the individual stocks in it are doing. The futures ----- NQ and ES ----are amazingly accurate leading indicators of where the...

Babek ---- I believe for intraday trading purposes on 5M charts Alan recommends 13-period BBs (at 2 Std dev) ---- see page 47 of The Master Swing Trader. I use those settings (13 period) myself and find the tightness of the bands almost perfectly suited for ES and NQ. I believe traders should...

Jaan ---- You may well be correct. The math makes sense. The last four rollovers have all been on Thursdays, on the 7th and 8th day of the month, which is as far back as my direct experience goes. I used the figure of the 9th day of the month because it is the standard default option on most...

There are a couple of ways to construct continuous futures contract charts, each has advantages and disadvantages, gaining something while giving something else up. Because each method has serious flaws and I'm a day trader anyway, I prefer to simply deal with the current contract, and use the...

Kicking ----- I think it's nearly always best to trade the contract with the greatest volume, giving better liquidity, smaller spreads, and the most accurate possible representation of the current price. You can trade December e-Minis right now if you wish, but the liquidity and spreads will be...

The semi-official rollover for index futures is the 9th day of the delivery month. When that falls on a weekend, as it will this September, the pit traders in SP and ND generally begin rollover on the Thursday preceding the weekend, and complete the rollover on Friday. Thursday the 6th of...

I think Turok is basically correct. Compare ES or NQ ---- which trade 23 1/2 hours every weekday with the pit SP and ND contracts, which trade just 6 3/4 hours a day. There are sometimes reopening gaps in response to news when ES and NQ (along with Globex big S&P) resume trading at 4:45 ET...

Sometimes the trades that turn out best are psychologically the hardest to make. It can be hard to short new lows and buy new highs because you keep telling yourself how much more you could have made had you already been long or short from a better price and wonder how much longer it can keep...

Ideally, of course, you want to be already short as price approaches support and already long as it approaches resistance. That way, whatever happens you either have a continuation of the move, or on a bounce, can consider covering or reversing. Failing that, I too would wait to see what...

I fully agree with Tymjr's excellent post. It would probably take me a several-hundred page book to discuss all the subtleties of the indicators and trading methodologies I use. Most newbies seem to think that there is some magic indicator or system which you just apply to a chart and voila...

I've used eSignal for the indices for over a year now, and find their feed to be outstanding in terms of accuracy, reliability and speed of transmission. In all that time, I've had just one minor problem on one symbol that was fixed within 5 minutes. One bad tick, a few missing trades or even...

Hitman ----- I think I know (and use) what tymjr is referring to, but he's right: it won't be that much help to you for stock trading. You'd be better off simply watching the futures themselves as leading indicators, as I'm sure you do already.

Dan ---- This subject was addressed by many members near the end of the recent thread "Top Books for Day Trading."