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I think the clearing firm is more important. I'm considering MB Trading as back up broker, but I don't trust Penson as the clearing firm. Just look at a chart of PNSN.

There is no way IBKR would buy TRAD for $250 million just for nicer charting/software. For a small fraction of that price they could buy lots of really great data/charting vendors. For an even smaller price they could just hire more programmers to clean up TWS and make all its features work...

Thanks for the link. I didn't know Taleb has a new book coming out: "The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms." I just pre ordered it. I also ordered "Fractals and Scaling In Finance: Discontinuity, Concentration, Risk" by Benoit B. Mandelbrot who is Taleb's hero.

The CL report must have released at 10:30 cause NG didn't move at all and CL volume exploded. This the first time I've seen an reporting error like this from bloomberg.

I think James is 100% correct. A daytrader is just a discretionary market maker and HFTs are automated market makers. Buy and hold profitable companies is the only other way to make money in the market other than market making. I wouldn't wish a career as a discretionary market maker...

I'm sure that 99% of IB customers would dump IB in a heartbeat if it weren't for Quotetracker, Ninjatrader, and many other great software vendors that know how to provide the basic charting/trading functionality traders need.

Discipline = Habit You can build it step by step, take baby steps and experience the power of incremental progress. "Inch by inch life's a cinch. Yard by yard life is hard." The temptation of shortcuts is the devil.

+10,000 this week

No addressed to me but today was my worst day in a very long time in terms of discipline. I had a streak of 9 losing trades in a row. Then I made it all back on a couple of trades. I then had another streak of 7 losing trades in a row. I then made it all back in a couple of trades. I...

It makes no sense to start a CTA/CPO fund if you have less than the registration minimum of 16 clients and less than the minimum $25 million in AUM. Since you have less than that you are much better off with an advisor account at IB...

That's actually another bug in IB's system (btw I'm using TWS 905 and won't upgrade until they bring back single click order entry in booktrader). And I have an advisor account, which makes me more prone to these kinds of bugs. I'm paying 2.11 per side in CL and 1.80 in ES. So my net...

+7200 this week

Last night around 9 pm, I logged onto TWS and I saw that I was short 2 CL even though I ended the day flat at noon. TWS and booktrader showed the short position but the account window did not. So I called IB and of course they didn't have anyone at the phones. Then I logged off and logged...

I have an adviser account. You can prevent your clients from trading. But you can't prevent them from logging onto TWS and taking a look at their account. And you can't prevent them from printing out statements for their account. What is your real concern? That they would reverse engineer...

Its not the strategy that is the problem, its the mentality. The mentality behind averaging down is increasing risk as losses increase because a bigger gain is required to "get even". I call it a martingale mentality/strategy. And even traders that don't average down still suffer from this...

Yes Risk is the only reality in trading, everything else is an illusion.

No such thing as edge. Risk is the only reality in the markets. You job as a trader is to minimize/limit/avoid/contain risk from every angle.

I find OVX unhelpful as an index and no longer track it. I now record the ATR for each day and that helps in reading the volitility of the market. So far the 20 day ATR for CL is about 1.6. That's 160 ticks. But this average is somewhat misleading because you hardly see a range that is...

concentration = focus = meditation = boredom ^^ all are the same, all are boring Good trading is extremely boring There are two kinds of boredom - hot and cool Hot boredom is extremely uncomfortable, you're just itching for entertainment in one form or another. When you deprive...

I don't remember the exact saying but it goes something like this: "Traders that focus on how much they can make, lose money. And traders that focus on how much they can lose, make money." And so after realizing this, I shifted my focus entirely to limiting risk and drawdowns. This focus...