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Short term trades are taxed at your ordinary income tax rate. Long term capital gains are taxed at 15%.

My biggest concern is when they manipulate the data. They can always revise it down at the next report like they have been doing. This is why most people are flat going into it.

At 8:30 AM: Nonfarm payrolls, unemployment rate, hourly earnings, and average workweek. Nonfarm Payrolls will be the most important in my opinion.

Good job on a choppy day. If you recognized that it would be an inside day and faded the extremes, you are in good shape. Now you need to expect that after 3 days of consolidation, a trend day is going to come soon. Look for a breakout to the upside/downside tomorrow after the employment...

With 5K I think you could trade YM. ES and ER2 you need 10 grand. The current volatility is just too big to be able to successfully weather the leverage.

What strategy? Come on, you can't be rigid in the markets. Every day is a new day. If traders could just build a simple strategy and extract money out of the markets everyone would be rich. It can be done, I'm doing it, but the key is being flexible and trading what the market is doing, not...

You've got to watch ES, NQ, YM, and ER2. ER2 is the main contract used to arb. You can sometimes see the spread traders leaning on the ER2 to get long NQ's or ES. Or the opposite. The interplay between the different market centers gives you the overall feel for what the big money is trying to...

Ouch!!, getting squeezed

I don't use this one myself, but it's free. http://www.optionsxpress.com/quote_option_chain.asp?SYMBOL=dia&PAGE=V You also want to find historical implied volatility of a stock's options so you can compare it to the current level and decide if the option is cheap or not. I don't know any free...

Gold is only a world is coming to an end trade. That is over now since the Federal reserve cronies basically gave their balance sheet to bail out all the rich bankers. If gold was an inflation hedge it would be much higher than 890 an ounce. If you believe the true inflation numbers out there...

AMEN!

There's many things that affect an option's value. The delta is the hedge ratio which basically means the percentage the option will move compared to the underlying price. Example if delta is .5 and stock goes up a dollar, the option will go up 50 cents. Also Implied Volatility. Typically if a...

That is not the news that caused the rally. It was the oversubscription to the preferred issued by LEH overnight.

You traded 79 contracts today? Today was an uptrend all freaking day. These are the bread and butter days. You have got to be able to capture a squeeze as furious as today's to make trading more than a hobby. I made my month's take just today. Why did you overtrade and not just ride the trend?

I am so glad I never went with IB. I have read post after post about their crappy service of data and customer support for years.

Good luck trading in the summer. Typically volume drops off so much, most pros take the summer off. 2007 was a unique situation because the uptick rule was repealed and the mortgage mess happened at the same time causing volatility to jump considerably. I would not expect that this year. By the...

This is nothing new, the PPT has been around since the crash of 1929. Jpmorgan being instructed to put in bids in every major stock in the Dow with the backup of the Federal Reserve. Sounds pretty similar to the rhetoric today. New words in policy, same effect. The spin machine trying to salvage...

This post origninating from the guy who called Obama a "baboon". I understand some people are fearful the world is coming to an end, but realize that many times has mankind gone through these crises. Right at the time of the most pessimism the inflection point comes into existence. The turn is...

You have a great attitude. I agree that the key to this game is keeping oneself from a gambling mentality by keeping a very strict structure and discipline. Glad to hear you came out positive.

Sounds like you have too much size. Tone it down a bit so you can handle the noise in the market to stick with your premise.