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One other comment: if you were to average 17% of perfect (per the screen shots you posted earlier), and if perfect for the ES was $170K/year, (my data from 5/24/07 to 5/23/08), then that should yield about $28.9K/year, or $2.4K/month. Does that sound right, or did I make a mistake somewhere...

James, Now that the trades are starting to accumulate, would it be too much trouble to post a running total of the P/L? I'm sure many of us are adding them in our heads to keep track of how things are going overall. But if it's going to add significant work then forget it, I can live with...

James, Where's the "% in position" data in the above links? Also, why do the "bars long" and "bars short" counts show zero? Thanks.

I've been trading with Dakota for about a year now, and really love it. My overall record in that period of time is 58% winners, 42% losers (based on about 140 trades). However, that includes a long learning/experimentation period for me. Recently I'm doing more like 70% winners. A big...

It now looks to me like I can get electronic quotes for options on the ZG contract during regular session hours. The spreads are horrible, but I expected that. I may try to buy some puts tomorrow and see what happens.

Thanks, I was afraid of that. So there's no way to get these quotes electronically? That's too bad.

Allen -- what's happening? Inquiring minds want to know. (I'm pulling for ya)

I've recently expanded my futures trading to include gold. I looked at the ZG and GC contracts, and went with GC due to the higher volumes. (BTW, is there some other reason that I should consider the ZG?) The problem I'm having is that I would like to buy some way-OTM puts for protection...

I did a simple little analysis a week or two ago on the correlation of daily price changes in gold and the Naz100, and got a low value, .10, for the last year's worth of data. You should check that yourself, of course.

I've recently started using puts that are 10% away from the market. You have to have enough gain in your other trades to overcome these costs, obviously. While I initially never expected to get any of the costs of the puts back, assuming they'd just decay to zero, I've found that if the last...

Here's another source that seems more complete and up-to-date: http://www.alaron.com/contract_specifications.aspx

I'm looking for a source of the historical performance bond (margin) data for the ES and ER eminis. Basically, a list of dates and dollars for the performance bond of each, going back a few years. I looked around the CME site and elsewhere on the net a little bit, but no luck so far...

Yes, they are, but it's still a good overall summary. Thanks.

Nice journal, Allen. It looks like to me that if you keep this up at anywhere near the rate that you are going, you should have no trouble blowing through your target. But that's a big "if", of course. I'll be watching and pulling for you.

I'm looking for a single place where I can find a comprehensive list of all the major futures contracts (not just index futures) along with some of their principal characteristics, such as contract size, margins required, type of delivery, etc. I know I can pull all this info together from...

In order to put some numbers on Nazzdack's idea, I did a little bit of analysis, see below. I did this using the OptionsXpress "pricer" tool, because it was handy and easy to use. It's pretty inaccurate for way OTM options, but that doesn't matter here. These start way OTM, but we can get...

OK, I finally get it now! I have to think about it some more, but it's an interesting idea. The one thing that bothers me is that the 650 put holder *could* exercise if he wanted to, for some wacky reason of his own. It might be irrational, per your explanation, but there is that...

Nazzdack, Thanks for the clarification. I hadn't thought of the volatility curve steepening, and I agree that the 630's would be more tradeable. I don't quite follow this part: Why is early assignment advantageous for the short seller? And why do you say the holder of the 650 put would...

OK, I'm all for that, but how? (see my other post above) Often what you get for free is worth what you pay for it... is there an exception here?

I'm not sure I understand this. If you mean something like selling a 650 put and using the proceeds to buy two 630 puts, how do I handle the case where the price drops to something like 640? At that point, couldn't I be assigned the contract? Not what I'd want to see happen in that...