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Hi, If I ran a broker firm, it would occur to me that a few percent of my customers would be good traders. It would not be hard to run reports that look at account growth over time. I could then look at their trades, and potentially reverse engineer their systems, or follow their trades, for...

I use and recommend IB. However, their paper account can only be used when you have a real account, and the minimum to open a real account is $10k. Can't be beat for range of products available to trade though.

Well said. In other words, only confidence in the tried-and-true long term performance of a system will give you the balls to continue trading it through rough patches. That confidence usually comes from having developed and honed it yourself.

I too was torn to shreds for asking a simple question last week. They assume one simple question means you don't know anything about anything. Comes with the territory I think, so don't take it personally. You asked why trade futures. Here's why I trade them (index futures in my case): -...

I backtest with 2 years of tick-level data for YM, which is almost 12M ticks (after removing redundant ones, i.e. ones with no price change). I wrote my own backtesting and strategy optimizing software. It can do a simulated trading run over this data in about 10 seconds, which makes it feasible...

You, sir, are what makes ET worthwhile :D

Could be other retail traders, could be pros. Let's just hope the supply of dumb money into the markets continues unabated. At the end of the day, the best man wins.

Ah well, can't be right all the time :D

OK, here's my call, FWIW: the Dow will drop 100 pts immediately after the Fed decision is announced, followed by a steady gain to finish the day more or less where it started. You heard it here first ...

Then you have an edge on us system traders. The brain is the best trading machine going, if well trained.

My system's actual performance equals backtested performance, but that's because I tested with 2 years of tick level data (avg. 25,000 price level changes per day, including off hours). The reason for testing with such a large data set is that as we all know the market changes over time...

Depends what you mean by dries up. It does flatten out a lot, but not completely. You can still get 10-15 point moves in that time. I think people are just taking a breather after the end of the market session before deciding on the next play. Some of the most interesting stuff happens...

I just wish people didn't have to be so negative on this board. I'm pretty much convinced this place is full of people with big egos and small trading accounts. Real traders are too busy trading to engage in this kind of BS (referring to the last two posts in particular).

Because I didn't know that practically every day some kind of news comes out at 7:30 Central. I thought it was pretty much dispersed throughout the day, and wasn't sure what was causing this spike at the same time every day. I thought it was a pretty straightforward question really, driven by...

No shit, Sherlock. Yes, I know about those things. But they don't affect my trading. I'm not sure what is so hard to understand about the fact that I run a purely mechanical system, every hour the market is open, through both run-ups and drawdowns. Needless to say, if the run-ups didn't...

Actually, I think not having run over 1 million simulated trading runs with 2 years of tick-level data and progressively refined your algorithms is much more likely to make one "out of it". Flame me if you wish, but I think statistically reliable patterns of price movement carry much more...

Nope. I have a mechanical trading system, and have been trading profitably for almost a year. As such, news is only of passing interest to me.

Hi, I trade the YM, and I noticed that at 7:30 Central time, almost every morning, there is a spike, either up or down. Once it's over, the price trend then usually goes back to what it was doing before. This is exactly an hour before regular trading hours commence and the stock exchanges...

Care to expand on that at all?

First there were more buyers than sellers in the market. Then there were more sellers.