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I've been self employed (both consulting and trading) for years. Here are my thoughts: 1. Self confidence: Biggest issue I suspect you'll face is one of confidence. If you're not confident, you'll not trade well. The only ways to reduce that risk is to have enough funds so that you're not...

Two other small suggestions. 1. I have found TWS to run better if I give it 512MB, so that's what i do. 2. if you want the garbage collection "spread out" more, there are several JVM parameters to affect that. I've never found that necessary, but maybe you do.

In my experience stops almost always reduce system profitability. That's just how it is. Here is what I do (and what i think you need to do to): graph all "max losses" for each position. This is sometimes called max adverse movement. For instance, you'll find that most position moves no more...

I found that SPI showed down realtick to a crawl. Did not affect eSignal. so somehow it's application dependent. Realtick actually told me to turn off SPI ... i cancelled the service in stead.

I use tradelog. Works very well for me. http://www.armencomp.com/ If you don't day trade, Quicken can be made to work.

Murray, I'd be interested in seeing some stats and contributing to the discussion. ORB is one of the most fascinating approaches, even though it does have long period of dry spells.

Cash is right. I avoid the AMEX always - just not worth it.

for the electronic contracts I just roll the day before FN on the open I compared volume a couple of times, and there seems to be very difference between last few days before FN.

Moved to chit chat. If you want to start a thread focused on trading, please do so.

This is actually funny. I'd be happy to make 20% of what mschey makes. I suspect his take home pay exceeds that of 50% of all CEOs. Now, why would he want to get a "real" job? funny ...

I now have a verizon broadband wireless modem for my laptop. That way I can connect even if power to the house is out. I also have UPSs on all trading computers and modems, as my primary recovery mechanism. Only about $60/mo, so pretty inexpensive insurance

I don't think so. No matter what, you have to develop some sense of how the market moves. You can call that "tape reading" if you like. The games change constantly, so no fixed set of observations will work, but there is no way around looking at the price (and charts if you like) for an extended...

firstchoice: you should really read up on the contract specs at www.cme.com. This is at least your 2nd post on buying between the minimum tick size for ES. FYI, the smallest price increment is .25 for ES, and it's rare that the spread is larger than one tick. Arbing with SP floor contract is...

I agree. I posted two things that were broken with the 860 release (the clientID and time stamp changes). I had to back out to the prior version to trade. The API definitely got hit this time!

Consider the following: Move to silicon valley (if you're not already here). Get a software job - very easy today. Good SW engieers get $95k to $150k depending on skill and personality. Markets open at 6:30 so you can get at least 2 hours of trading in every day. Do this until...

My experience is that currency futures can be traded for 1 to 5 day swings. I have found that the average trade (over time) relative to the day to day noise to be low, so it takes a lot of patience to get the money out. I mainly trade(d) EUR, JPY and CAD and AUD vs the US For me, the size of...

Just a heads up: I have also run into at least two "non documented" changes as it relates to the API 1. It's no longer possible to re-use clientId across sessions. I use the same setup for my trading account and demo account (for testing). I no longer can use the demo account after having...

Just got a reply to the trouble ticket i filed: "Our programmers are aware of this issue and are currently working on a resolution. Unfortunately I do not have a time frame as to when this will be accomplished. IB apologizes for any inconvenience that this may have caused you in this situation."

Also discussed here under a not-too-descriptive thread title: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=70862&perpage=6&pagenumber=2

Today was even worse for me. Got about 50 pop-up dialogs with the error message. It's really nuts to pop a blocking dialog in response to an API order. At least feed the error message back through the API, so that our software can deal with it. I've filed a trouble ticket, and I suggest...