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Microhedge is probably the most comprehensive and flexible options software, used by most of the marketmakers and floor traders I know. It has nothing to do with making "recommendations", though, it is just an analysis and portfolio management program. If you want to trade, there is no one that...

COM member of the CBOT (still am), traded mostly grain options, now I trade off floor. I find the experience to be essential to what I do now for all sorts of reasons. Jessie

In my experience, New York is bad, but if you are doing size, you can get access to a pit brokers headset, and get fills back in seconds, even there. As for Chicago, if you are waiting more than a minute for a fill report on an executable order, you need to change brokers. If it is executable, I...

To each his own, but I had been using TurboTax for a few years, found a good accountant, and he paid for himself three times over the first year I used him. Maybe I am wrong, but in several cases, he has attached letters of explanation to my return regarding unusual deductions that may well have...

Create an entity for your trading (I use an LLC), get your insurance through that, and it is generally not a problem. Jessie

You're right, they will want to see how you do in a variety of market conditions, and they will also want to see how you LOSE. It's great not to have had any losing months, but eventually you will, and how you handle that is really important to institutional money managers. There are lots of...

But it is really pretty..... Jessie

As others have said here as well, even if you are looking at gold as a "safety net" and not an investment, take a 50 year chart of gold and look at it correlated with everything "bad" that has happened in the last 5 decades. What you will find is that there was no "safety net", and gold provided...

You might get a few accounts with a track record measured in months, but any real money will want to see a few years, through a variety of market conditions. They will also especially want to see how you handle a BAD period, and what your "bounce back" is like, e.g. do you grind back up in a...

Why not just place a buy order on a stop 50 pips up and a sell order on a stop 100 pips up to close it out if it gets filled, and a sell order on a stop 50 pips down and a buy stop order 100 pips down doing the same thing on the downside, and you will have the same net-50 results in either...

Take a look at a 50 year gold chart, through good economies and bad, and think about whether at any point gold would have been a good long-term investment. On an inflation adjusted basis, you would have been much better off keeping pennies in a jar. If gold doubled tomorrow, it would still be...

Not exactly. A MM will always (or usually) be willing to take either side of the market freely. When I am in the pit, I might price an option like this: "1/4 bid at 3/4". This means that I am willing to either buy the option for 1/4 or sell it for 3/4. I do that all day, keeping my delta hedged...

Live in hope, die in despair, remember DrKoop.com. If you get stopped out of a trade, unless you have the incredible bad luck to hit the exact top or bottom, if you so choose, you can always get back in, usually at a better price. At worst, you will do better half the time and worse half, and it...

If you mean what price you can get executed at immediately, you will generally pay the offer and sell at the bid. If you are trading with limit orders (always wise, unless you need out in a big hurry), you can, of course, try and do better, and a good floor broker can usually at least split the...

A reasonable expectation is to still be trading after 3 or 4 years, not having lost all your money. If you can do that, you will probably make it, and start making money. Yes, I'm sure you will hear from people who made lots of money their first year or two and never looked back, but in the real...

Actually now one trader can do pit/screen arbitrage by himself in the CBOT pits with a hand-held.. The CBOT is encouraging their use for arb purposes in all of the pits. Jessie

My thoughts are that if you have commercials and central banks who can deliver, and a bunch of short specs who will eventually have to sell to close their positions, the commercials will always eventually win. Does this mean that a bull market can't start? No, but upside is limited by buying...

Actually, in the U.S., I believe that the predecessor of what became the mid-am preceded the CBOT, and is (was) the oldest U.S. futures exchange. Jessie

There are two different crops trading, "old crop" and "new crop", and they are not deliverable against each other. With nov, you are betting on this year's weather, harvest conditions, crop condition, etc. for beans still in the field, and we are looking at a big crop. Nov contract is the first...

I must be slow. It took me about 10 years and 4 or 5 blown accounts before I had a few years of consistent profitability, and it felt like a business. Mostly, that was the result of it taking me that long to develop the discipline that I have now, it really had nothing to do with finding a...