A 20yr old futures trader needs help with trade management

Why not just keep life easy and test your questions out. Do you make money or not? If what you're doing makes money, it's right. See if it keeps making money or not. If it keeps making you money, it's good.
 
The point is gentlemen - Sound Advice is very rare, but it is even more rare that advice-seeker can identify sound advice from multitude of advices he gets and even if he identifies sound advice - its incredibly hard to follow sound advice - because sound advice can so many times be based on cold blooded logic - and we all being emotional over-confident idiots tend to think we are better than the rest of the mankind and we will do 'ok' even if we ignore solid cold analytical advice sometimes and go with our superior instincts.

James - Listen to Eddie - if you can :) and I am 99% sure you will find it v.v. hard to follow what Eddie is preaching.

Quote from Eddiefl:

James,

i will save you years of tormet and tons of $$$.. read very carefully. I know the chances are you wont go with what i say, but i can only the horse to water.

Dont ever open up a daytrading chart, forget you ever heard that term. NO charts under 15minute, preferably 30minute or above.

Sing treade with 1 contract, after 3-4 months of doing well, add another contract. There, bam, done. Class is over you gains should be like this.

+.2.2,-.15,+22,+1.85,-.25,+.19.......

You gains and equity curve should be full of this , large gain, small loss, small gain, large gain, and so forth and so forth.

YOu need, let me repeat , YOU NEED, not want, YOU absolutely need out liers, large outlier gains.

Look at pros and successful traders, , in one month, it will be 2 or 3 outliers that make thier month, the rest of the trades try to cancel themselves out,

good luck,

EF
More...
 
Quote from Eddiefl:

James,

i will save you years of tormet and tons of $$$.. read very carefully. I know the chances are you wont go with what i say, but i can only the horse to water.

Dont ever open up a daytrading chart, forget you ever heard that term. NO charts under 15minute, preferably 30minute or above.

Sing treade with 1 contract, after 3-4 months of doing well, add another contract. There, bam, done. Class is over you gains should be like this.

+.2.2,-.15,+22,+1.85,-.25,+.19.......

You gains and equity curve should be full of this , large gain, small loss, small gain, large gain, and so forth and so forth.

YOu need, let me repeat , YOU NEED, not want, YOU absolutely need out liers, large outlier gains.

Look at pros and successful traders, , in one month, it will be 2 or 3 outliers that make thier month, the rest of the trades try to cancel themselves out,

good luck,

EF
More...

Thanks for your advice. Do you think I would be able to make enough to live on this way trading based on the 60 minute with one contract? Because the problem is it takes a while to get a great trade to line up on the 60 minute chart and oftentimes it happens when I am sleeping. I usually trade off the 5 minute and have the 60 minute chart up because the different time intervals mirror each other in some way, shape or form. Anyway I will keep your advice to heart. I am still going to paper trade what I have come up with and I will also paper trade the 60 minute and just continue to scalp with real money based on the 1 minute (that's the chart I use to scalp).
 
Patience young man. You just responded to the answer you wanted to hear.

The answer is no way. Can you make a little money? Possibly

I gave you the expectancy formula earlier. You didn't get it. You responded by telling me 50 bucks per trade is no problem, but forgot to figure in your losses.

Be honest with what is really going on and people will come out of the woodwork to help..

You have a major head start when it comes to your potential risk reward, and in regards to your overall knowledge. And Eddiefl has a huge HUGE point about outliers.

There is a reason why you were questioning letting your profits run in your first post. I will take the risk of being chastised by others while saying scalping is a very bad idea in the long run. Scalping is easy. Letting your profits run is the hardest thing in trading, and that's why it pays off.

I don't mean to call you out. Just trying to help. I think you'll find many of us are willing to help. Nodoji, the one who just said "no" earlier, is quickly becoming the Mom of Elite Trader. I was around way before her, and now I ask her questions about futures. I suggest you pay attention to her.

There are people here who really want to help. You'll learn to filter out the rest.

All the best.

JB
 
Quote from James:

Say I have a 5,000 dollar account balance. I have a system that literally gives me a 90% chance of getting .5 pts (but only .5pts). I am seeking to get the bigger moves but the .5pts is to give me cushion. I use other highs for stops so they are roughly 1 point away. Does it make sense to trade 5 contracts, sell 3 of them when I get .5pts (for the cushion on the other 2 contracts) and keep the other 2 in for larger point moves? I have around a 10% chance of getting stopped out with a 1-1.5pt loss on ALL 5 contracts, a 90% chance of at least getting .5pts per contract.

I was thinking of just scalping, but then I would miss larger moves and I would be risking 1-1.5 pts for ever .5 point. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense because god forbid it is only an 80% success rate, that would wipe out like 2-3pts if I did it ten times and I would make a net of like 2 points in the day with 10 trades. It just seems bleh. That is why I am trying to keep contracts in longer (like 2 contracts) but still scalp to cushion the larger potential for loss with keeping contracts in longer.

Futures are much more complicated and tricky than stocks.

And let me say, the 90% statistic is from 6 months of closely watching the markets with the tools I am utilizing. So I didn't just grab it out of the air.
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I am happy you have asked this question at your age and experience....to have proceeded with your theory would ultimately given you nightmares....must be Halloween effect...:D


Please dump what it is you are trying to do....you have to understand there is NO such thing as easy money in trading.

You need to continue to work at minimzing risk while seeking out a reasonably good edge, say 1.5:1 NET...on a sim account deduct a tick for BOTH sides for a start...

You seem to be a bright young person....so be patient and it may very well come to you...

Good luck...

NiN
 
I think a lot of people on here are being unfair because they are just assuming I am some 20yr old trying to strike it rich and I just jumped into trading futures. But this is the internet so people like to talk sh*t because in the real world they can't.

AlgoKid, don't jump to conclusions and insinuate that I am a crappy trader. I would lose 50,000 dollars trading 1 contract with my system? What system is that exactly? You have no idea what you are talking about wise one.
 
Quote from James:

And let me say, the 90% statistic is from 6 months of closely watching the markets with the tools I am utilizing. So I didn't just grab it out of the air.
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I wonder why nobody commented on this, or did I miss it?

Your 90% statistic is just a hope, a dream, arising from your bias in applying on paper a noise trading method to random walk data. When you actually trade at that level of random walk, that statistic will take a more realistic value close to 60% if you are really, really good. If you are just a dreamer, it will be like 25% to 40%.

Friendly advice, save your 5K for college. Take a few courses on statistics and probability.
 
Quote from James:

And let me say, the 90% statistic is from 6 months of closely watching the markets with the tools I am utilizing. So I didn't just grab it out of the air.
More...

One of the students was 15 when his Dad brought him as a guest to my class. He is now quite successful. Your age is irrelevant. Don't use that as an excuse for not heeding good advice.

What is suspect is your system qualification method. "Watching" the market is meaningless. Learn the four-part qualification methodology for a system worth trading. "Watching" does not even qualify as backtesting. Start there. Learn the tradeoffs (limitations) of backtesting so that you do not get falsely optimistic and begin trading on these results. Just as bad is to disqualify a good system too early in the evaluation process.
 
James,

You are getting a great deal of high quality advice here. More than most get and that is because you are being taken seriously. I don't know that I am qualified to give you sophisticated advice so I will simply repeat the earlier, basic advice I offered.

DO NOT INCREASE YOUR RISK OF RUIN BY TRADING MORE THAN A SINGLE CONTRACT AT THIS STAGE.

I hope others will again weigh in on this simple point: Staying alive is hard. Make it a priority and recognize that using less leverage is (to steal a line from Ford Motor) JOB ONE. While I am not recommending gearing it up later, I would rather you do it later than now. To be new and heavily leveraged is suicidal.

See the movie Platoon. The portrayal by Charlie Sheen of how heavily the odds are stacked against the fresh meat in a combat scenario seems (I'm not a veteran) to be realistic.
 
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