@Robert Morse Maybe you can do something for this guy? Sounds like he's ready to join your crew, and is just coming up a bit short. Accommodation?
GrowleyMonster's Sorta Journal
- Thread starter GrowleyMonster
- Start date
Well, I did some mods to the trading station. I tried sticking a full size graphics card in, with the case just left open, but the ports were not all accessible. Then I got a low profile card and now it works just fine. I am at like 1360-something wide, 16x9 on both screens. I got to adjust the color balance a bit on the 32" but the res is okay. I now have TWS playing nicely on two screens. The 21" has all the meat of the app and four chart windows. The 32" I have set up with just 6 chart windows. I can trade directly through each individual chart window and the order ticket automatically defaults to the stock showing in that window. I have a RPi 3B giving me my screener on a 7" (LOL) screen for now. My backup is my laptop, not shown. The backup to my backup is one of my rooted Note3 phablets running Cyanogenmod for an OS. The RPi is running Raspbian and all other computer shaped objects are running Ubuntu 16.04 which seems a lot more polished than 18.04.
The PS in the Dell Optiplex SFF is only 240w and it should be at least 300w to run that card. I have a brand new 450w unit but it is too big for the case and I will have to pop rivet it to the outside if I want to install. I won't bother unless I see poor performance related to the 240w PS.
So now I have a big boy PS and a big boy graphics card. I know I got a few sticks of RAM around somewhere, and lots of HDs and a couple of SSDs, though most are in 2.5" format. So hey, a junk case and a decent Mobo and a nice processor and I can be into a nice trading puter for just a couple hundred bucks. I have a Rpi 4B on the way and I will maybe use it for my screener. It supports two 1080p monitors so I can do a lot with that, and the 3B will go back to mp3 player duties.
Tomorrow is a live trading day. It would be today, but 4th of July screwed me out of a day. Still PDT limited. Going to my union hall after lunch to put in my retirement papers and hopefully I will be nicely funded in a couple of months.
The PS in the Dell Optiplex SFF is only 240w and it should be at least 300w to run that card. I have a brand new 450w unit but it is too big for the case and I will have to pop rivet it to the outside if I want to install. I won't bother unless I see poor performance related to the 240w PS.
So now I have a big boy PS and a big boy graphics card. I know I got a few sticks of RAM around somewhere, and lots of HDs and a couple of SSDs, though most are in 2.5" format. So hey, a junk case and a decent Mobo and a nice processor and I can be into a nice trading puter for just a couple hundred bucks. I have a Rpi 4B on the way and I will maybe use it for my screener. It supports two 1080p monitors so I can do a lot with that, and the 3B will go back to mp3 player duties.
Tomorrow is a live trading day. It would be today, but 4th of July screwed me out of a day. Still PDT limited. Going to my union hall after lunch to put in my retirement papers and hopefully I will be nicely funded in a couple of months.
Hah that guy has pretty deep pockets so the rent would be kinda high. With his overall track record I think we could work something out on the profit split. I would be happy to teach him all I know. We would need a separate router if he uses that other OS... WinDOHs machines are not allowed on our network.
I started watching his $583.15 to $1M tubes but stopped at day 100, and just watched his final $1M tube. Pretty cool series of vids.
The winning streak continues!!! +$69!!!!! Three winning trading days in a row!
bought EQT, 100@$16.26, time 09:34:10. Stopped out at $16.1548, time 09:35:21, for a loss of -$12.57
GRRRRRRR!!!!!
Back in with 100@$15.91, time 09:37:09. Moved stop above entry, stopped out at $15.9635 at 09:39:26 for a gain of +$3.31. Meh. I'll take it.
Third and final trade for the week. In for 300@$15.86 at 09:44:30. Took profit at $16.13 time 09:51:19 for a gain of +$77.86 and a total for the day of $69. Account, after withdrawals for stupid stuff on the IB debit card and after commissions which are crazy low compared to all those flat rate brokers, is $9988, -$12 from where I started three months ago. I really wanted to get on the plus side relative to my initial funding but as far as trading goes, I am there already.
ANALYSIS
Local thunderstorms knocked my puters and the household cable modem offline while I was struggling to set up my 32" monitor with multiple chart windows and all the other stuff on the 21" board. I didn't have my watch list set up. One of my personal rules is that I get into a position within the first 15 minutes of the day, or play another day. For a small U.S. account, the morning volatility is IMHO a necessary part of the trading environment in general. So I stuck my thumb in basically the first plum on the screener and played the hand it dealt me. Now I was juggling setting up the chart windows with watching the stock especially watching for volume flood, and I went in with a pretty weak initial position considering the price of the stock and my plan for the day to only have one open position. I should have went 300 or 400 shares right off the bat. That would have been the correct play, but as it happens I would have been a net loser for tthe day if I had done that. On the third and final trade I did smarten up a bit and go 300 shares but in reality at 1% planned risk per trade I could have filled the boat and I would be up a couple hundred $ more. Still it was obviously a step in the right direction. You can't be too timid with a small account once you have grasped the basic mechanics of trading, or you get nowhere.
Biggest takeaway from the morning, build or buy a solid UPS for my trading desk, and also for GF's desk and router. I am so used to "So? It's a laptop. I don't care if the lights go out. I use my phone for internet connection." I got to get out of the portable mindset. Next, do what I KNOW I GOT to do before placing a trade, and calculate risk and position size, and be consistent with it. Next, yeah it is important to go no more than 5 days between trade days on a PDT limited account, because that 6th day is just a day lost, but more important to be 100% ready to face the day and have all the alligators in a row before committing money. I should have finished the setup stuff yesterday.
One problem with TWS is you spend hours setting up your child windows in Mosaic for paper trading, and then you have to do it ALL OVER AGIN for live trading even if you use the same username for both accounts. Or vice versa. Same with watchlists, etc. Booooooo. Otherwise I like it.
Bottom line, I made $69 in ten minutes with a small account at a U.S. brokerage. I am not quite as pleased as I was on my first day of live trading when I won $840-something, but Still feel like a tree shaker all things considered.
bought EQT, 100@$16.26, time 09:34:10. Stopped out at $16.1548, time 09:35:21, for a loss of -$12.57
GRRRRRRR!!!!!
Back in with 100@$15.91, time 09:37:09. Moved stop above entry, stopped out at $15.9635 at 09:39:26 for a gain of +$3.31. Meh. I'll take it.
Third and final trade for the week. In for 300@$15.86 at 09:44:30. Took profit at $16.13 time 09:51:19 for a gain of +$77.86 and a total for the day of $69. Account, after withdrawals for stupid stuff on the IB debit card and after commissions which are crazy low compared to all those flat rate brokers, is $9988, -$12 from where I started three months ago. I really wanted to get on the plus side relative to my initial funding but as far as trading goes, I am there already.
ANALYSIS
Local thunderstorms knocked my puters and the household cable modem offline while I was struggling to set up my 32" monitor with multiple chart windows and all the other stuff on the 21" board. I didn't have my watch list set up. One of my personal rules is that I get into a position within the first 15 minutes of the day, or play another day. For a small U.S. account, the morning volatility is IMHO a necessary part of the trading environment in general. So I stuck my thumb in basically the first plum on the screener and played the hand it dealt me. Now I was juggling setting up the chart windows with watching the stock especially watching for volume flood, and I went in with a pretty weak initial position considering the price of the stock and my plan for the day to only have one open position. I should have went 300 or 400 shares right off the bat. That would have been the correct play, but as it happens I would have been a net loser for tthe day if I had done that. On the third and final trade I did smarten up a bit and go 300 shares but in reality at 1% planned risk per trade I could have filled the boat and I would be up a couple hundred $ more. Still it was obviously a step in the right direction. You can't be too timid with a small account once you have grasped the basic mechanics of trading, or you get nowhere.
Biggest takeaway from the morning, build or buy a solid UPS for my trading desk, and also for GF's desk and router. I am so used to "So? It's a laptop. I don't care if the lights go out. I use my phone for internet connection." I got to get out of the portable mindset. Next, do what I KNOW I GOT to do before placing a trade, and calculate risk and position size, and be consistent with it. Next, yeah it is important to go no more than 5 days between trade days on a PDT limited account, because that 6th day is just a day lost, but more important to be 100% ready to face the day and have all the alligators in a row before committing money. I should have finished the setup stuff yesterday.
One problem with TWS is you spend hours setting up your child windows in Mosaic for paper trading, and then you have to do it ALL OVER AGIN for live trading even if you use the same username for both accounts. Or vice versa. Same with watchlists, etc. Booooooo. Otherwise I like it.
Bottom line, I made $69 in ten minutes with a small account at a U.S. brokerage. I am not quite as pleased as I was on my first day of live trading when I won $840-something, but Still feel like a tree shaker all things considered.
Today was a paper trading day. My intention was to trade from bell to bell on my roughly $260k paper account. Unfortunately my recent configuration changes seem to have messed up my platform. I kept getting an error and TWS would not transmit my order. Something to do with the time of the order. System time was set to east coast time. TWS was using E coast time. After two hours it was still doing that. I finally reset to a known good configuration and started trading, a little bit late, missed all the fun. I traded a total of about 28k shares in 10 different stocks for a net loss of $513. So the paper account is now down to $259,329. I recently reset it to $250k after losing a bunch of phoney money. I honestly don't do well at paper trading. I am just not into it. But it keeps my hand in, and helps me to think about what is going on. And yeah I guess it is kind of fun but it is more fun to be playing with real money, and even more fun to be winning real money.
I wanted to do a LOT of paper trading today. I want to condition myself to feel like a day where I trade 3 stocks with 3 or 4 trades in each is a slow and leisurely trading day. I want to improve my signal processing time and get my reaction times down. I did not explicitly calculate any risk levels or position sizes today, just winged it. Started light and after about 1300 I was trading 1K lots. Worst loser was TQQQ and best earner was BYND. TQQQ I just didn't play the hand right. I kept trying to go long when it was a bear roundup out there. The overall trend was obvious but I was trying to get the upward pullbacks and thinking there would likely be a breakout at the top. Then I said WTF lemme do a couple shorts then, and I just hit it all wrong. I was watching price patterns and I was watching volume but I just wasn't reacting correctly. BYND anybody could have traded today. Nearly every move was obvious.
For the volume I was trading and the size of the paper account, the $513 beat was pretty minor. And if I had been able to trade from the opening bell and if I had only tried to manage 2 or 3 open positions at a time, sure, I would have won a bit.
No trading tomorrow. I got things to do on the boat and in the shop. Plus now that I am officially retired I get to do the dishes and stuff. I may do a paper trading session Mondya morning, and then Wednesday is another live trading day. Until then...
I wanted to do a LOT of paper trading today. I want to condition myself to feel like a day where I trade 3 stocks with 3 or 4 trades in each is a slow and leisurely trading day. I want to improve my signal processing time and get my reaction times down. I did not explicitly calculate any risk levels or position sizes today, just winged it. Started light and after about 1300 I was trading 1K lots. Worst loser was TQQQ and best earner was BYND. TQQQ I just didn't play the hand right. I kept trying to go long when it was a bear roundup out there. The overall trend was obvious but I was trying to get the upward pullbacks and thinking there would likely be a breakout at the top. Then I said WTF lemme do a couple shorts then, and I just hit it all wrong. I was watching price patterns and I was watching volume but I just wasn't reacting correctly. BYND anybody could have traded today. Nearly every move was obvious.
For the volume I was trading and the size of the paper account, the $513 beat was pretty minor. And if I had been able to trade from the opening bell and if I had only tried to manage 2 or 3 open positions at a time, sure, I would have won a bit.
No trading tomorrow. I got things to do on the boat and in the shop. Plus now that I am officially retired I get to do the dishes and stuff. I may do a paper trading session Mondya morning, and then Wednesday is another live trading day. Until then...
GrowleyMonster
Paper trading won't do any good , just go ahead and trade bud , trade good stocks and don't use STOPS too often , scale into positions.
Paper trading won't do any good , just go ahead and trade bud , trade good stocks and don't use STOPS too often , scale into positions.
The RPi 4B arrived today. I will set it up tomorrow and see what it can do. If nothing else it will do for a TradingView scanner. Paper traded this morning, did crazy good, FWIW. Mainly I got things set up just a little bit better. I got my configuration settings routines down a bit better, more organized. No live trading until Wednesday. Sucks, but it won't be long til I can be free to trade every day all day if I want. My initial goal is $3k the first month of unrestricted trading. Let's see how I do. I think I can do it. I am taking this one month at a time until the end of the year.
GRRRRRR the winning streak is broken. I lost $6 today. For some reason TWS was giving me an error when I tried to transmit. Invalid time or some such nonsense. I tried all the relevant settings, and no joy. Tried the "IBot" help system and the regular help, nothing helpful there, but it wasn't doing that before so I knew how to fix it if I didn't mind losing recent settings changes which after all, were probably the cause. I restored to the settings I used paper trading yesterday and changed the default order presets so I wouldn't be trying to buy 10k shares with my $10k account, (paper trading account is well over a million now LOL) and sent a buy order on a random stock on my watchlist and immediately closed the position but the timing and the order (buy on the ask) sucked, and I lost $11. I knew I could make that back scalping WKHS, one of my goto penny stocks, and I did. I had too many positions open though, and when I hit target I got the dreaded PDT error. <Face Palm> so after a glance at my P&L I decided to bail before I was in the double digits of loss, and hit "Close All Positions", which apparently does an end run around the PDT rule. I have to remember that trick LOL it could be useful some time. Anyway I ended up with a loss of $6, ending my winning streak. I was supposed to be up over my initial account value of $10k but instead I am back down to $9982. Oh, how the mighty are fallen. The HUMANITY! And it could have been a great day. Well, a great day if I could make unlimited trades.
Anyway I am spending the rest of the morning adjusting settings. I added a bunch of hot buttons for instantly buying 100, 200, 400, etc shares up to 4000 and modified the other buttons and so I still have a generic Buy and Sell buttons that do not automatically transmit, and the "Close Position" button is more prominent. I want quote panel showing, and Orders/Trades/Portfolio areas for each chart. This squeezes the charts vertically, so I am going to go with just four chart windows on the big screen, each running full height, and the four across. Four is to me, a very comfortable number of charts to watch at once. Eight, (well, nine actually) gets a bit busy. Another chart window is open on the small monitor that I can use to browse through my watchlist for interesting patterns. I got myself a sort of finger ring trackball. It fits on my index finger and flexing finger activates main button. Much better than a touchpad for zipping across from one screen to the other with the mouse. I used it yesterday in paper trading and I really like it, and it makes the hot buttons about as convenient as the hotkeys, with the advantage of having labels so I don't have to remember them. I have changed all my hotkeys so many times I can't remember all of them. The hot buttons make it a non issue for now.
I took and passed IB's little challenge exam on Forex and applied for trading permission, yesterday. I will try some EURUSD paper trading over the next couple of weeks. Not sure if I will ever want to go live on it or not. However if I had known then what I know now, starting with $10k I probably would have elected to try Forex before stocks, simply because there is no PDT rule there. That is sort of moot now, as I expect to fund my account fully within weeks. It would have been cool to trade up to it, but at the rate I am going that would take a couple of years LOL.
Well a couple more things to do to my TWS setup, then I got to go to the boat and take measurements and make a new companionway door to replace one that is in bad shape and doesn't do much to keep the weather out. Maybe a bit of Forex fun tomorrow, on paper. I think they should let newbies paper trade whatever they want, be it options, futures, whatever. You can't lose your nest egg paper trading, right?
Anyway I am spending the rest of the morning adjusting settings. I added a bunch of hot buttons for instantly buying 100, 200, 400, etc shares up to 4000 and modified the other buttons and so I still have a generic Buy and Sell buttons that do not automatically transmit, and the "Close Position" button is more prominent. I want quote panel showing, and Orders/Trades/Portfolio areas for each chart. This squeezes the charts vertically, so I am going to go with just four chart windows on the big screen, each running full height, and the four across. Four is to me, a very comfortable number of charts to watch at once. Eight, (well, nine actually) gets a bit busy. Another chart window is open on the small monitor that I can use to browse through my watchlist for interesting patterns. I got myself a sort of finger ring trackball. It fits on my index finger and flexing finger activates main button. Much better than a touchpad for zipping across from one screen to the other with the mouse. I used it yesterday in paper trading and I really like it, and it makes the hot buttons about as convenient as the hotkeys, with the advantage of having labels so I don't have to remember them. I have changed all my hotkeys so many times I can't remember all of them. The hot buttons make it a non issue for now.
I took and passed IB's little challenge exam on Forex and applied for trading permission, yesterday. I will try some EURUSD paper trading over the next couple of weeks. Not sure if I will ever want to go live on it or not. However if I had known then what I know now, starting with $10k I probably would have elected to try Forex before stocks, simply because there is no PDT rule there. That is sort of moot now, as I expect to fund my account fully within weeks. It would have been cool to trade up to it, but at the rate I am going that would take a couple of years LOL.
Well a couple more things to do to my TWS setup, then I got to go to the boat and take measurements and make a new companionway door to replace one that is in bad shape and doesn't do much to keep the weather out. Maybe a bit of Forex fun tomorrow, on paper. I think they should let newbies paper trade whatever they want, be it options, futures, whatever. You can't lose your nest egg paper trading, right?
Darn. I just checked my email. IB shut me down after all. I thought I managed to squirm past the PDT thing yesterday but the only thing I managed to do was to close my positions and activate the PDT flag. That's okay. Next month I will be funded properly and can trade at will. It looks like I could tell them I will not be day trading this account and they would lift the freeze, but the fact is, I am not all that interested in swing trading. And it would take me a couple of months to go live on Forex as all my studies have been related to intraday stock trading so far.
So for the next few weeks I just sit on my hands, maybe try to double my paper trading account LOL! Next month I will be back at the table. I will use the free time to work on my Python skills. So far I haven't gotten past the basics. I can see now that my idea of doing some of my trading by automation is going to take a couple of years.
So for the next few weeks I just sit on my hands, maybe try to double my paper trading account LOL! Next month I will be back at the table. I will use the free time to work on my Python skills. So far I haven't gotten past the basics. I can see now that my idea of doing some of my trading by automation is going to take a couple of years.