Yeah I know. I just don't feel the passion for futures. Anyway I will be back at the table in a few weeks, no sweat. So if I went in for live trading futures to fill the gap, or forex or whatever, I would just be rushing in with too little preparation when I could wait it out. It's not like I am giving up a lot of earnings. I am right now standing at $18 less than I started with three months ago. It won't hurt me to not trade for a bit.
GrowleyMonster's Sorta Journal
- Thread starter GrowleyMonster
- Start date
Got bored this morning and looked into offshore forex brokers. None cater to Linux users. However just out of curiousity I tried installing MT4 with Wine. It installed, seems to be running. I am betting it will be slow, running in Wine, but maybe comparable to webware, I don't know. This was on my laptop. Maybe it would be faster on the Optiplex. I figure on putting in some more RAM and a SSD, actually, so it ought to run WinDOHs apps in Wine pretty good. I was actually surprised it installed from the exe installer with no issues. I signed up for two demo accounts. Brokers are LQDFX and TradersWay. LQDFX has 500:1 margin, TW has 100:1 and the minimum deposit for live account is $10 for one and $20 for the other, forgot which is which. I didn't compare commissions or fees yet. I will mess around with the demo accounts Monday morning. Not saying I will start doing forex live, but if I ever do it probably won't be with a US broker, and I will probably deposit not more than $5k. I am curious about how MT4 will behave on my computers. Running Ubuntu 16.04. 18.04 kinda sucks, a lot of stuff seems to be missing from the gui. I am expecting the 20.04 release next year to be better. Support for 16.04 runs out in 2011. If 20 sucks too, I will probably switch to Debian.
Just paper trading today. Waiting for a check to clear into my bank so I can shoot some dough into my IB account, and then I will be fully funded for day trading. Meanwhile I am fiddling around with stuff and paper trading and I was so busy with managing 4 to 6 positions at once I couldn't fix whatever was wrong with my custom short sell button, and all the stuff I started trading this morning was in a bearish trend. I kept trying to be a bull and snipe on the pullbacks but it was eating me alive. I was down like $21k and then TVIX to the rescue. TVIX made $31k for me, catching all the up swings on one minute candles, made $31k on it, finished almost $10k up. Paper account is now well over $1M from a $100k reset. I wish I could do that in live trading! I am a little more slow and careful with real money and I have only had a $10k account to play with, lately frozen for PDT violation. That's me... stock market violator, I guess. Hey I'm not ashamed.
I was having so much fun trading this thing that once again I wasn't watching the time. But I figured out how to get my orders executed after hours, so it was a productive session. I was stuck with 16k shares of TVIX and 4k shares of two penny stocks that I was hoping (yeah I know, never "hope" a stock up!) would go up a half buck a share, I probably would have been okay holding all three positions but this was something I needed to figure out for later on, anyway.
Oh I see I am still stuck with the little guys. Well thats okay I guess. I will log on and close those positions at the morning bell. But TVIX close order executed no problemo.
Tomorrow I will troubleshoot that short sell button. I would have probably finished $50k up, if it had been working right. It's my bracket order, I know. It won't take long to figure it out. I think it is all about the offsets, pos/neg, all that. I want to spend an hour or two this evening programming in a new set of hotkeys. I need to have all my alligators in a row by the time I can trade like a grownup.
ARGH. I was afraid of that. I got stuck holding 7800 shares (paper trading. Whew!) of DF overnight. Dropped to $1.12 and I took a $3700 loss on it. Another lesson learned, thankfully in paper trading. WATCH THE CLOCK!!! I was so wrapped up in the TVIX action that I was blissfully unaware of the approaching closing bell. Good thing I was able to get out of my 16k share TVIX position. It gapped down like $6.50 overnight from bell to bell. That would have really sucked. Posted a $604 gain on CRK, the other one I got stuck with.
TVIX active again this morning. Hmmmm
TVIX active again this morning. Hmmmm
I watched one where a chap lost $20,000. Talk to me after the show.Maybe he did,maybe he didn't.If you can base your living on clicking within a second you're a certain type.Not me.
Eeep. That's a bad beatdown, yeah. I guess he didn't believe in setting stops, or else he was trading craaaaaazy volume. If I lost $20k in one sitting I think I would just quit trading for a while until I figured out what the hell just happened and how not to happen that thing again.
Hmmm yeah I will look for that. However I will probably end up setting an alarm for 1545 NY time, and close out manually. I might want to let something run overnight some time, or give myself time to pick a good exit point.
I think TVIX is gonna make a big move again today. I won't be trading, though. Have to go to Slidell with the ol lady to pick up our truck before she goes to work. They just replaced the engine. Now I just got to replace the driver side door and the passenger side mirror, and the windshield and we will have a nice truck again until the automatic transmission (I hate those things... FAILURE POINTS!) goes out. I will probably source one from a junkyard and rebuild it myself, and have it standing by.
Crystal Ball forecast... TVIX up to 28.50 today after an opening bell dip.