GrowleyMonster's Sorta Journal

GrowleyMonster

GrowleyMonster

I thought it was time to start putting stuff down in black and white but don't expect me to be typing here when I need to be trading and stuff.

Background:

Turned 60 last week. Thinking about retiring soon. Maybe when I am 65, or 62, or next year, or next week. Undecided. I am afraid when I retire I will be too busy to enjoy it I guess.

I got interested in day trading because you can work an hour or two a day. So I was told. LOL.

Hardcore fanatical Ubuntu/Raspbian/Debian user, WinDOHs/Mac hater. Got started with computers back when most of them did not have hard drives. I was so proud of that first 20MB HD! I thought I was NEVER gonna fill that bad boy up. LOL. Until a week or two had gone by and I saw a bigger one for sale. Went through DOS, early Windows, OS/2 Warp, BeOS, a few other OSs including RedHat and other Linuxes, back to Windows cause I thought Linux was a bit geeky for me, then MS dropped the ball with W8 and I bailed, discovered Ubuntu, and never looked back. Did some simple programming with the BASICS, VB3, VB for DOS, some C. Fixing to learn Python now.

Blue collar background, seaman/fisherman/oilfield trash. Last job was Bosun on a 40000 ton or so RoRo ("car carrier, but most of these carry a lot more than just cars.) No actual college, AS degree from CLEP, etc challenge exams. Did not graduate HS, was busy working my ass off making money on highline shrimp trawlers and kicking pipe in the oil patch and having a good time when I could.

Not much previous investment experience, no trading experience, before this year. Got the bug late last year, started researching.

Underfunded. Came in around middle of April with $10k. Had a great first day in live trading, made I think almost $900 before getting shut out by PDT. Small gains, small losses since then. Never got below $9800 though so I am beating the average I guess. Was back up over $10k a couple times but took a little $ out with the debit card on the account. I hope to be fully funded by the end of the year so I can trade every day and scalp all day long if I am feeling the love from the market.

Settled on IB as a broker. My only choices, being a Linux user, were IB and TDAmeritrade. Happy with IB and Trader WorkStation, so far, on my Ubuntu powered trading computer. Unfortunately this puts the PDT thumb on my trading activity. I could do Forex or something, but nah. Real Men trade Stocks. So I was told. LOL

Trading education... 90% came from reading the first book on day trading that I picked up. FTR, it was Andrew Aziz's "How to Day Trade for a Living: A Beginner’s Guide to Trading Tools and Tactics, Money Management, Discipline and Trading Psychology" but almost any of the other couple dozen books on day trading that I bought would have served equally well. No formal instruction, no webinars or lessons. Spent some time just looking at charts, and paper trading after I opened my account at IB. Currently reading "The Way of the Turtle" and a couple of penny stock books. Got a lot of questions answered on this forum. Only paper traded a couple of weeks before I went live, contrary to the conventional standard advice. However once I do my three trades, I can paper trade, or not trade, so sometimes I still do a paper trade day.

Equipment is a Dell refurb and a single monitor, at present, running Ubuntu 18.04. I rely heavily on TradingView for scanning. Subscribed to WSJ, delivered to doorstep and filling up my inbox nearly to the point of unusability until I filtered the trading emails to a separate folder. Internet by Cox, not too fast, not too slow. Half fast I guess. Trading computer is only for trading. Eventually I will have two or three computers and 6 or 8 monitors all dedicated to trading.

Some interest in FOREX and auto/algo trading, a little in futures and swing trading, mostly preoccupied with intraday stock trading for its simple direct and less abstract nature. Want to make my own scanner, and eventually a complete automated trader. GF is data scientist / project manager for a large oil company that will not be named at this time, so she is on the short list for help. I think eventually I can do that and make it work profitably.

TODAY'S TRADING

Long on NERV from the open for a half hour and ended up $94 in the green, balance now back up to $9909. I am on a roll! One day in a row, I am a winner! If I can stretch it to two trade days in a row, I will be back once again over my initial deposit. Not bad for a newbie, two months in, huh? Once again I wished I had put more money on the trade. I just keep remembering all the losing trades where I was glad I kept the position small. So anyway, almost 1% return in a half hour. If I could do that for a couple of years, how much would that be? LOL. I will NOT blow this account. Period. Not gonna happen. If it ever gets down to $9k I am stopping all live intraday trading for 6 months. That is my written in stone rule.
 
Yeah I know Mac is POSIX based. But it is so inflexible. Works as designed. Designed to do... what the designers think you should be doing. A full Linux distro gives you a lot of power and freedom. Also Mac source code is secret. Not open to public review. Not available for customization. Do you trust Apple to act in your best interests? Me, I never liked Apple computers due to their closed source nature. I flirted briefly with the iphone but keeping it jailbroke was a pain. Not jailbroke, I couldn't DO anything with it. An android is a tiny computer that can also make phone calls. An iphone is a phone that can perform a few silly tricks. Works perfectly, as designed. Not good enough for me. A rooted Android with a custom OS is pretty close to perfection in a pocket computer that can make phone calls. I amazed lots of iphone users by reading/writing hard drives, DVD R/W drives, USB thumb drives, when hardly anybody imagined it could be done. On a rooted Note 3. Just the stuff I could do with the file system was useful, handy, and to an ithing fanboy, amazing. Like let someone enter the password for one time use of a bar or restaurant wifi, then casually recover it from data/misc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf. Creating actual, real "grownup" files that play nicely on the real computer. Download movies on usenet (remember that?) or do FTP or download from youtube and send the file to my laptop, or set up a VPN client, or use my android as a hotspot when the carrier did not "allow" it, or back up an app and reinstall it without internet, and so on. You can't push the envelope very far with any apple product. You can do what they allow you to do, usually very efficiently and safely. Android is now open source. NOT inherently secure if you root your phone, but then, it's on you. Linux gives you the power and flexibility without necessarily compromising on security.

At its most basic level, Mac and Linux are not so different. At high level, where it interacts with the user, there is a tremendous difference. The one thing I tip my hat to Mac on, is security. It is practically on level with Linux. Closed Source operating system rings warning bells with me, though. I don't like being expected to just trust it. "We know what's best for you." LOL.

Another thing with Linux. Pretty much any computer made in the last 20 years will run a popular Linux distro, though some desktops will be a bit much for some less capable hardware. Mac is very hardware specific. Not too many guys can just buy a motherboard, processor, graphics card, case, and power supply, and cobble it together into something that will run Mac, I don't imagine. I am pretty sure the latest Ubuntu release would run on a typical 386 machine. Faster than DOS, I imagine. Way faster than W3.1 or any other WinDOHs product.

Thanks for the encouragement. As for closing bar entries, I have thought about that but not done any real study on it yet. Sounds a bit risky for the return, but it would give me a trade that doesn't count against me. I am just so darn busy right now it is tempting to stick with what I have already learned a little about, which is intraday stocks. I got three boats to maintain and refit (GF owns one, I own two) and a razor making shop to get off the ground, and lots of house carpentry projects to get done. Oh and a pickup with a dying engine to repower. In addition to learning Python LOL. But maybe I will devote some time into looking at closing bar setups in the near future. You are actually the first person to recommend that. Everybody else, including all the authors I have bought into, parrots the conventional wisdom of if you are gonna be a day trader, close out all positions before the bell. So thanks for bringing it up.
 
I am a Solaris user from the late 90s. I still have one Sparc20 running.

I agree that Mac is too restrictive. I run too many front-ends to stick with Linux, but I bought a System76 this weekend.
 
destriero said:
It's likely the only way you're going to avoid triggering PDT. Extend your (chart) frequency and reduce size.
More...

Yeah, starting to sound like a thing. Maybe next week. I used all my trades today. Actually maybe I have another one now... I am sure I only made two trades today, one a fumble of the mouse, at that, that cost me $47 so my day actually should have been better than it was. So I know I did three trades last Monday. Maybe they reset minute by minute, and I should have another trade available today before the close. I will look for a setup if I am in the house. I don't trade with my phone.

What do you think I ought to look for? I usually go with momentum or a reversal based on moving averages or bollinger bands, and volume action. Sometimes I just hitch a ride on a stock with 2 or 3 big tall bull candles with heavy volume with an entry a penny above the ask so I can get in, and ride it until... and sometimes I watch for breakouts on volatile stocks with high relative volume that had previously been pretty quiet. I like riding reversals up and down between support/resistance lines and this is pretty safe but it uses up my trades for an often modest return. That's why I like breakouts or likely/possible breakouts. Fewer trades but potentially big profits. A breakout you can usually just hold the position until mid afternoon and keep making profit. So let's say I get away from the 1 minute and 5 minute candles and go with hour candles, and look for the trends and patterns and switch to longer moving averages. And resign myself to maybe holding that close of market position for multiple days. I have NOT studied swing trading though I have a couple of unread books on the bookshelf. And if it looks good, sort of like a lucky premarket entry, play it like a normal day trade. Any input on that? And if I still hold it at the end of the day, then decide if I want to run it overnight again?

I THINK when I make a small entry and then add to it, they count as separate trades for PDT purposes, with IB. IOW, I buy 100 shares right before the closing bell, and then add 400 shares of the same stock to it the next morning, and sell all 500 that day, it is two trades, an inter day trade for 100 and an intraday of 400. Otherwise I would shop for likely candidates just to hold the trade for the overnight, buy a small position, and get bizzy with it the next day for real.

destriero said:
I am a Solaris user from the late 90s. I still have one Sparc20 running.

I agree that Mac is too restrictive. I run too many front-ends to stick with Linux, but I bought a System76 this weekend.
More...

Solaris? Sparc 20? Kewl. Business, or hobby?
 
GrowleyMonster said:
Yeah, starting to sound like a thing. Maybe next week. I used all my trades today. Actually maybe I have another one now... I am sure I only made two trades today, one a fumble of the mouse, at that, that cost me $47 so my day actually should have been better than it was. So I know I did three trades last Monday. Maybe they reset minute by minute, and I should have another trade available today before the close. I will look for a setup if I am in the house. I don't trade with my phone.

What do you think I ought to look for? I usually go with momentum or a reversal based on moving averages or bollinger bands, and volume action. Sometimes I just hitch a ride on a stock with 2 or 3 big tall bull candles with heavy volume with an entry a penny above the ask so I can get in, and ride it until... and sometimes I watch for breakouts on volatile stocks with high relative volume that had previously been pretty quiet. I like riding reversals up and down between support/resistance lines and this is pretty safe but it uses up my trades for an often modest return. That's why I like breakouts or likely/possible breakouts. Fewer trades but potentially big profits. A breakout you can usually just hold the position until mid afternoon and keep making profit. So let's say I get away from the 1 minute and 5 minute candles and go with hour candles, and look for the trends and patterns and switch to longer moving averages. And resign myself to maybe holding that close of market position for multiple days. I have NOT studied swing trading though I have a couple of unread books on the bookshelf. And if it looks good, sort of like a lucky premarket entry, play it like a normal day trade. Any input on that? And if I still hold it at the end of the day, then decide if I want to run it overnight again?

I THINK when I make a small entry and then add to it, they count as separate trades for PDT purposes, with IB. IOW, I buy 100 shares right before the closing bell, and then add 400 shares of the same stock to it the next morning, and sell all 500 that day, it is two trades, an inter day trade for 100 and an intraday of 400. Otherwise I would shop for likely candidates just to hold the trade for the overnight, buy a small position, and get bizzy with it the next day for real.



Solaris? Sparc 20? Kewl. Business, or hobby?
More...

I can't really recommend a method. I'd run basket charts (GOOGL + AAPL + AMZN) etc., provided your charting allows you to use operators. I don't know anything about the PDT rules, but I would think that buying 100 at the close, 400 the next day, and closing (that day) would be considered one day trade.

I was running Inventure Ranger on the Sparc20 and a backdrop NN. I still run a lot of legacy software on the Sparc20. I had to have someone retrofit some new fans last year. I am porting all of my Solaris stuff to Linux this year on that System76 hardware.
 
destriero said:
I can't really recommend a method. I'd run basket charts (GOOGL + AAPL + AMZN) etc., provided your charting allows you to use operators. I don't know anything about the PDT rules, but I would think that buying 100 at the close, 400 the next day, and closing (that day) would be considered one day trade.

I was running Inventure Ranger on the Sparc20 and a backdrop NN. I still run a lot of legacy software on the Sparc20. I had to have someone retrofit some new fans last year. I am porting all of my Solaris stuff to Linux this year on that System76 hardware.
More...

backprop. FU Safari spellcheck.
 
GrowleyMonster said:
If it ever gets down to $9k I am stopping all live intraday trading for 6 months.
More...
Imho, with the style of trading you describe(high vol low floats), you are not giving yourself enough rope. Maybe if you trade your way up to 11k before increasing size. Also, IB is not a good choice for these stocks - Linux or not.
 
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