Learn To Take Losses

[tomi01]

What is:

Medved Trader for charting and DOM in MT.

https://www.medvedtrader.com/www/frontend

It interfaces with TD Ameritrade and will with Schwab when the time comes that your account is moved over (around May they say all accounts will be moved to Schwab) and Medved Trader will interface with your data feed from your account there.

DOM is Depth of Market. It is similar to a level 2 panel which shows the orders placed on a "tape"..

If you use tick candles, this is essentially the same as "tape reading" but a lot better visually in my opinion for executing trades by seeing a bit ahead.

Medved Trader also has the feature of allowing the indexes to be at the top of your screen so you can see what they are doing. 80% of stocks are moving along with the market, so you can anticipate where the market is going by keeping a close eye on what they are doing. The VIX index is going to be the contrarian index, (when it goes down, the others will go up more often than not) and when the VIX is increasing the other indexes will start to go down.. It is known as the "fear index" but it actually tracks options but I don't actually understand more than that about it. Just that it is opposite to the others most of the time.

 

[ironchef]

My personal experience (yours may differ) is that placing orders a few ticks away from the price saves me pennies but costs me pounds (and a lot of aggravation). Now I just wait for the price to hit an area of interest for me (I set up alerts) and then, when I see it, I pay the spread on a tick up (long) or down (short). I still have many small losses, but now I never miss a winning move because just because I wanted to get a few extra ticks out of the chop and later I didn't want to chase.

*Edit: of course, I do miss many trades, every day, my meaning is I don't lose them over a few ticks.

Great post.

I should take a look at doing similar.

 

[ironchef]

https://www.medvedtrader.com/www/frontend

It interfaces with TD Ameritrade and will with Schwab when the time comes that your account is moved over (around May they say all accounts will be moved to Schwab) and Medved Trader will interface with your data feed from your account there.

Thank you.

 

[ironchef]

The TOS sim is actually broken and has been for ages. The techs there say it is the last on their priority list to get fixed during this time of transistion to CSchwab.

Try sending a market order for 100 shares or even less and you will see, you can count the seconds until the order gets filled. Closing the trade is frustrating in the sim as it takes forever even using flatten now. All measures of your performance are messed up to the point of it being useless. Now in the past month or so they could have fixed this, but about 2 months ago and last year it was broken. I've gone to using less shares to work out my chinks in trading using real money and gradually building up the number of shares I will trade as I work through my learning processes.

After looking into TOS sim more carefully, I think you are right, it cannot really sim scalping. The built in time lags and bid/ask etc. make rapid trading based on tick by tick invalid. I cannot really fine tune my approach with TOS sim.

I have a few questions for you if you don't mind:

1. How do I do a one button buy/sell with predetermined stop loss or trailing stop with TOS?

2. Do you normally enter with market or limit, and if market can you specify buy on bid and sell on ask?

3. Have you ever use the Schwab SSE platform, if so, your comparison?

Thank you for your help.

 

[ironchef]

The TOS sim is actually broken and has been for ages. The techs there say it is the last on their priority list to get fixed during this time of transistion to CSchwab.

Try sending a market order for 100 shares or even less and you will see, you can count the seconds until the order gets filled. Closing the trade is frustrating in the sim as it takes forever even using flatten now. All measures of your performance are messed up to the point of it being useless. Now in the past month or so they could have fixed this, but about 2 months ago and last year it was broken. I've gone to using less shares to work out my chinks in trading using real money and gradually building up the number of shares I will trade as I work through my learning processes.

It worked better when I went back to trading > 1 min rhythm and "let my profits run".

 

[ironchef]

I'm not sure what you mean here that tech support told you. A few years back I started out on the TOS sim and it was exactly as quick as real trading, if not quicker, with fills. But beginning around the start of last year their sim started to behave very strangely. Like it would take forever to fill or close a trade. You could count the seconds.. up to 15 seconds or more at times.

I got on chat support about this probably 5 or more times. Each time I had a support tech who was knowledgeable they were honest and said it wouldn't be fixed more than likely in the "foreseeable future" due to an overload of other projects going on with the transistion.

But there is nothing that can be an issue with you going live or sim at any time you want with your account. Some people trade with real money then finish the up the day with a sim or if they screw up with live trading finish the day or week on the sim.. That was before it became basically useless due to not filling trades until you have had time to go make a tea...

TD Ameritrade was purchased by Charles Schwab and perhaps what the tech person was trying to say is that if your account is moved over to Schwab there is of course no going back to TD Ameritrade, but they are managing this in stages and I'm one of those thankfully that will be moved at the very end of May along with everyone left over, perhaps you are in that same group I'm in.

But this has no effect on your using the sim or live trading which ever you choose when you want to trade.

Try 1 share for a while, go to 10 shares then after good progress is made over weeks, reward yourself with increasing the shares gradually. This helps get the reps and experience in and also gives you a chance to try a lot of different strategies until you figure out what works best for you without risking any serious amount of capital.

I grew up with Schwab, with them for more than 30 years. Started active trading with StreetSmart, migrated to StreetSmart Edge but in Dec last year, Schwab tech support emailed me, told me I should learn TOS as they planned to shut down SSE in 2024. I called, they suggested I practiced on TOS sim but cautioned not to activate TOS realtime until I could trade on TOS because once I activate my TOS account, I cannot go back to SSE.

In their opinion, TOS is far superior to SSE.

 

[tomi01]

Ahh that explains it!

I've had a good lesson in taking losses today.. trading DJT ..
FA&FO... getting reps in includes f'ing around & finding out.. I suppose..
But I'm okay with it, because I was trying scalps that taught me a lot of lessons today..
kind of like trying to surf a tsunami..
(I now have great respect for tsunamis..)

 

[tomi01]

I grew up with Schwab, with them for more than 30 years. Started active trading with StreetSmart, migrated to StreetSmart Edge but in Dec last year, Schwab tech support emailed me, told me I should learn TOS as they planned to shut down SSE in 2024. I called, they suggested I practiced on TOS sim but cautioned not to activate TOS realtime until I could trade on TOS because once I activate my TOS account, I cannot go back to SSE.

In their opinion, TOS is far superior to SSE.

I used to be with TD Ameritrade back when they used to be Datek and in those days Medved Trader's earlier software was called Quote Tracker. Everyone used it, we were very cultish about it and still are cultish with MT.. We had a trading guru called Trader X when we were all learning as a group on IRC and Trader X was the first to develop the heat map. We were given access to it as his special groupies..
Quote Tracker was sold to TD Ameritrade and Jerry Medved & crew went on to create the next great masterpiece called Medved Trader.. (Thankfully because I don't think I could use anything else after all this time or want to even try.)

 

[tomi01]

After looking into TOS sim more carefully, I think you are right, it cannot really sim scalping. The built in time lags and bid/ask etc. make rapid trading based on tick by tick invalid. I cannot really fine tune my approach with TOS sim.

I have a few questions for you if you don't mind:

1. How do I do a one button buy/sell with predetermined stop loss or trailing stop with TOS?

2. Do you normally enter with market or limit, and if market can you specify buy on bid and sell on ask?

3. Have you ever use the Schwab SSE platform, if so, your comparison?

Thank you for your help.

Hi,
I'll try to help best I can. Let me show you the underlying settings I have for a stop under the Active Trader buy sell area.

Since it means pasting in images, I'll have to create more posts I think in answering your questions than just this one, so bear with me..

Remember, this cutout is what you are aiming for if you don't want to see the whole trading ladder in the Active Trading area. It detaches from the main screen as its own separate module. This is tricky to figure out and it would take me figuring it out again to replicate what I now have over again. I've had to do it several times and it is a real pain, because TOS is to me the least user friendly overly meshed up convoluted pos platform imaginable.. by psychopaths who decided to throw everything together including the kitchen sink into a trading platform with no clear areas of distinction until you figure it out with great effort..

 

[tomi01]

Contd 2:
Once you have the buttons set up the way you want (I've set them up this way because for me it is simple to see and use quickly)... then you click that arrow on the left by the button so it faces down and you get to the deeper settings..
Here is what I have set for a $1.00 stop.
My trades are always market orders. I've never set a limit order in Active Trader or on the Ladder so I wouldn't know how to do it or explain it to you.