My high school summer job: trading the NQ

Quote from le140:

I think you should take the rest of the money in the account and wine and dine these girls. You might get lucky before the summer is over.

Now the serious stuff, dont feel bad even if you walk away now. $500 is pocket changes for good traders and you will be one if you keep at it but not now. Now you need a new plan. I have been there, done that and I can tell you that you are taking the long way to the promise land. As soon as I stop scalping, things turn around for me.

Scalping may work for you but why make it harder? You are sweating it out every minutes. Shoot for points in one of many runs the market offers. Here you can walk away for hours waiting for stops/targets to hit. Less commissions, less stress, more time to do other stuff. What would be a better strategy of the 2? Like I said before, I've done both. Observe the intraday moves and know where the turns will be. If you cant read it then you are not ready yet. If you can time the turns with 80% accuracy, then and only then you should come back and trade again. Other than that, good luck kid.
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Yes, thanks for this advice; you make a good point. Like I said I will be expanding my profit target to AT LEAST 3.5 points if not more as I realized that especially with the NQ you get lots of long runs that if timed correctly will make you a whole lotta $$$
 
Quote from bhristov1:

I have been on the sidelines observing this journal for a bit but havent commented. Now I simply want to reiterate that you shouldnt expect to be profitable at first and you will prob lose many hundreds of minimum wage hours at CVS before you even break even. The absolute minimum losses I have ever heard of for day trading before making money is probably 5000. Usually its around 20K or more. Its just the nature of the business. When I was about your age I learned that. I was trading PCLN, LU and FRNT at $2 a share and generating 66% return in 3 months. Then I put all my 5K into PCLN at $7 a share and sold it at $2 a year later. It took all of my college years and more capital to get to breakeven(and later profit). By this time I was addicted.

Daytrading after college took a year before I saw some consistency, but by that time I was burned out, stressed, depressed and on the verge of losing my mind for nothing really.

Now, besides dabbling into auto trading FX which I do as a hobby with less than two percent of my capital I TRY not to touch the markets. I havent really gotten this to work as planned see my journal LOL.

You are 17 and have your whole life to invest for the long term (THIS is where my real money is). I have found that an all ETF portfolio works quite nicely to diversify me as much as I want and with things like EEM (held it since $70) and a but of GSG I have easily been beating the markets.

My point is this, you if you keep daytrading expect much harder times than this, not better. Expect losses of 1000 in a single day, (even seconds) not just 500 in a week. Eventually you will get it, but there is a cost associated with it.

Enjoy your life now, dont stress on things you dont NEED to stress on. Get girls, go to parties, have fun with friends make good memories cuz thats what will be valuable when you are old, not wether you made $500 or lost $500. Most girls your age dont even care about money yet, they are just as inexperienced/nervous and whatnot as you and there is no need to buy them diamonds and yachts to get their attention, you would be surprised at how far a movie and starbucks would go with a girl that you click with.

Just my experience and my two cents take it or leave it.
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Wow that's a pretty volatile journey that you have had. And of course I know about the whole "hot teen ass doesn't care about how much you're worth" thing, I'm just pissed off for my own sake, because daddy needs an Iphone, some Armani Exchange clothes, a new guitar, and a whole bunch of other shit not worth mentioning.
 
Does your broker charge a monthly fee?. If they do, you can still do this if you dont mind the expense. Heres what you do:

Stop trading real money

Open MS excel (if you dont have it...buy it) give yourself the same amt of trading capital that you started with

make these rows on the spread sheet:
1. date
2. long/short
3. lots
4. entry
5. spread (or commission)
6. stop
7. target
8. r/r (risk reward ratio on the trade)
9 % of account risked per trade (optional)
10. PnL
11. Daily PnL
12 Aggregate total
13. your thoughts before and after the trade


keep this open while you trade so you dont forget to post your trades!...AFTER your trade is done, go back to the chart, and mark your entry, stop, and target....take a screen shot of it, and open your paint program and save it as something like this:

NQ_scalps_7_13_08

Because your scalping, it might be hard and time consuming to mark every entry /exit...so do it for maybe the 2 biggest winners/ losers

keep doing this till you feel confident in your method

Take it from me. I had a journal on here too, but had to stop before I blew up my account. Sure, you dont have to do this, but it will really help :D

cm69
 

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Interesting cash money, I might just do that. Anyways, like I said, I will put the whole "trading with real money" on hold for a week or two, and test my strategy with bigger profit targets, and see how that goes. I guess I can post up my paper results too, but I just feel like it wouldn't feel as authentic when I do it with my real $ trades.
 
I'm sorry if someone has suggested this already, but I would say write down the exact steps of your strategy , and enter your stops (if appropriate) atthr time of entry , and keep a log of whether you follow your strategy and what the result is. This would be a good idea regardless of paper or real trading until you have the discipline. Just imo
 
Yes, like I said I will definitely do that, it sounds like a pretty good idea. However, since I will be doing this virtually for the next week or two, we all know the difference that real $ can make, so I guess the whole point in this is to give me full and utter confidence in myself so that when the time comes, I WILL be able to pull that stupid trigger and have the patience to hold for a gain because I will be statistically confident in the way I trade.
 
Perfect man. I had some trouble with over-trading that took some time to get over, and writing down the exact step by step rules of my strategy helped to curtail that. Good luck.
 
So, I don't know guys, should I start posting up my virtual trades with the record keeping as well for you to critique? (I would hope you could help, but seeing as it's sim...)

And btw I didn't really feel like trading today real or sim, so you can relax about whether I made bank or not.

Instead, I did what you guys told me as "enjoying my youth without care for money". I'll SIM it up for the rest of the week and let you guys know how that goes.
 
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