Trader P/L 2005

Status
Not open for further replies.
Quote from Kicking:

and how do you keep losers small (or to 0 I guess ) everyday? I sometimes trade or look at stocks like GOOG and CME, would be scared to trade more than 200 shares

you can buy then 5 sec later the bid dropped 35 cents, and sometimes you just know the quotes are behind, the spread changes all the time it's not fixed like in futures. Hear you can't rely on the book so how do you manage such risk and your exit ?
You may not trade this kind of stocks but you probably trade stocks that show up on your scan without being used to their behaviour. How do you trade 1000 shares or more in those stocks you don't know well?
More...

I've been trading the same style for years now so unless I get on the wrong side of news I usually don't lose money. It just takes experience and a lot of "screen time". I know most of the stocks I trade since I trade each of them almost every day. My position size is 1k to 3k depending on the strength of the alert, and liquidity of the stock. Tough to say what the average cent profit per trade is but I would guess between 5-10c if you include the losers.
 
Quote from Dustin:

Tough to say what the average cent profit per trade is but I would guess between 5-10c if you include the losers.
More...

Thank you for your replies. So you are out once you are up a quarter or less in most cases , right? you don't hang on for more. I can see how it works for the trade that go in your favor (usually my occasional intraday trade in a stock show a 25 cent profit at some point then reverses and I must get out even or down 10-15 cent because of slippage) but those that go against you they usually do so right away or it goes up 5-10 cents the next 10 seconds then down in a flash.
My only experience with NYSE is with ETF's and very small orders on stocks like CME, execution is usually crappy with ETF's I wonder what it would be like on 1000 shares of a volatile stocks, obviously if you want to keep losers tiny (because you have tiny per share profit) you need flawless instant execution and very quick fingers . Don't have time to use stops I suppose?
 
Quote from Kicking:

Thank you for your replies. So you are out once you are up a quarter or less in most cases , right? you don't hang on for more. I can see how it works for the trade that go in your favor (usually my occasional intraday trade in a stock show a 25 cent profit at some point then reverses and I must get out even or down 10-15 cent because of slippage) but those that go against you they usually do so right away or it goes up 5-10 cents the next 10 seconds then down in a flash.
My only experience with NYSE is with ETF's and very small orders on stocks like CME, execution is usually crappy with ETF's I wonder what it would be like on 1000 shares of a volatile stocks, obviously if you want to keep losers tiny (because you have tiny per share profit) you need flawless instant execution and very quick fingers . Don't have time to use stops I suppose?
More...

Trading for me is knowing where a stock is going to go in the next few minutes. 5 years ago a stock like JNPR could move $2 in 3 mins...now I am happy to get $.25 on any trade. I use the open book, and futures to gauge my exit and scale out accordingly.

ETF's are very tough to trade. SPY and QQQQ are some of the most liquid and efficient instruments in the world. Therefore I do not trade them. There are hundreds of guys a lot smarter than me trading those. Why not trade something that those guys don't pay attention to? Something that can have inefficiencies that you can take advantage of. All the guys here on ET that want the specialist system to go electronic don't know what the hell they are talking about, in my opinion. Efficient markets suck. Bring back Grasso and 1/8ths and SOES bandits.
 
Dustin,

Do you have a background in programming? What kind of program do you use for your automation? Right now I am just trading discretionary and I am not sure where to start.

Let say you were to go back trading manually, do you think your performance would come down. How has automation improved your bottom line?




Quote from Dustin:

Yesterday was just a good day because the Fed got the market to move more than the average day. My trading is 80%+ automated entries so I didn't do much different.

Yes, the numbers are net of comms. I posted the left side of the blotter to include all fees. (ET won't let me post the entire page due to file size)

BTW I also get a monthly rebate so for June add about $1k to the total.
More...
 
Quote from Dustin:

Trading for me is knowing where a stock is going to go in the next few minutes. 5 years ago a stock like JNPR could move $2 in 3 mins...now I am happy to get $.25 on any trade. I use the open book, and futures to gauge my exit and scale out accordingly.

ETF's are very tough to trade. SPY and QQQQ are some of the most liquid and efficient instruments in the world. Therefore I do not trade them. There are hundreds of guys a lot smarter than me trading those. Why not trade something that those guys don't pay attention to? Something that can have inefficiencies that you can take advantage of. All the guys here on ET that want the specialist system to go electronic don't know what the hell they are talking about, in my opinion. Efficient markets suck. Bring back Grasso and 1/8ths and SOES bandits.
More...

Don't forget the reason the SOES bandits made money so easily, was because there weren't that many of 'm. If they change the rules back, instead of 500 SOES bandits, there will be 10000 SOES bandits trying to get the same fill. Good luck with that!
 
after trading for 15 years i find it hard to believe many of the guys on here taking 50k postions in stocks like lu aren't getting stuck many times. for instance when the fed raised rates we fell then skied then fell then ran. any one of those reversal pts could have been big down days. not doubting many on here doing well but belive me they're having some dousey down days. in regards to many trading nyse stocks many are iliiquid as heck and tough to get fast fills on. look at a stock like unh with 1.3 billion shares outstanding. many times it has almost no shares for sale when it turns up and has 10 cent spreads. if one's using the futures to buy many of these stocks i don't see how they're getitng fills on many nyse's. i use sdot and nx all the time and its a challange to get quick fills on 1k. this stragey jsut as many others over the last 100 years few make money. so before you go slining 1-10k shares around thinking you can make 5-10 cent every trade think about what happens when you get the rug pulled out from udner you on big shares
 
joey,

you have great concerns and i am not critizing your points but you make the comment "what happens when you get the rug pulled out from under you on big shares?"

Simply put ... newbies or unsuccessful traders dont learn to change/modify their trading/approach .. and they keep having these losing episodes.

a good/consistent trader pays his MU (market university) fee that losing day, and learns their lesson and modifies their trading not to be put in the same situation.

it is that simple.

patrick
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top