First, I finally found the best futures broker. It took me literally years to figure this out so I hope you noobies out there appreciate this info. Through the Stockguy22 chatroom- a tremendous value in its own right, I was approached by Anthony, a representative of Infinity Futures. It turns out Infinity is an introducing broker, meaning they match up traders with institutions to meet their needs. After chatting for a few minutes about my situation Anthony knew exactly what I needed and set me up with Transact Futures with the AT platform. This works out perfectly for the setup I have been using. I can continue to use ThinkorSwim for charting, which is great because it is what I am most comfortable with, and I combine that with the AT execution platform, which is just a functional trading ladder, or DOM interface, for the order entry. The AT platform allows for single click order entry, easy to use stop/limit management, OCO bracket orders, multi bracket orders for multiple contracts, and trailing stops (if I were to ever want to use them). The bottom line is the commissions are dirt cheap- $4.30 round trip and the execution/data is lightning fast. The best part is- this all costs... nothing! Plus, $500 intra-day margins so I don't have to have all my cash tied up in a futures account. So far I love the platform, however I have been losing money lately, which reminded me that I need to log my trading activities- and that is why I am back here writing.
Since getting back into futures trading after a long hiatus where I experimented with stock and option trading I have taken quite a beating. It felt like the old days of trying to trade the market freely only to wind up with a string of painful losers, which is exactly what has happened over the last few weeks. So to hit the reset button and hopefully get back on track I will once again be posting my trades to this blog using the same strategy I had before, with a slight improvement in risk management.
One rather good lesson I have learned over the last year is the skill of taking small losses. I seem to have become an expert in taking small losses, as it seems like that is all I do. While the ability to keep stops in place and take losses with grace is an essential asset in this business, this losing streak I am on is really starting to disgust me. I ran the numbers and it is clear that whatever I am doing has given me a statistically significant method of picking losers. Obviously this is not what I want. After reading my past entries of the blog I think I know why I am losing and it comes down to basic strategy. Over this last year I had been exposed to a variety of strategies that, for some reason, I believed were better than the one I had been using effectively right here on this blog. The bottom line is that I am getting killed trying to implement new ideas. What I need to do is continue down the path I started using confirmation candles as entry signals instead of what I have been doing lately- using key levels to try to pick a move in the very beginning. Picking tops and bottoms is not possible- I need to remind myself of that. Greed is the emotion that tries to pick key inflection points instead of letting price show me that an inflection has occurred.
At any rate, it is good to be back in the futures game. Let the game begin.
For the purpose of tracking information I will reset my starting balance to zero.
Most importantly, I am now trading live money because I was consistently profitable on the simulator. All future trades logged here are real money trades!
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