f2calv - some good questions, will try and cover them for you.
Will certainly aim to improve production with some quick edit software, a steadier hand and more emphasis on what I'm talking about with mouse cursor.
Depth of Market is more liquidity - how many potential buyers and sellers there are at each level
Volume, rather the amount of transactions that actually took place at any point in time - whether that was a micro second ago or ten years ago.
Yes, Prospreads is a spreabetting company based in Gibraltar, but their platform is very professional and the only one to my knowledge that provides the DOM or ladder.
I really like it as very easy to click n trade and place stops, cancel oredrs etc. Plus, you trade the mkt price less a small commission.
The microlots are synthetic - so Prospreads are the marketmaker. But they don't screw with the price and fills are good.
But if you trade actual lot sizes with them, then they offset each trade in the actual marketplace - you can see this by placing a full lot trade on their platform and then see your order in the real market on another platform like MD or CQG.
For full size lots I trade through AMP futures currently using Market Delta and CQG data feed
ProRealTime - for transparency reasons - I have a partnership with them. But, yes I use the standard platform with subscribed market feeds. I have used PRT since 2008 - brilliant platform that is great for creating the type of models I do.
All the fractal indicators or models are my own proprietary work.
I was daytrading on and off before Futex, but that was when I really got serious about it.
I was already living in France for more than two years when I took the job with Futex, but realised France was where my heart was, so left to come back an live with my now wife. Probably not the best financial move, but I'm more than just about money and I prefer living in the sun!
Global Macro - I love it. It's one of the biggest games in town and I always swayed towards top-down analysis. After 2008/9 when so many suppose experts/ professionals lost huge chunks of their clients money, I thought there could be a business opportunity for a research service that advised on subtle risk, building risk, contagion and cascade risk on major financial instruments and join all the pieces of the jigsaw together (my twitter feed gave some hints of pending risk prior to the recent sell off) and my actual research work even more so - I'm a big proponent that most economic/financial market storms are forewarned in the data. With my models, they will never fail to pick up all major bull or bear markets. But, obviously they won't predict sudden exogenous events that come out of the blue - you can't predict that stuff.
I set up my reserach service also to build a track record and maybe one day turn it into a hedge fund.
I prefer spending most of my time doing GM work with a couple of hours a day if I have time to trade intra day futures - I like to keep developing my skills in this area. It's very much like on-line poker which I also play. There is a lot of cross over in the skill set - eg getting the read of the market or table, detecting strength/weakness, waiting for the right setups/opportunity, hitting it hard when the probability favours, sizing down when you see nothing, standing aside when there is nothing and CHIP STACK management and the PSYCHOLOGY of the money game!
No, I have not managed to automate my approach as it involves multiple different functions that are stochastic and somewhat still ambiguous in their output. I don't have the programming skills to do this at present.
My commercial interest - can't talk about on this forum because of the rules.
Hope that answers your questions,
Cheers
Simon
