Hi All,
I've been interested in equities trading for the last 15 years or so spent enormous time and money on courses. I spent lots of time looking at trying to create algorithms for automated trading but the real fact on reflection is that I never really put in my 100% due to the day job.
I worked at a financial software company as a quantitative software engineer developing investment banking software products since 2000 and they had massive redundancies in 2015 due to bad financial results and I got hit as well. Unfortunately around three years earlier, my father had had a serious fall and around the time of my redundancy, had began to get more ill. I thought about getting back to another job and would have gotten a job quite easily at the time but found myself spending too much time looking after my father to be able to get back to work.
After spending a few months trying to decide what to do, I did some trading courses but unfortunately couldn't devote enough time consistently to trading due to caring for my father. So life plodded on for a year or two and I decided to re-do Mr Charts' course in July 2017 (I had done the course back around 2004) thinking that learning it would give me a fast track using the secrets but realized that I would have to spend lots of consistent time to learn the practical nuances of the markets. Unfortunately I didn't have the consistent time I needed so I put things on hold again.
Fast track to this year. Sadly my dear father passed away in the middle of January. After a few months off due to grief and sadness, I slowly started dabbling in trading around April this year. Even though I had spent so long playing around and reading I had never really traded properly in the markets so it has been a little uphill struggle to learn all the techniques - I still don't think I am an expert yet but getting there.
So I have been sim trading equities in using Ninjatrader 8 with an iqfeed data feed. The methodology I employ is to initially trade gapping equities at the the open and then depending on how things go use these equities as a watch list well as using other mainly continuation strategies I have programmed into the Trade-Ideas scanner.
Since April, its been a few months of mostly losses, then up and down and now finally I think I am getting somewhat consistent although once I really do feel that I am consistent I will still trade everyday for a couple more months to make sure I am making money before I go live. I do have the occasional big loss but I am getting there in learning to control them. My current biggest problem is that I after a good winning streak, don't exit the losses quickly enough and keep adding into the trade and end up in the deer-in-headlights (DIH ) situation losing trade and exit with a big loss! For example I traded perfectly and stopping the out correctly until Thursday last week and then ended up in the DIH situation I just described. Then I overtrade to get back what I lost! You can see this where the commissions are very large for the day...
This week has again been perfect so far with every single trade this week. Things are definitely getting better....
So here are my PnL:
April 2019: http://prntscr.com/owa50v
May 2019: http://prntscr.com/owa8b8
Jun 2019: http://prntscr.com/owa8l9
Jul 2019: http://prntscr.com/owa8zv
Aug 2019: http://prntscr.com/owa9d6
I am using:
Ninjatrader 8
IQeed equities data feed
Trade Ideas
I still have some deer in the light issues with exiting as a few times I have just let the trade go when it has against me only for it to give me a big loss - you can see this in the big losses. I just need to cut the losses immediately if the trade goes against me.
Cheers,
Imran
I've been interested in equities trading for the last 15 years or so spent enormous time and money on courses. I spent lots of time looking at trying to create algorithms for automated trading but the real fact on reflection is that I never really put in my 100% due to the day job.
I worked at a financial software company as a quantitative software engineer developing investment banking software products since 2000 and they had massive redundancies in 2015 due to bad financial results and I got hit as well. Unfortunately around three years earlier, my father had had a serious fall and around the time of my redundancy, had began to get more ill. I thought about getting back to another job and would have gotten a job quite easily at the time but found myself spending too much time looking after my father to be able to get back to work.
After spending a few months trying to decide what to do, I did some trading courses but unfortunately couldn't devote enough time consistently to trading due to caring for my father. So life plodded on for a year or two and I decided to re-do Mr Charts' course in July 2017 (I had done the course back around 2004) thinking that learning it would give me a fast track using the secrets but realized that I would have to spend lots of consistent time to learn the practical nuances of the markets. Unfortunately I didn't have the consistent time I needed so I put things on hold again.
Fast track to this year. Sadly my dear father passed away in the middle of January. After a few months off due to grief and sadness, I slowly started dabbling in trading around April this year. Even though I had spent so long playing around and reading I had never really traded properly in the markets so it has been a little uphill struggle to learn all the techniques - I still don't think I am an expert yet but getting there.
So I have been sim trading equities in using Ninjatrader 8 with an iqfeed data feed. The methodology I employ is to initially trade gapping equities at the the open and then depending on how things go use these equities as a watch list well as using other mainly continuation strategies I have programmed into the Trade-Ideas scanner.
Since April, its been a few months of mostly losses, then up and down and now finally I think I am getting somewhat consistent although once I really do feel that I am consistent I will still trade everyday for a couple more months to make sure I am making money before I go live. I do have the occasional big loss but I am getting there in learning to control them. My current biggest problem is that I after a good winning streak, don't exit the losses quickly enough and keep adding into the trade and end up in the deer-in-headlights (DIH ) situation losing trade and exit with a big loss! For example I traded perfectly and stopping the out correctly until Thursday last week and then ended up in the DIH situation I just described. Then I overtrade to get back what I lost! You can see this where the commissions are very large for the day...
This week has again been perfect so far with every single trade this week. Things are definitely getting better....
So here are my PnL:
April 2019: http://prntscr.com/owa50v
May 2019: http://prntscr.com/owa8b8
Jun 2019: http://prntscr.com/owa8l9
Jul 2019: http://prntscr.com/owa8zv
Aug 2019: http://prntscr.com/owa9d6
I am using:
Ninjatrader 8
IQeed equities data feed
Trade Ideas
I still have some deer in the light issues with exiting as a few times I have just let the trade go when it has against me only for it to give me a big loss - you can see this in the big losses. I just need to cut the losses immediately if the trade goes against me.
Cheers,
Imran
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