My advice for someone starting out

Here is some advice I have compiled for those who are interested in and/or are new to trading.

Commitment:

The first question you must ask yourself is if you really want to do this?  I’ve been at it almost 3 years and it took me 2 until I was making a little bit of money.  Even after almost 3 years I’m still not making half of what I made before as a software developer.  So depending on your job and if you like it, it may not be worth it.  The 3 years is more than full time, working evenings, weekends, etc.  I think it takes about 10,000 hours to be able to make money in trading.

If you’re doing it part time, say 2 hours/day during the week and 6 hours on the weekend, you’re looking at 12 years!!  I don’t want to discourage but rather tell you exactly what you’re in for.  It really is a full time job and you have to be very motivated, even obsessed with it to succeed.  It will be the biggest challenge of your life.

Also know that when trading professionally, it’s really boring.  You sit & wait for a trade and if you get distracted you miss it.  It’s even more boring when trading on simulator and it’s very hard to remain disciplined and do it.  I doubt many people can trade on simulator for many years, I know I couldn’t.

In theory one finds one setup that works and just increases size to 100 contracts.  It’s not that easy.  I’ve been trading 2 lots for 2 years now.  It’s hard to increase size unless risk is totally under control and that’s quite challenging.  Stops too tight = get stopped out.  Stops too loose = big losers.  it’s not easy finding the balance.  I’ve been working on it for 2 years now!

Trading US EST evenings:

Trading US EST evening will not be good.  The markets are really slow.  No major cash markets are open.  I don’t recommend trading this time.  A better alternative would be to get up early and trade European markets and even ES pre-market.  May not be easy for you to get up so early though, and even then, it will be during the slow period around the European lunch, and when the US has news releases (around 8:30 EST).

You could always try swing trading stocks based on the daily chart.  1 hour/day would be enough to do this.  But that’s outside my expertise but lately I’ve been considering it.
Tools for trading:

If you want to practice, ninjatrader is free for simulator use and has market replay which looks & acts exactly like real time.  I’ve used it a lot.  The “issue” is if you want to do market profile & volume profile, you will need investor RT (around $60/month I believe, I use the pro version of market delta which is more).  IRT has a replay but the problem is it doesn’t have a DOM so you can’t trade it on sim but you could paper trade it writing down entries.

You don’t need to buy ninja until you’re consistently profitable on sim so basically your costs would be IRT at $60.  If you deposit $5k in a broker account you can get a free broker datafeed so your costs would be just $60/month.  I recommend Velocity for trading but recommend Mirus for their datafeed which is better.
Markets:

I think ES is the best market to trade.  Others trade it especially those following FT71 so you can compare notes.  And it’s slower than some of the more volatile markets.  Stay away from anything volatile like crude, euro, gold, etc.  ZN is another good market but I just focus on ES.  Focusing on 1 market is best.

Trading Account:

Set aside around $10-$15k for your trading account and plan on loosing at least half of it and maybe all of it depending on how good your discipline is.  So plan on another $10-$15k to reload it assuming you don’t give up.

Charts:

I use a daily chart, 30min market profile chart, a 5min chart with composite profile & volume profiles, and to time entries a footprint chart and fast tick chart.  That’s about it.  I use VWAP & cumulative delta and that’s about it for indicators except for my own proprietary indicators.  Anything with a lookback period is not going to be very useful and this rules out MA’s, stochastics, RSI, MACD, etc.

Books & Webinars:

I’ve probably read 30-40 trading books and I found that most books were not very useful.  These are the best that I’ve read:

• Mind Over Markets
• Markets in Profile
• Dalton‘s free webinars
• FT71‘s webinars & chats (requires a small donation to charity)
• Reading Price Charts Bar by Bar
• Diary of a Professional Commodity Trader
• Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
• Market Wizards
• The New Market Wizards
• The Very Latest E-Mini Trading ( This book is good for beginners to give you some ideas on how to use Market Profile)

Trading Rooms:

I have done trials of many trading rooms and my opinion is that none of them were very useful to me.  I recommend doing a free trial any time you can in order to learn something new but I do not recommend investing money in them.

One room I was in the guy claimed to make around $4k/day.  He decided to trade live showing his DOM for a month and during that time he barely made money.  Another room I tried, I learned that he was not reporting all his trades particularly his losses.  Another room the guy would only tell you he took a trade after it was profitable (thus keeping quiet about losers).   In one popular room a member compiled performance stats and the guy, widely known as a profitable trader, lost money.  I’ve seen so many scams that it’s not even worth it to get involved in these rooms.

A consistently profitable trader will have a huge salary and the freedom to do whatever they want.  Running a trading room is a huge commitment.  It’s like having a job.  The two just seem incompatible to me.

Trading Courses:

The only course I can recommend is from Balance Trader.  Contact him via his website to inquire about purchasing it.  Please note that this is not a trading system.  It focuses on the “big picture” and teaches the concept of balance and how to identify balance areas and then to look for trades around these balance areas.  It does not cover timing entries, trade management, or anything like that.

Trading Forums:

Trading forums may seem very helpful to someone new, but I would caution against spending time participating in forums.  The reason is the forums are full of unprofitable traders.  Even worse, many of these unprofitable traders are pretending to be profitable trading gurus!  This can be very dangerous to someone new.  I can’t count how many hours I wasted investigating ideas & methods I read about on forums.  It was a wild goose chase.  Most forums are full of “the blind leading the blind”.

I met one guy who learned how to scalp the DOM and he wrote (I’ll paraphrase): “I wish I could delete every post I ever made because it was all wrong”.  I feel exactly the same way.  I used to write on forums about a cycle method.  I tried explaining what I was doing, how it worked etc.  The truth is I really didn’t know myself.  I thought I did at the time but now I realize I really didn’t.  It was useful for me to try and explain it and show examples, but was it useful for anyone else?  I wish I could delete all those posts as it would only lead people astray.

It’s been 9 months since I stopped participating in forums.  The time I had spent at forums was then channeled towards studying my charts & trades, or doing something completely different.  Both of which were much more beneficial to me.  Many forums sites are simply businesses that make money from advertising and/or donations.

I hope that helps.  I hope to expand this in the future as I receive more questions so if anything isn’t covered here please let me know.