Trading intraday patterns and volume breakouts in Futures

You ever done spreading Can?

ThingyMajiggy said:

You ever done spreading Can?

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No i haven't Sam, the only thing i've even seen on it that is close SKCs pairs trading....




Been a busy week, pretty much scratched my profits too...will try and update later.

In the middle of changing ISPs....upgrading to a faster line....

CanOz

CanOz said:

In the middle of changing ISPs....upgrading to a faster line....

CanOz

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Ahh so jealous, if only I had that option, forever stuck on Bigpond wireless, destined not to be a trader

ThingyMajiggy said:

Ahh so jealous, if only I had that option, forever stuck on Bigpond wireless, destined not to be a trader

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I tell ya Sam there have been times when I've wondered the same thing...every time i just seem to be getting a foot hold i start to have connection issues again.

Interactive Brokers data is really bad, its fine for trading my pattern strategy with the minis...no problem. However, trying to combine that with a shorter term stop run strategy is just impossible, last night IB missed an entire sweep of the offers on gold, didn't print a farkin thing until it got to the top, then did one print for the entire amount...

Anyway, last week i gave back my entire prior weeks profits plus Wednesdays profits. Simple over-trading and i'm having a little NT code put together for me so i get a warning when i'm over my daily stop, which normally would be 2% of my account balance or two full stop trades. My goal of breaking even for the month is still attainable but i need to be more careful. It would have been worse Friday, down almost 1200 for the day i made back another 600+ when the shorts started covering....still undisciplined trading is a killer.

My ISP shows up after lunch so fingers crossed that it makes a difference. Even though the speed is double it doesn't mean the quality will be better.

CanOz

CanOz said:

I tell ya Sam there have been times when I've wondered the same thing...every time i just seem to be getting a foot hold i start to have connection issues again.

Interactive Brokers data is really bad, its fine for trading my pattern strategy with the minis...no problem. However, trying to combine that with a shorter term stop run strategy is just impossible, last night IB missed an entire sweep of the offers on gold, didn't print a farkin thing until it got to the top, then did one print for the entire amount...

Anyway, last week i gave back my entire prior weeks profits plus Wednesdays profits. Simple over-trading and i'm having a little NT code put together for me so i get a warning when i'm over my daily stop, which normally would be 2% of my account balance or two full stop trades. My goal of breaking even for the month is still attainable but i need to be more careful. It would have been worse Friday, down almost 1200 for the day i made back another 600+ when the shorts started covering....still undisciplined trading is a killer.

My ISP shows up after lunch so fingers crossed that it makes a difference. Even though the speed is double it doesn't mean the quality will be better.

CanOz

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Yeah it's a real pain in the ar$e, it's just not that realistic for me to even attempt to be a live full time trader at the moment where i live, half an hour in any direction and you can get unlimited ADSL2+ etc but right where I am, wireless is it, talk about frustrating! Plus then there's the IB data as you say, then there's funding, then there's paying living expenses out of the profits that you get, certainly doesn't make it easy.....and to think people come to trading to make a quick buck hey?

Hope the new ISP works out for you!

ThingyMajiggy said:

Yeah it's a real pain in the ar$e, it's just not that realistic for me to even attempt to be a live full time trader at the moment where i live, half an hour in any direction and you can get unlimited ADSL2+ etc but right where I am, wireless is it, talk about frustrating! Plus then there's the IB data as you say, then there's funding, then there's paying living expenses out of the profits that you get, certainly doesn't make it easy.....and to think people come to trading to make a quick buck hey?

Hope the new ISP works out for you!

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And to think most of those issues never get easier, gluttons for punishment we are

Re: Trading EOD/Intraday patterns and volume breakouts in Futures

Paper trading my futures swing system here now, basically the same as the volume breakouts intra-day only i will trading the EOD patterns most of the time. It a very simple pattern system, i think you'll see some similarities with Tech and Pavs system for equities....

Getting back to basic technical stuff, patterns, basic support and resistance, plus some key levels occasionally from the market profiles and some seasonality.

Some key items of the plan:

Why futures? Cost per transaction and diversity of the markets, something different than equities.

Account size: 100k AUD

This is a trend following discretionary system. We want to jump on a trend and stay on as long as possible.

Max risk / Trade is 1% of account, evaluated weekly

Only trades with better then 2 to 1 reward to risk are taken.

Stops will be moved to BE as soon as possible usually on a HH or LL...

Where there is a seasonal bias we will try and factor that into our plan.

Intra-day patterns will be used if they support the daily's and lower the risk.

I'll list the markets traded here today as well....

My aim is to paper trade this for a month or two to evaluate if the system has a hope of being profitable after some of my better trades with the volume breakouts showed some promise. Now that i'm not distracted with intra-day trading i can focus on testing this.

We took a large account size in order to simplify things. It is possible to trade minis as well but i have some data issues with AMP/CQG on some of the minis to work out anyway. If this can be done profitably then we can fund this for full size or minis.

By the way, anything i know about pattern trading can be credited towards Nick Radge. I traded his power setups for a long time and while i didn't trade the futures setups i was a keen student.

There are some good books out there as well on this stuff...

Feel free to jump in with any queries on the details. It may seem as if i am starting something new, but in reality its a continuation of my volume breakouts but trying to step back out of the intra-day time frame unless it offers an outstanding risk/reward advantage.

There are some other things i want to research as well, such as spread trading...calendar and similar instruments with bonds. If i get to a point where i can also paper trade those concepts then I'll do that in another thread. I feel its something that may be slow and boring, but is the bread and butter of many Prop Firms so it must be worthwhile doing... as per Whitey's comments too.

So to begin we'll show you the TWS setup with the products we'll be looking at each day.

CanOz

Here is our symbol list....and my TWS workspace. I always setup a new workspace for trading/testing ideas or paper trading. Saves getting things cluttered and wasting time looking for things.

Just had a quick re-read. Why do you think you have more success outside of index futures canoz?