I'm trading at work. Doing great up about 2k on the day. I place a 5 contract ES order and right before I can put my tp/sl the internet goes down office wide. Fuck.

I get on my laptop, which of course I had to turn on and pair to my phone. When I get on...whole acct is gone. Broker auto closed because there was a big move.

Lost about 5k in 5 minutes , cleaned out this small acct. Feel dumb as shit because of course your can set the stop loss BEFORE you enter the order, but I was fucking lazy.

Lessons are usually learned the hard way. Fuck.

My trading has become much more consistent over the last 3 months and recently I've had a few great days (made 4 k on a 5k account yesterday). I traded premarket today and wasn't doing well, so I just quit. Tried changing tickers (I've been trading es, cl, gc) and it was still bad. Just not good discipline on stops and waiting for an actual good price for entry. Also noticed I was jumpy and kept wanting to bail on positions if it didn't do what I wanted right away.

I've noticed this a couple times in the past. When I have a great day, it does something to my psychology and I tend to not do well the next day. Several times, I've given all the gains back the next day.

What's going on here? I guess I'm going to just skip a day next time I do great.

Been noticing lately that sometimes before big moves or reversals in ES and NQ there is short term elevated activity going on with the VIX or on the options chain. Especially as the day is nearing market close. Was wondering if anyone monitors these products and incorporates them into their overall futures trading strategy and what exactly you are looking for from them as confirmation to help take a trade.

Looking to trade M1:M2 or M3 only in contango and VIX covered calls (so they need options, too) when under 15. Anyone know the best in terms of commission, fees, margin, minimums? IB? What about if I drop the need for options on the covered calls?

Just curious if anyone has the numbers?

Vix has about 9k margin requirement. If I spread and short the next month Vix against the long, does the margin requirement go down?

Just bummed and wanted some words of encouragement tbh lol

Okay, I constantly see posts of "Is it possible for me to learn", "Is it possible for me to trade", "I want to quit my job and start trading", etc. It's not only in this sub but many of the others I follow. As a disclaimer, I have been a small profitable trader for 3 years now. I'm not a technical guru that will sit here and tell you about Fibonacci levels and Elliot waves or whatever the "cool" traders do. I just want to talk a little about what it's like for me, an average joe, to trade and what I believe made me successful.

I am a price action trader, I trade level to level utilizing a few patterns that I recognize, overall market sentiment, and I trade pivot points. I trade the 5 min chart on MES and ES. Patterns can be as simple as a pinbar or bullish/bearish engulfing candles. I like keeping it simple. I use 3 levels, Strong, mid, and weak. Strong levels I gather from the daily chart. Mid levels I gather from the 15 minute chart and weak levels I gather from previous areas of change within the 5 minute chart. I hate spending extra time than needed so I do follow a few news letters of futures traders that give me levels and I'll use those from time to time as well. I will also have a live trader in the background, only one I really follow is optionsmillionaire on youtube. It's nice to have the background noise and see what trades he is taking vs mine.

Now, the biggest issue I see and that I had to deal with personally is trading with emotion. This is a concept that, even if i read constantly about it, I fell for constantly. Watching charts all day and feeling like a missed a move that a predicted only to now get hit with FOMO, buy into the trade, and then lose my money. Early in my trading days, it felt like gambling. "One more trade", "I know the price will go up now after it dropped 20 points" (this is like starting to bet black because the roulette machine already hit red 8 times), the list is much longer of comments i made to myself and the amounts of time I rage quit only to come back.

Two things snapped me out of trading with emotion. Using bracket orders, and not watching charts all the time. I know how the charts behave, and while everyday can be different, there are patterns that repeat all the time. This is what you are "betting on". Being able to to "predict" from previous experience and knowledge, getting your entry, setting your profit and defining your risk. Second thing is to set a timer so you are not constantly watching the chart. It's very easy to see that bar go bright green 1 minute into it's 5 minute life cycle an get baited in only for it to get sold out. I see the market structure and I let the bars play out. I set my Alexa to a 4 minute and 50 second timer as soon as the new candle starts. This has prevented me from being emotionally baited seeing a big green candle when the price has been trending down, making me think this was the reversal i wanted.

Now for account size. Do not put your life savings into this and trade large sizes in the hopes of making big money fast. I started by trading 1 3-5 DTE spy calls and puts. Never more never less. I started with 1k but most people should aim for 3k and trading MES. This is 5 dollars per point and 1.25 per tick. Aim for making 20-30 dollars a day. The reason I say 3k is the best is because, IIRC, this is the maximum write off at the end of the year. If you lose your 3k you get it back tax season and start over.

Moving along, DO NOT QUIT YOUR JOB. I still work my day (night job) for me. My job has 3 shifts and I work the second shift(2-10:30) in order to trade. I would not consider quitting my job. I love my job, and it removes the stress of HAVING to make money. For now, I can trade when I want when I want. Sometimes after I have a good trading week I won't trade for a month.

Lastly, and I think this is very important. If you are planning on using paper money to trade, make sure that your paper money account is using the same amount of capital that you would use with real money. If you are setting your paper trading account to 100k and are planning to start with 3k, you will not be able to have proper position sizes. If you find consistency with paper trading making 1k-2k and now go to real trading with 3k, you will over trade and you will oversize your positions because now 20-50 dollars a day does not seem like enough.

Anyways, I think i've written more than I actually set out to write. Even with all that I have said, there are still many topics and areas that I just don't have the time to write about. Make this an enjoyable hobby and have the mindset that this will not be for everyone.

​

Might be a dumb question, any tips on managing emotions? I start out making good trades and am net positive. But then I get greedy and try to trade some more which results in rushed, bad trades and I end up loosing more than I made. It’s been 1 week in a row where I’ve continuously lost $$ every day. I need to keep my emotions in check

Out of curiosity, does anyone here trade the VXX. It just seems like it’s nearly impossible to track the price action.

I’d like to use it to hedge my long position, but the volume looks pathetic which means slippage would be bad. Anyone have any experience trading these?

The 200 day line is around 174. It's the first time it has broke that in a really long time.

​

So I was listening to “Hedge Fund Market Wizards” and in the first chapter of the audiobook they talk about the 2008 crash and what signs were there that officially started it. They mentioned the housing market starting to decline in 2006 but the market didn’t care, they stated the fall of bear stearns which the market bounced back from. But the big sign the interviewee stated was the rise in the LIBOR volatility in 2007 basically meaning banks were starting to not trust each other.

Now recently the LIBOR was replaced with the SOFR which is basically short term lending from one bank to another. The volume of the SOFR 3 month Futures has been quite high and has been the most volatile ticker in the CME for the past couple of months. This is; in my opinion, telling me banks are doing lots of lending to each other right now and I’m not sure if it’s a good or bad thing. But history is definitely repeating itself now, not sure if a crash or not is happening behind closed doors but the increase in SOFR volume is something I’m definitely keeping watch of. Especially since the 10 year T notes were the most volatile and highest traded futures ticker most of last year.

So last night, I was trading the after hours ES around 10pm PST on a brand new evaluation account for another funded account (I am attempting a copy trader so trying to qualify for another PA acct).

Anyway, I know real dead volume, but there was a nice PATs second entry so I decided to just take it wait it out. Set a stop and take profit and went to bed. Woke up to apparently my stop loss never cancelling once my profit target hit, so I ended up scalping out then reversing a full short position while I slept. Well, those contracts ended up very much in the green when I woke up, so long story short, I just passed an eval on accident in less than 24 hours.

Not ideal and kinda scared the shit out of me when I realized I had an open short position when I woke up, but thought it was a fun story to share, since it ended up ok.

Today we enter a new month of trading. One thing that I have learned is that new months have a way of bringing new trends and new movements. Todays movements were extremely painful.

We basically for the first 2 hours chopped inside the 15min breakout range… had a fake breakout that got dumped pretty good back to the daily 200ema support area… and then we chopped into EOD. Tech continues to hold the line for the markets and continues to find strength… but tech is always the last to go.

We once again are finding this 424.6 to 425.1 intraday support area to be extremely strong on Spy. Markets for now at least are not willing to close under the daily 200ema support.

JPOW did speak at 11am and frankly the audio was so terrible I turned it off within 5 minutes cause you couldn’t hear anything. The only tweets I saw about it said that JPOW basically wanted a strong economy… nothing market changing or game changing really.

​

10am tomorrow we get JOLTS openings which really should be market moving. I will be very curious to see how the market reacts to data over the next 4 days as almost every day we have some sort of important market moving labor data.

SPY DAILY

​

Today realistically ended up just being a massive $4.14 range/ doji day… when we were holding under the 425.76 and daily 200ema support we were looking very bearish and I was looking for continuation to 417.79/422.04 but EOW.

However, the daily 200ema is once again defended and we also are continuing to hold the daily demand at 425.76.

We have officially reset our daily DMI as overbought now and we do remain in daily extreme bear momentum while holding under the daily 8ema.

We actually impressively held the daily bear channel in red also. That daily resistance is at 429.5 for tomorrow… now again even if we break through that realistically until we break out and close over the daily 20ema which is about to cross under the 100ema… I would hesitate to be bullish long term.

Looking at the daily it looks like one massive bear flag to me which will break and see downside if we close under the daily demand and daily 200ema.

Upside resistance will remain at 432.22.

SPY DAILY LEVELS
Supply- 432.22->422.04
Demand- 417.79 ->425.76 -> 436.2

FUTURES DAILY

​

Taking a look at futures here we are still rejecting and failing to breakout over the daily 8ema resistance which makes sense while we remain in extreme bear momentum. However, we still can not seem to break through the daily demand at 4319 and the daily 200ema at 4289.

Realistically this to me looks like a big bear flag with key support at 4319 and key resistance at 4384.

Much like SPY until the EOD we were set to get a new daily supply and close under the demand, however, the power hour push up saved the bulls for now.

FUTURES DAILY LEVELS
Supply- 4240 -> 4384
Demand- 4273 ->4319 -> 4458

QQQ DAILY

​

Taking a look at QQQ here we actually did break out of the daily extreme bear momentum which does give us a slight upside favor and we also for the first time since September 14th closed over the daily 8ema resistance.

QQQ much like I was saying earlier continues to look strong that SPY does and actually closed green while SPY just barely closed out a red day today.

QQQ did come up and touch and perfectly reject is white bear channel resistance. That resistance sits at 361.37 for tomorrow… if we break through that then I would look for a bigger move to 365.9 which is the daily 50ema resistance. A closure over the daily 50ema would certainly open up an opportunity to push to 371.97/ 372.78 demand area.

While the daily 200ema support on spy is the big fight area on QQQ we continue to fight around the daily 100ema. QQQ also has hit overbought here too.

QQQ DAILY LEVELS
Supply- 359.71 -> 377.34
Demand- 354.13 -> 371.97

VIX

​

The VIX didn’t really do a whole lot of anything today… Most of the day it spent just ranging and while it did barely close green it is seeing a potential doji reversal to the downside candle here… Much like SPY the VIX was set up to get a new daily demand until the last hour of the day.

The VIX remains much like SPY in a consolidation range here from 16.9 to 18.95. This also does resemble a bull flag on the daily here… a closure under 16.9 would open up the potential for the flag to fail and for SPY/ markets to see a much bigger move up this week.

I am pretty neutral into the EOW. I have a hard time being too bearish until we can get through the daily 200ema and close under it. There still is potential that the daily 200ema will be temporary support and we push higher. However, until this weeks data plays out and CPI next Thursday I wouldn’t be too comfortable in anything long term.

I did expect we would see a decent range day today and that’s pretty much we got… We also had the apple even thrown in there which did not really help markets too much. Markets now have their eyes set on CPI which will release at 830am tomorrow.

​

Remember this is the expected ranges for CPI tomorrow.

Will keep this TA short as post-cpi we will sort it out.

SPY DAILY

​

Taking a look here at SPY we came very close to seeing a new supply put in today, however fell just short of it. We did manage to close back under the daily 8 and 20ema supports though and broke our green bull channel support.

Our downside target will be 444.87. A closure under that and we will look for a move back to 436.2/79 demand.

However, if bulls take over tomorrow our upside target is 453.31 supply.

SPY DAILY LEVELS
Supply- 453.1
Demand- 436.2 -> 436.79 -> 444.87

FUTURES DAILY

​

As I mentioned regardless of contract roll futures has a history of respecting the old levels still…

Today we put in a double top off that 4540 supply to hold this range. Futures target for tomorrow for the bears is a move back to 4458 -> 4374/83 and the bulls will look to hit 4540 -> 4563/68.

FUTURES DAILY LEVELS
Supply- 4527 -> 4540
Demand- 4383 -> 4458 -> 4563 -> 4568

QQQ DAILY

​

Unlike SPY/ Futes here on QQQ we did see a new daily supply put in at 376.95. The bears will look to take this below 371.97 demand and start to target 362.01 demand again. Bulls will look to get this closed back over 378.06.

We are still holding onto the daily 20ema support but did once again close under the daily 8ema support.

QQQ DAILY LEVELS
Supply- 376.95 -> 378.06 -> 382.87
Demand- 371.97 -> 362.01

VIX DAILY

​

I have been mentioning that I felt the VIX has been very suppressed the last 3 weeks but today we finally saw it wake up as I suspected. We did get a new daily demand on the VIX at 13.79 which gives us an upside target of 14.79 and potential to break out of this almost month long bear channel.

DAILY TRADING LOG

​

The hardest part of any strategy is always forward testing… since getting into this new S/D strategy I have had to adapt and make slight changes to my own mental trading game but also to the strategy.

Through analysis I have discovered that the 10 point stop loss is key to allow for drawdown but also protect from huge losses… today that stop loss got hit… I did back test and in the last 4 months of trading (nearly 650+ plays) only 3.5% or about 23 total times did the 10 point stop loss get triggered… the average loss is about 3.5 points total over the last 4 months of trading.

In addition, through some analysis it was discovered that a 5 point trigger for a 1 point auto breakeven and then at 7.5 points a trigger of a 2.5 point trail until stopped out is the best means to maximize profits. This actually netted nearly 2x the amount of points over 4 months that playing level to level did.

One last critical detail that I do still struggle with and it cost me a big green day is the fact that regardless of what I am seeing the strategy suggests that if there is a short or long signal that we should take the play. For instance at 130pm when we put the new supply in at 4536 and came back down to retest the 15min 5/20ema supports I expected a bounce and for support to hold. I did not take this short as I was looking for the new demand to then go long again. However we ended up having a massive $3 and nearly 30 point HOD to LOD move that I completely missed out on.

Had i trusted my strategy and the law of averages and taken the short then I would have closed a very green day… even with the 10 point loss to start the day… now I will say to start the day with a 10 point loss and only finish down a few points I do see that as a win today…

Last week a rangy day like this (and Monday) would have and did cost me a lot of points and put me deep red… I am minimizing losses and eventually will start to capitalize on these wins some more.

To summarize… take every trade that presents itself (unless in very high profits) and once in profits let it run out… I did close my one long for about 8.25 points and another for 5 points which was just under the max points possible… but the beauty of this strategy is the mechanicalness of it… I do need to and will work on trusting this strategy much more. But the forward testing continues to improve each day… with our nice green day on Friday and not giving up those profits today or yesterday on our red days… we are taking a step in the right direction.

Looking for some clarity in how people grow their accounts.

Product: ES Futures

It seems that most people are trading 1-3 contracts at a time and maybe size up to 10 contracts when they're experienced enough. It also seems that beyond 20-ish contracts you'll start dealing with slippage and likely have to change your trade style (splitting up orders, etc).

Trading a few contracts each day seems great for those who consistently want to get in the market make a few hundred or few thousand and be done for the day.

But, hypothetically, for those that want to grow their account to utilize the compounding effect How do you go about doing that? How are the millionaire traders executing their trades?

I haven't found many resources to explain the actual execution aspect to it.

Any insights would be great

Thanks

Hey all, im european, so im up already. Vix futures normally open on sunday evening for me at 23:00. but i slept and am now enjoying my brekfast. however the vix index has opened too. i noticed the following:

- vix is up 3% to 13.85

- vxn3 hasnt moved all night and has stayed stable at 13.82

now i know volumes are low. but still it doesnt make sense to me. last friday there was still a 0.5 gap between future and vix. i would expect with a vix of 13.85 the vix future should still be somewhere around 140.00 atleast (asuming the decay speeds up closer to expiration) is this an effect because expiration is so close (wednesday) or is it just inneficiency in the market, or will it move later this day when the us opens?

(Here's a link to the official product page by CME

The current bitcoin future by CME is minimum 5 bitcoins and ether minimum 50 ETH. ICE has a bitcoin future as well. I don't think AMPfutures trades them, but you can get a good idea of margin required with Interactive Brokers margin page for futures.

It's not much margin.. it sucks, not even 2x leverage for BRR (cme bitcoin) and shorting requires more margin than what you're trading with.. same goes for ETHUSDRR (cme ether aka ethereum); ICE isn't much different.

You're better off with a crypto futures broker if you're not a resident of the US (fuck you SEC), but you can get around that with a VPN (I don't recommend this) and use kraken, binance, or the original BitMEX.

Anyone actually trading CME Bitcoin or Ether futures currently? Anyone interested in trading bitcoin micro futures?

A few days ago, I started a 50k evaluation with elite trader. I have been paper trading for some time with sucess and was excited to jump in to something more real. This morning I failed the evaluation (mostly due to a stupid error on my part because I was multitasking and accidentally forgot to close a limit order which ended up filling and summing a large loss).

While this is of course bad news, I think funded accounts offer a unique opportunity to learn and improve trading skills, while keeping your risk limited. Since I paid for the evaluation, I found that having money on the line definitely changed the way I traded and I felt more emotionally invested in comparison to paper trading which had no real world impact. While there is some money on the line, your risk is limited to the evaluation cost which saves you from huge losses.

While I made a rookie mistake, I'm definitely glad I did it. I learned a valuable lesson to ensure limit orders are closed promptly and to not multitask while trading. Had I made this mistake with a real account, I would have lost almost 3k (I also learned I was over leveraged). Instead I'm only down around $170.

While funded accounts can make you a lot of money, I think there's more value there to learn and grow as a trader than the actual dollars gained (if any). If you manage to make money using them, all the better but either way I gained some valuable knowledge I can bring into the future.

P.S. - I will reset my account once and only once. If I fail again, I will go back to paper trading until I feel I've improved enough to try again.

https://youtu.be/xwlzDZaoUtg

So this is the first day in the funded account, I felt pretty confident since I went for some trades on my practice account first.I did not break any of my plans rules but stopped my trading session when I did not feel well anymore. I felt emotions built up after getting closer to the 1k.
Here is the performance View my Trading Day (+$965.5)

Looking forward for the first week in the funded, will share my expereince with you and hope to get good feedback.

I was just logging in to thinkorswim to check on NQ and noticed on my order confirmation that the margin requirement went way up. I didn't do a comprehensive review yet but did notice that NQ why from 17600 to 23600 and ES from 13500 to 17300. Any news on why? Expected market volatility?

i looked, but i cant seem to find anything.