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My summary of my second year of trading live. If I sum up my two years of live trading, it would be the surprising path of self-improvement that day trading instigates. Day trading, especially at the open, is an effective and sometimes harsh vehicle to face all your fears and unproductive habits. All the layers of checks and balances that you have developed over the years to counteract personality flaws no longer work. Trading is too fast, too fierce, it pierces through the mental defenses because the decisions are instant. So as both Mark Douglas and Dr. Steenbarger state in their books, you must improve yourself to improve in trading. In case you don’t want to read my whole post I have tabulated the differences between my first and second year. Then I explain in more detail below. 1st Year 2nd year Profitability Break Even Profitable Common Setups 1/5min ORB - break out from levels 15 sec and 1min ORBs. Fallen Angels Key trading parameters Candles, (Daily+PM) levels, MAs and T/S Price action, candles, volume and L2 Office setup Laptop with two external monitors. Stand up desk Laptop with two external monitors. Stand up desk DAS Setup Two montages, four 1min charts hotkeys by shares size One montage, six 1min charts and hotkeys by risk size Stops Manual Hard stops Bias None Long Broker CMEG/Centerpoint IB Chat Always on Turn on for PM show and turn off a few seconds before the open Journal Online on the BBT website. Heavy data mining for improvements Private and now video with hand written journal. Some minor data mining. Study 13 hours a week outside of markets, training and studying. Recaps, reading and SIM. 10 hours a week and most of it Futures and psychology. Max loss Did not hit max loss for the last 9 months of the first year. Max loss is hit about 3 times a month. Exercise Run 3 times a week and walk 4 times a week. Run 7 days a week. Meditation 10 to 20 min a day 10 to 20 min a day Stress High stress before the market open then heart pounding until I stop trading for the day. Mild stress before and during the open with occasional stress increase on certain trades. Luck Hotkey and other mistakes always go against me I get some lucky breaks sometimes. So for profitability I lost money my first 3 months live, then was break even the next eight. Finally, my last month of my first year I was profitable. My second year I have been profitable 11 out of 12 months reaching my 20R/month goal five times. My setups haven’t changed that much, but the indicators I use have changed. My first year I was heavy into breakouts of daily/PM levels now I am more into price movement and volume. So my first year I could explain all the specifics why I took a trade. My second year the trade setups are more difficult to explain. Things like, “I just felt the way the price was moving it looked like it was going to pop.” Not helpful when you are mining your journal for consistency. I have kept to two computer monitors the whole two years. Since I trade the open I need to keep my attention focused. Data overload is easy and I will miss the move. This year I even lowered to one montage to help me focus on one trade at a time. It sometimes feels I took a step back with my stops. My first year it was all manual stops, now it is all hard stops. I was always hoping, with the manual stops, as I get better I would start to exit before my stop when I see the trade going bad. That skill never materialized. Instead I wasted lots of mental energy keeping to my stops without any benefit. So I switched to placing a stop order right after I enter the trade. My first year I tried two different brokers. First I tried CMEG which took quite an effort to open an account. The killer was the $3 price tag on every ticket. Since my risk per trade was low at the time and I take too many partials, I would have good trades that I would not net any profit. After a few months I switched to Centerpoint when BBT had a deal on 35 cents per ticket. But my fills were so bad I was unable to trade the open. When I discussed it with the broker they suggested I switch to a different (faster) route which cost $1 a ticket. The fills were OK but not impressive. Then the shorts availability was REALLY bad and they were known for having the best shorts availability. They would split their shorts into easy and hard categories. The easy short list you can just short. The hard to short list stocks you would have to use their app to find shares. This app, besides costing more money than their commissions, would take too long to use at the open. I usually like a list of 6 stocks on my watch list. But the whole time I was with Centerpoint half my watchlist would not have shorts, while I see Carlos have shorts most of the time. The final straw was due to the unreliability of their max loss risk setting. It would only sometimes work. When a stock spikes down for an instant and touches my max loss the risk controls would work too well and liquidate my position and lock me out. But when I was stuck in a trade that even the panic button could not get me out of I thought I was safe because the risk controls would save me. But when I called the broker to get me out of the trade they informed me it was already three times my max loss and they do not know why the risk controls failed. Then I finally switched to IB and have been quite happy with them. My first year I would have the chat on as I traded. But I found myself with terrible FOMO hearing better trades being taken. Now I listen to the PM show and turn off the chat seconds before the open. This has improved my trading. My journaling has sure changed from year one to two. The first year I journalled on the BBT website, which you can see from the previous posts. My second year I record all my trades and watch them later. Then by hand I journal my notes. I find hand writing the notes goes into memory better. I use to study a bit more my first year, trading on SIM, reading tech books, watching recaps, reading other BBT journals and reading trading psychology books. My second year I watch and trade SIM on Futures trading and read self-improvement books. I still meditate the same amount but I have moved to more intensive exercise. I went 9 months, in my first year, without hitting my max loss. I was proud of my discipline. But now I do try and trade if I am in a deficient. Most of the time I do dig my way out. About 3 times a month I don’t and hit max loss. I am getting better about the max loss. In general my stress levels have gone way down as I trade. My first year my heart would pound at the open even though my risk per trade was quite low. Now I am more excited at the open and only stressed once in a while. My luck has changed. Hotkey mistakes and bad fills ALWAYS went against me my first year. Now I get some lucky breaks sometimes. So myself destructive behavior may be decreasing. Here is my thoughts on luck: I met one of the luckiest people and worked with him in graduate school then the corporate world for about 12 years. It’s amazing how luck is always on his side and he always makes the assumption that luck will be on his side. After 12 years I see how it actually works. It’s two major traits. One there must be dozens (or more) little decisions made every day that are very binary. He will always lean to making the decision that may bring something positive, though the odds are very small. I will tend to do the opposite and make decisions that may cause something negative to happen. After say a week, a few hundred of these choices have occurred. One or two pan out or a combo of several and something reasonable go his way and the opposite for me. Since it is impossible to follow the repercussions of all these choices, it looks like good or bad luck. The second trait is an open mind to different possibilities. If you think that something positive may happen, when an opportunity, though it may be outside the box, crosses your path, he would see it and act. I would be close minded and not see it. There is actually some data for this. I once read about an experiment where volunteers were gathered. One set of people considered themselves usually the lucky type and the second group considered themselves unlucky. Everyone was given a newspaper and asked to count the number of pictures in the newspaper. The unlucky group usually took 2 or 3 minutes to count all the pictures. The lucky group usually took around 10 seconds. Because the lucky group all noticed a big sign on page two stating, “there are 46 pictures in the newspaper.” The unlucky group were focused on just looking for pictures and never noticed the sign. You can imagine how that applies to day trading. The final thing that made me profitable? This is the change that finally placed me into profitability for ORBs. Add a few cents to your stop. I kept missing huge runs by the price dropping and taking me out by a penny or two and going for a 10R run. I kept telling myself it was a coincidence there isn't an algo going to my stop and taking me out. But after a 100 or so times I realize that is exactly what the algo is doing. Because I have set my stop in the same place as the other 10,000 or so retailers. So we all can be taken out at the same penny or two because we all chose to have our stop 5 cents below VWAP or something like that. So I added a couple of cents to my hot key. I still choose the same stop as always but my hot key makes the stop a couple of pennies deeper. Same for my B/E stop key I added a couple of cents. Now, at least half the time, the price drops just misses my stop and the stock takes me with it on its big run. I spent the first year reading trading books and stock trading books. I remember when I read in Douglas/Steebarger’s books about needing to improve yourself if you want to improve your trading. I thought that’s fine, so how do I do that. All the trading psychology books give you details on how to improve your trading and the need to go deeper, but they would never say how. All the books seemed to discuss how to fine tune your psychology. They were very good, but didn’t help. What about me who needs a complete overhaul? So I tried paying a course from the Van Tharp Institute. This is a trading school, that is on the pricey side but very good. Van Tharp actually has a list of 40 trading rules that I recommend reviewing. I posted them here: https://forums.bearbulltraders.com/topic/2199-tharp-think-principles-for-trading/?tab=comments#comment-16787So I paid for one of their self-study courses. I posted the work I did here: https://forums.bearbulltraders.com/topic/1286-van-tharp-institute-peak-performance-course-for-traders-my-journey-through-the-course/?tab=comments#comment-8893It was a lot of work and I only found a few things useful, which I will list here. First, the most common trait they have found in successful traders is that they exercise four or more hours a week. Second, I took a test to see if I have enough avenues to decrease stress in my life that it was safe for me to day trade. I failed so badly that my score wasn’t even on their charts. And finally they recommended listening to the book The Secret. Forgetting about the mysticism or trendiness of The Secret I found two things very useful from the book. First, how to correctly be positive. I know that a positive attitude helps, but you have to correctly be positive. For example I would say to my-self “I will not trade the premarket, I will not trade the premarket.” Well that is reinforcing the negative and making trading in the PM more likely. Instead saying, “I will have full control of my trading in the premarket,” is better but not quite there. The correct way is to be thankful that you already have full control of your trading in the PM. It is weird to be grateful of something you don’t already have, but this places your mind in the right state. How can you be self-destructive about PM trading if you already think you have control over it? The second useful thing from the book is it gave me a list of authors that I can look to for answers. For some reason I shied away from the well known authors, assuming they were trendy and read quite a few of the less well known ones. Their books were good and they seemed like people I would respect, but none of them were useful. So I decided to try one of the more trendy authors, James Ray, and found his book very good. Not crazy he went to prison, so you really have to separate the message from the messenger. Though only some practical use, and too much mystic explanation, it did tell his journey how he found answers for himself. His interpretation on the Bible’s claim of a rich man going to heaven is like a camel passing through an eye of a needle was alone worth the read. Then I continued to Jack Canfield’s book Success Principles. Because of his fame with the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, I originally thought he was too trendy. This book was also very good and more practical. The I read the Unfu*k Yourself book. Another trendy book that is worth reading and some Tony Robbins stuff is very good and the most practical. Again due to his trendiness and tons of info commercials I originally shied away from him as well. Another good book is the Alchemist which puts everything together in a fictional story. So I still have a lot to learn, but now I have some knowledge of the improvement methods. I hope to start trading Futures live soon. I have been trading SIM for a few months now. Thanks for reading and good luck with your trading and other pursuits. Rob C

Generally, for backtesting you have a few options. -Quantopian : Cloud based, aimed at algorithm development. -Zipline: Local version of Quantopian, tad complex to get setup and running right. -Backtrader: Open Source Python backtester with ability to trade live via the IB API. Learning curve, but probably the best of the free bunch. -Amibroker: Powerful backtest software but expensive ($400 for the complete package). They all will do what you want if you know how to program for them, that's where it gets tricky, as you have to set them up to load in your executions and how to handle the In-trade procedure. The tool I'm developing (and will eventually release to the community) loads your exported trades, caches the minute data for the stock, and then runs a bunch of simulations against that data before producing a report of comparisons to the baseline. For example if you wanted to compare what your PnL looked like if you never moved to breakeven and sold at R.5, R1, R1.5, and R2 levels, it'd do it. The report crunches the benchmark numbers and adds some meta data about each trade (e.g. calculated stop too close, risk reward ratio not adequate, scaled too early, didn't let run) - the goal is to give a broad brush idea to people about areas they may be able to hone their edge (a few trades flagged as scaled-too-early is just noise, a large percentage might be something to look at). The difficult part about this is making it user friendly. Not sure when I'll have it in a state to release, lots of projects at the moment so the passion development has to go on the back burner.