Marek Liyanage

Finished linking up StreamDeck to Chart and Keyboard Trading tools in Trade Station. It's pretty straightforward once you enabled and customized the keyboard after opening up the keyboard mapping menu by clicking on the 3 dots next to "Entry - B/F Buy" pull down menu. That opens up the mapping tools. Once you set-up the hot buttons there...just link them to the keys on the StreamDeck...

Update on StreamDeck, Keyboard and Chart Trading Functionalities: TradeStation will tie in with StreamDeck. A screenshot of the "Macro" and "Hotkey" feature below shows how you can program commands and then you do the same as in DAS when using the StreamDeck....simply assign the hotkey in the StreamDeck s/w. TS also offers 2 simpler tools "Chart Trading" and "Keyboard Trading" that replace a lot of the hot key and chart trading functionalities. So between those two tools I cover all my needs. To better understand what "Chart Trading" and "Keyboard Trading" functionalities offer in TradeStation watch this Video: If you have questions best DM me on Fintwit.... https://twitter.com/MarekLiyanage

I began trading options a month or so ago. With swing and options trading in mind I had moved away from DAS to the TradeStation platform. The last few weeks I also tweaked my scanners to restrict the universe of stocks I trade to those that have price >10, market cap >200Mio and Float >20Mio as a minimum requirement for any scanner I use and then added a few fixed lists of stocks that are more suitable for options day and swing trading. E.g one window just tracks a short list of my favorite 15 stocks for intraday options trading. Then there's 2 other lists "Movers 'n Shakers" and "Swing" which includes mostly growth stocks good for day or swing trading. These lists are fixed so don't change (the weekend I update the underlying symbol lists so they might change from one week to the next by a few stocks I add or remove). The only real scanners I use are a market open and pre market as well as an earnings scanner. These scanners are very simple scanners. I have color-coded everything to improve visual perception and as you can see the lists track things like options volume or relative stock volume or "below/above" premarket high/low levels which are useful levels to trade off. Here's the Trade-Ideas cloud link - you will probably need a TI subscription to download or open the layout. Play around with it and let me know how you like or don't. You can also DM me or hit me up on Fintwit if you have questions. https://www.trade-ideas.com/Cloud.html?code=8f1b49ca041a33a3663c66e0a042a800

Took my first bigger options trade today on TSLA. Scalped a few weekly 500 calls. I trade them just like I do the stock...just watch the stock on a separate montage. As you can see one contract w a price of $25 requires about $2,500 in buying power to purchase (100 share per lot). So a $2.5 move on the contract equals ~10% while the stock probably moved maybe 2% or so... I follow Jay on Instagram...he's pretty good at posting educational stuff there and on youtube where he has a channel.

Options Delta and Gamma are well explained in more detail in Nate Sheldenbergs Options Bible....the book is a bit epic so just read the part about Delta and Gamma beginning around p. 99 to better wrap your head around the concepts. A more fun way to that will also highlight the same ideas is just to compare underlying price with contract pricing for a few tech stocks when they were on the move...the key is to pick the contracts where the strike price was close to or below the stock price BEFORE the move began..then watch what happened to the contract price as the stock price moved closer, thru and zoomed beyond the strike price....that's where delta and gamma (gamma = acceleration of delta) explode. http://terredegaia.free.fr/ppics/Trading/Mcgraw-Hill - Option Pricing And Volatility - Advanced Strategies And Trading Techniques - Sheldon Natenberg - (1994).pdf Visualization of Delta ...the image is from the 2015 version of Nate Sheldenberg's book.

Over the Summer I switched from DAS Trader Pro to TradeStation s/w...one of the main reasons was the lack of resources for trading Options and Futures in DAS s/w...happy to report that all is wel and the migratoin proved to be not just a profitable move but also saved commissions and platform fees. Now the fees were an aside bc nothing comes for free and there are a few drawbacks that were discussed in various other threads. None of these drawbacks concerned me much (e.g. pre and post market trading) since my focus was expanding the instruments and tools available within the s/w ecosystem and I feel TS has a lot more to offer there (non-US residents don't have the same access to TS so pls check with sales if you reside outside the US). Which brings me to options scanners which are simply not available in DAS....you need to use some third party s/w or ToS to be able to find the option contracts in play on any given morning at the market open. TradeStation has a number of pre-built option scanners that are useful for break out traders who like to trade the market open like many of us. Because there's a gazillion contracts for each stock you need to find the correct strike price that's in play. A simpler work around is to watch the stocks that light up on TradeIdeas and then find strike prices close to the current price and look up those contracts on the montage. This still doesn't tell you much about an important factor: liquidity. So this is really not a very good way to get into business bc your trade might end up losing bc you picked the wrong strike price and just lacked the liquidity to get in and get out quickly so maybe you got chewed out on the spread or maybe it just didn't move as well or in sync with the underlying stock. Being that speed if of essence for break out traders at the market open TradeStation scanners offers the necessary tools that let option break out traders quickly scan for contracts gapping or moving quickly out of the gate at the market open by, showing % change, $ change and volume for each contract specification within each of the prebuilt scanners. The screenshots below shows how the scanners were populated at the market close of Friday so obviously they will refresh empty on Monday morning and begin populating as market activity rises at 9:30ET. I apply price, strike price, volume, % and $ change filters in order not to get overwhelmed with tickers showing up on scanners. One big piece of information that sets apart option break out traders from other option traders or traders of the underlying are the delta and gamma of the options contract. Options breakout traders are not only hunting for momentum in the underlying stock but also looking for contracts with high delta and gamma. So what are delta and gamma....well that is a separate topic but it helps to think about how the options premium of a contract will change as the stock approaches or exceeds the strike price...e.g. a weekly expiration contract might be worthless at Wednesdays close bc it's OTM but then suddenly sky rocket bc the stock gapped up 10% in pre market on Thursday and moved thru the strike price...so something that was worth a few cents might suddenly be worth several dollars so increased in value by several hundred or thousand percent. If you are more interested read up a bit about delta/gamma and look up ROKU contracts that were on the move last week as ROKU moved 10%. They increased by 400% in value...went from $2.5 to $10. ROKU contracts are very liquid so if you had seen ROKU moving and picked the correct contract you could probably reasonably make 25-50% of that move which amounts to about 200-500 per contract. First grader math shows the sky is the limit and especially for small accounts e.g. with $2,500 you could well make a few hundred $$$s with acceptable downside risk. Especially, if you already are a momentum scalper like Andrew or some of the other traders in the chat room. There's a few other threads I started a while back on TradeStation...take a look at those bc there were some useful points brought up by other traders. Liquid options of tech stocks especially the higher priced ones with good volatility like AMZN, NVDA, NFLX, TSLA, SQ, ROKU, BYND, AMD, FB or even BA are all very suitable to be traded at the market open...especially high priced ones like AMZN contracts can move many $$s when delta jumps on a contract.

You have a big advantage being a market professional but that also can turn into baggage bc you need to settle the time frame you want to focus on. Even if you already know it's "intraday" that's still a wide spectrum and that's where many of us stumble bc we mix and match different styles that we haven't totally mastered well. I began trading with TS at the 2 year mark of my day trading journey which is August/September. It's been great now for 2 months straight with only a few days of losses. After two years I consider myself consistent even though I knew what my "edge" was after about 3 months into trading. It took another 12-15 months chip away at the big losses scalpers suffer every now that wipe out weeks of hard work. I attribute a good amount of that to switching platforms. One thing that has greatly improved has been stock selection in pre market and at the market open where for scalpers speed is absolute key. A lot of times the best stocks at the open are not necessarily the ones that showed in pre market so you need to keep a good eye not just on your scanners but also on a good number of charts. TS flexibility displaying number of charts and switching time frames just blows DAS away by light years on this. For scalpers DAS probably has the better fills overall but if you trade anything over a few minute time frames there's really no good reason not to use TS. Time in pre market is better spent researching stocks and not trading....I had to give up post market trading too with the switch. Would have loved to short INTC on earnings but that's just the way it is...it frees up the mind. Remember trading can become an addiction just like any other gambling activity so you need to be mindful about your mental resources, energy and the rational limitations that sometimes might make more sense than having unlimited options.

Weekend chart review in TradeStation... $SPY $QQQ $IWM now at or below the 50MAs on daily and weekly charts. Most tech leaders ended the week soft...pulling below 9/20MAs and hovering at or below the 50. $ZM $RH $PTON $FVRR $PINS $CRWD $APPS $QCOM (closed above Friday's open!) $CMG are still trading around 9/20DMAs 9/20/50 daily and weekly MAs as well as 52-week channel indicator in RadarScreen on TS used to triage stocks. The stocks I follow fall into 2 categories: A. High Volume Day (Options) Trading Stocks High volume growth names I focus on for intraday trading. Mostly to the long side or when the market corrects (like right now) also to the short side. Syncing the trade direction of growth names with the overall market direction makes trading a lot less complicated. Something I picked up from Mark Minervini. B. Intermediate to Low Volume Stocks (some suitable for day but others more for Swing or Options trading) Stocks with strength defined by Investors Business Daily lists according to CANSLIM and William O'Neills strategies. Many stocks especially PINS, CHWY, PTON, QCOM or CRWD can be traded (scalped) intraday but many are just not liquid enough and have large spreads so are better for swing trading (e.g. CMG, NOW, SEDG and TTD daily volume last Friday was below 1 Million shares traded)

TradeStation is a power hungry piece of software...I have gone thru several upgrades to my gaming rig since the upgrade...it's also 32-bit, I am not sure bc I am not a programmer but don't think that helps with a 64-bit Windows 10 system either. I am curious why they don't lift the software up to 64-bit so it can take advantage of better performance under a 64-bit environment. Maybe someone else can comment on this. Anyways the jist for those considering it would be ...you need a pretty solid PC rig bc if you load it up with workspaces and charts which I love to do it will push your system to the limits quickly. If all you use/need are a few workspaces and charts you won't have any issues. The best way to start out is load your basic workspace and then slowly keep adding charts, watchlists, scanners and other workspaces.

TradeStation makes it easier than you might think bc you can just use your keyboard for everything. They took a nifty route to cover the need for many different hotkeys....rather than programming every single setting into separate hotkeys they use a few keys to separately control: ORDER TYPES PRICE VOLUME ROUTES plus a few other misc variables (see image of my current config below). This configuration gives the user a lot more flexibility...the issue with Streamdeck here is the XL gives you several levels of programming but you need to dig down a level which makes it almost like working in a DOS files and folders...w TS approach you need to know a few keys well but you have unlimited flexibility, e.g. you can set share price at the 3- or 4-digit level and then just up the ante by hitting the PgUp or PgDn key to go from 1000 to 6000. re. Price markers for trading from charts...see the second attached infographic it's self explanatory.

its unfortunate but not a deal breaker considering all the other benefits you get with the software and trading commission free...

Here's what TSLA and AAPL intrday charts look like with intraday levels from today, yesterday and past days on the montage screen. With the studies tied to windows the levels show for different tickers automatically when you toggle thru a RadarScreen or Hotlist window

With Y (previous day's) HOD, LOD added as a separate study

here's a chart with daily OPEN/HIGH/LOW indicators in TradeStation. In TS studies are connected to specific windows so simply create a layout with charts that all have the studies you would like to see and it will be applied globally to any chart you pull up regardless of the ticker. Makre sure to save that layout...et voila....you got what you needed. BTW, you can copy and paste any window in TS which is another great feature once you have created the a chart window with the studies you would like to have on each chart.

My wife and I like to travel a fair amount....I use 2 travel setups....the first is one using USB powered displays (Andrew uses ASUS, Lepow makes ones that uses newer USB-C standard).....ASUS has been pioneering these so those are the most reliable ones. They run between $150-200. The second option I recently turned to for more screen real estate is using 22-25" AC powered displays. You can get ones that are flat and light so are pretty portable for travel in a a car with some luggage. Here I turned to ACER 22 and 24" that were available for ~$100 on Amazon or at Costco. Most laptops have several USB ports...make sure you have the matching standard...newer USB standards 3.0 and up are usually marked in blue but you need to check this in your laptop specs. Many laptops will sport an HDMI , MiniDP port, VGA, DVI or now also USB-C that will feed video to an external display at higher resolution. If you are shopping for a laptop and will be using it for trading a lot make sure it fits your needs for external displays. The Lenovo Y545 w 1660TI GPU I use can put out video without a hub directly to 3 USB or AC powered displays. The USB displays are less than 2lbs and the AC powered ones are about 6lbs. I have attached a few pics of the AC powered setup w one ACER 22" and 2 ACER 24" displays. The Y545 is a 15" laptop/ One more thing....you gotta think about with this...as you can there's 3 different sized displays in this setup. This could be an issue with DAS s/w bc if you want to extend the screen across several displays the sizing can become a hiccup. A few others here have suggested some workaround for this. My USB displays all match the size of the 15" Lenovo screen so with those I haven't had an issue while traveling. Recently I switched to TradeStation software trading platform and w that s/w theres no issue with screen size bc you can have several different desktops and workspaces so I just use 3 different desktops for trading s/w.