Jason H.

I have noticed that late day trends on active stocks tend to continue, albeit slowly. I think it's a valid late day strategy for sure!

I believe Think or Swim offers a replay functionality. I think the difficulty will be that the scanners won't work real time, so I'd suggest perhaps logging in during the morning to grab the watchlist so you at least have a starting point to practice.

Here are examples of my screens. These photos are a little old, but are generally the same as what I'm using today. I have a few more folders for experimental buy and short actions (buy 75% of buying power, etc.) that aren't pictured.

I LOVE my streamdeck. I've got mine configured with multiple screens for short and long positions in different sizes. I have the controls nested and color coded so I don't mistakenly short when I mean to go long, or to large when I mean to go small size. You can see pictures in the "show us your setup" thread. Here is my icon set if you want to use it.

I was eyeing this monitor just yesterday. I currently have an Acer XR342CK bmijpphz 34-inch widescreen and a 10 year old 23 inch display. That 49inch monitor is a beast, but I'm not convinced the width makes up for the slight decrease in resolution. My 34" is 3440x1440, and the Samsung 49 is only slightly wider at 3840, while significantly less vertically at 1080. I'd be curious to compare them side-by-side. I'll probably end up adding a second 34, as for me it's the perfect size.

This is awesome. I've added this as an icon and a hotkey on my StreamDeck home screen.

Andrew, Since I made the warning about the double input a firmware update fixed it. When I get home this weekend I'll upload my icon set and hotkey file that I use with it. The Streamdeck is configured using a windows tool that allows you a lot of flexibility in how you configure it because each button is a tiny screen. It might even be more useful for you because you're streaming, and could set up actions to automatically post a notification when you buy or sell, for example. Might speed up your morning streaming. Let me know if you have specific questions!

This is cool! Thanks for sharing! Would this calculate correctly with a short as well?

Put another way, if you do a strict limit order you need orders to fill at that exact price, versus if you did a market order instead in which you'll simply get filled at whatever prices are available, even if it's 30 cents above when you clicked the button.

This is great, thank you for those who have contributed so far! If anyone is willing to share their spreadsheets with me I'd love to examine them in action. What other features outside of day to day logging are useful? I noted one app that has a way to choose and track strategies per trade (so you can say, choose that you used the ABCD strategy and then get a report on the percentage of time it was successful). Do you make a lot of use of screenshots? Thanks in advance!

Trailing stops are a great tool for a trend trade when the price is moving slowly but inexorably in one direction for a longish period of time. A trailing stop acts as a moving stop loss to protect your profits while also allowing you to secure near the maximum profits of the trend when it reverses. I started using them in SIM today because I recognized that I tend to jump out of trends too early, leaving profits on the table. You can create a trailing stop on both the long and short side in the same way: 1. In your montage, set the order type to STOP 2. In the "Stop Type" drop down, select "Trailing" 3. Just below the "Stop Type" drop-down, the third field over from the left is labeled "Trailer Price", set the value to the amount you want the stop to move behind the price. 4a. If you're setting a stop for a long position, click "SELL" - You should now see an order sitting in your order window 4b. If you're setting a stop for a short position, click "BUY" - You should now see an order sitting in your order window A trailing stop always stays a set value below the current price, so for example, if the price is 4.20 and you set a Trailer Price of .20 on a long position your stop loss will be at 4.00. If the price goes up the trailing stop price moves with it, but only in one direction. So for example, if the 4.20 stock moved up to 4.30, the trailing stop would would move to 4.10. If the price subsequently moved down to 4.15, your trailing stop price will stay at 4.10. The trailing stop price will always be set based on the current price, so be careful to look at the current price and movement on the 1 minute chart, the stop will trigger the moment the price tics back to the stop price. For example, if you see the 1 minute candles varying about 10 cents per minute on the trend, a .05 trailer price will probably trigger too early. Make sure you're setting your trailer price to a value that protects your profits without prematurely closing your position when the trend would likely continue. I will update this thread with real chart examples. I also have a hotkey but I want to test it in SIM Monday before I post it here. Edit: How to create a hotkey to set a trailing stop.

The old version of the Stream Deck software and firmware has a potential account killer bug. Namely, it has a tendency to execute a key input more than once on a single press (meaning you press "buy 100" once and end up sending 2 buy orders). I discovered this bug is exacerbated if you upgrade the software but not the Stream Deck firmware. This issue is FIXED (I tested in a text document with no errors) with the current firmware, but it takes a second step in order to update the firmware: 1. Open the Stream Deck app 2. Click the gear icon in the middle right top 3. Hit "Check for updates" next to software version and update it's available 4. Once installed, open the settings (gear icon) again and look at the firmware version. There will be a button to update firmware if it's not current. Press it and profit As with any configurable hardware tool, I suggest testing your setup thoroughly before using it in live trading. The Stream Deck and other input devices are great efficiency tools, but they aren't immune to bugs.

This is cool, I'm going to test it for sure!

I have been +/- .05 since I started.

I've been doing research on various trade journal web sites and applications. While many have some good features, none of them have everything I'm looking for in my trade journal. Being a software designer, I'm considering making my own. My question to you all is: What features and functionality do YOU want in a trade journaling app?

I'm trading in the central time zone and go in to work about 9am. Basically, I trade the open and first 20 minutes. I'm intending to study forex because the market is open 5 days a week, 24 hours a day, but the markets are a lot to learn! Forex is a good way to trade if you have a full time job.

Lee, can you give a typical example? I chose fixed pricing because I couldn't tell what the exchange fees would ultimately amount to.

I've written more versions of this answer than I care to admit to, and I haven't settled on allocations or percentages, but I do finally have what I consider a solid strategy. I have made only 3 real money day trades since I started learning and taking it seriously. I don't subscribe to the "set a daily goal" mentality, I've found in my life I'm much better at simply continuing any given effort while it's working and I have the energy, and stepping away when I don't. I also don't want to artificially cap my income based on a number. I'd rather cap myself through good trade management and opportunity recognition. That said, I don't have much of an expectation one way or the other what my income might actually be, so instead my goal starting out will be to have a framework in place to manage whatever profits I make. Each stage would allocate profits in order once until they are all allocated: 1. Pay next months living expenses: Basically, pay my bills. 2. Pay one months living expenses into padding account: This assumes I make more than a months expenses in a month obviously, but who isn't aiming for that? The goal here is to build a backup fund to cover living expenses should I have a bad month. Hopefully I'll never need it! 3. Deposit X% in one or more retirement investment accounts: I don't want to be a long term investor. I think there are folks much more interested and suited to that and so I'll trust them to run their funds for my benefit and I'll stick to day trading. The goal here obviously is to diversify. 4. Retain X% to grow trading account: This one is last because once I've begun day trading full time I assume I'll have a large enough account size to realistically earn enough for 1 through 3, but I also want to be open to scaling my trades as I get more consistent and confident, and I'll always prefer to do this with my own money, not margin. So the big question obviously is how to I get to a point where I can implement my plan? My goal right now is staged. Stage 1 is learn to trade. I believe I can confidently recognize ABCD, bull and bear flags, trends, and reversals. I'm good at math so I can calculate correct share size, stop loss, etc. in my head on the fly for risk management, and I'm getting better and exiting at my set stop. All of which is to say, I know basically nothing and have almost no discipline. I have a long way to go. Assuming I can learn to trade, my next goal is purely to grow my account, first to a point where I can day trade without restriction (I'm currently under the PDT balance requirement). I'll do this through a few trades a week and accumulation. I'm fortunate to have a flexible job that allows me to take "hobby" jobs to earn extra income. All of that income is being allocated to growing my trading account. My original goal was to have a years salary put away plus a safely funded trading account. Robert put the fear of god into me and now I'm thinking closer to 3 or 4 years put away. I'm quite a ways from that goal, but feel it's important to ensure success. I don't want to put myself into a position of being a desperation trader. I have enough sources of income to make it a realistic goal, and while I'm excited to become a full-time trader, I'm also in no hurry to. I've always pushed myself to do things the best way possible to increase the chances of success. I expect I'll go live in 6 months to a year, mostly trading the open. Probably a year after that I'll aim to go full time. All of this is subject to change. I'm still figuring out what works, but I'm enjoying that as well!

I have to echo WP above. I am a UX designer by profession and life-long mac user. When it came time to start learning to trade it only took a bit of research for it to become obvious I needed a dedicated windows PC. You can get into one that will run DAS for very little money, and it's a worthwhile investment for time and piece of mind.

I briefly tested DAS on my iMac and it worked fine, however I didn't use an emulator, I booted directly to windows. I would be wary are running DAS in crossover. If you have to use emulation, use a windows emulator like parallels or Fusion.

For my first standing desk (now being used by my girlfriend for video editing) I bought the base and had a custom top made. Home Depot does custom kitchen counters and they’ll make them to whatever dimension you ask for (mine is 50x32 inches). I wanted a lot of space as well. For the base I used Jarvis.

As some of you have seen in another thread, I have a device set up so I can quickly enter and exit trades. It's very efficient until I get to setting stop loss orders. I find I still have to go to the montage window, change the order type to "STOP" and enter a trigger price. It's incredibly inefficient. Does anyone have a better way?

The upper left key is the “back” button. “Screens” on the stream deck or organized in folders, so on the first screen the upper left are the “long” and “short” folders and drilling into them shows the trading screens I’ve set up. Once in a folder the upper left is the back or up a level button by default.

Hey anhkind: Quick question, do you have any issues uploading? I did a test upload both using an export and your script and with a blank file and didn't get anything in tradebench.

Really cool! Also thanks for the reminder about TradeBench, I have to test that out!