deejaypj

Thanks for sharing the pictures. Looks like quite an adventure!

Hi Rebecca. Welcome to the family. It can be daunting at first but with time it will seem much slower. Re-watch the videos and just keep doing sim as long as it takes to get comfortable. There's no rush to go live. Make sure to ask questions. There are many awesome helpful people in the group. PJ

Hi Ali, I am not an expert and still trying to learn myself, but some of my learning is just reviewing my trades, the good ones and the bad ones. Also, just reviewing charts of other people's trades. I will sometimes go back and listen to some of the trade recaps (we have some excellent recaps posted by other members) and then pull up the charts to see what they actually looked like when they were taken. Using something like Tradingview, I can go to a day in the past and play it back candle by candle. This helps me to see how the setup looked as it was forming and because I can advance one candle at a time, I can also see how I would have managed the trade after taking it. Hope that is helpful. It's all about constantly improving and learning. Good luck! PJ

Hi Peter, I would tend to believe that story about Schwab, as they are part of the old school when it comes to brokerage firms and the old school thinking definitely leans towards the idea that shorting is unamerican. I actually only have a Schwab account because I was with OptionsXpress and they were bought by Schwab. I figured I would give them a try. Perhaps this experience is the answer to my question regarding whether to stay or not. Thanks everyone for the replies!

Yes Robert, it's Schwab and I was thinking the same thing. My shorter term trading (day trading and such) has been Forex and futures up to this point. I had mainly traded Options in this account before coming to BBT. In both Forex and futures I have never been allowed to trade beyond my margin limit, so I wasn't thinking it would be an issue. I don't understand if there is an issue with going over my BP then why allow it in the first place? Anyway, I have no problem changing brokers. After calling them this week I will make a decision.

Thanks for the reply Jimmy. Yes, that is what I did. I've been familiar with the pattern day trader regulation regarding 25k in the account. This was an instance when I hit the hotkey one too many times and ended up with way too many shares. It was a mistake and I noticed that my bp went red. I figured if I just closed the position it would sort out, however I received an email from my broker warning me of the issue and it said they would then be monitoring my trading to see if it needed the additional restriction. I then figured that since I wouldn't be doing that again, I'd be okay. They didn't seem to do much monitoring. They just slapped me with a restriction that seems as if I am not allowed to use any margin. Going to call them this week to see what the situation is.

Not sure if the Brokers section is the right area for this but I wanted to see if anyone has come across this issue and what might be the solution. I mistakenly bought the wrong quantity of a stock on Monday and ended up with negative available margin in my account. I closed the trade soon after. It seems I broke some sort of rule with this. As I am new to actual day trading of stock, I wasn't aware of all the rules involved. I tried to do as much research as possible before going live but somehow missed this one. I imagine this is somehow tied to good old USA government regulations. Any way, I am now facing a big restriction on my trading for 90 days and maybe longer. Any ideas on this? Thanks, Patrick

Yes, I have also played around with the Recognia tool and much like you, I gave up on it. I was planning to look at it again. I haven't seen many actionable signals when I've had it open. I keep seeing results from a day or so back. I've only used the predefined events in the event setup library. I've mostly tried the flags and breakouts. Maybe these aren't the best scans and sometimes with these types of tools the predefined choices aren't very good. Haven't spent much time trying to make my own scans and maybe that's the answer. One thing I noticed though is that when defining criteria, the smallest time frame it uses is 15 minutes and I had hoped it would go down to 5 min. I checked out the video tutorials but they were pretty lame. Tried to see if there was more info out there, since it's a third party tool, but found very little. The company website appears to be under construction and so not much info there either. Maybe I'll play around with it today. I'll let you know if I discover anything.

Sorry too hear that you had a rough day. I know they happen. It's part of the game but they hurt. I almost had one of those days too. Started off rough. I went against my rules about the lower price stocks and traded FORD because Andrew was trading it (so much for the disclaimer about trading as an individual). I totally chased it to boot. Anyway, let it go way too far against me before closing. Fortunately I took it again for a nice win and then traded NVDA for a decent trade. Thanks for taking the time to share your screen settings. Looks like we have our screens set up similarly. I also use average daily vol because it does weed out some of the less active stocks. One thing that I incorporate as a filter is in regards to shorts. I am a subscriber to IBD and I won't short stocks that I know have high IBD ratings. I know fundamentals aren't necessarily a factor in day trades and even strong stocks pull back. It's just more a mentality thing for me. I've seen stocks like NVDA, for instance, look like it's going down and then get a sharp move up. Just my extra little filter there. Hope you are having a great weekend. Talk next week.

Hey David, I feel a bit stupid at this point. I opened my platform this morning and looked at the preset screen for "Change from Open" and I see that it has results from pre-market. It's the screens that I have created that don't have results. I'll have to look into it a bit more to figure out what I need to change on my custom screens.

Thanks for the follow up. I'm east coast also, Florida to be exact. I do also like a lot of the features of StreetSmart but I am still learning the platform so I'm not totally happy with my execution at times. Are you able to use the built in scanner in StreetSmart to find Pre-market movers? I haven't figured out how to do that. The scans that I have been able to set up are only working after the market opens. Sounds like you have some similar parameters as I do when it comes to filtering out stocks. I like to stay away from the real cheap stocks and NYSE issues as well. The time of day is also a good thought. Whenever I try to trade too late I always seem to give back to the market. I did already discover the hotkey issue you mentioned, where you need to have the "all-in-one" window active. The confirmation was the other thing. That made me a little nervous at first, since I was thinking what if I accidentally sent an order off. I did have something bad happen just today and I'm not real sure why it was. I somehow left an order on the books and went to trade another stock. A few minutes later I was long and the stock was quite a bit lower. It cost me a few hundred (not good). I guess I need to have my order/positions window visible in addition to all the other windows I have open.

Hi David, I am also with Schwab. Formerly, I was Options Xpress, so ended up at Schwab in the buyout and still trying to decide if I should look for a change or stay with Schwab. I am finding that it is hard to trade to the short side on some of the trades mentioned by Andrew but I mostly trade a little more based on 5min formations and stay away from the low float issues so it's not much of a problem. I am still working out the setup of the platform and integrating some of the ideas discussed here, such as hotkeys. I'm relatively new to BearBull so I haven't taken many trades based on strategies discussed here at this point. I would love to discuss more about ideas, as I'm sure it would benefit both of us. Patrick

Great trades Robert. Thanks for sharing your examples.

Not sure how to edit my reply above, but I wanted to add that I am Patrick C in the chat, since I know I'm not the only Patrick. :-)

Hi everyone, I'm Patrick and I live in the Orlando Florida area. I run my own business (I'm a DJ for weddings and events) which doesn't have much of a connection to the financial markets but I actually got my degree in finance and so I've had some interest in the markets for quite a while. I. like many others here, would like to put myself in a position where I know I can make consistent money from the markets. Found Andrew through the Desire to Trade Podcast interview and bought the audio book (I prefer audio books because I'm a slow reader) and thought he made a lot of sense. I've been down just about every road in trading, stocks, options, forex, futures and my journey has been somewhat of a roller coaster ride. I'd like to say that I've made more than I've lost, which is true more recently but I have blown up a few times. I've just started the learning process here with Andrew's methodology. I like what I've seen and I'm looking forward to learning a lot here.