Bonjour from sunny Florida!

[Jean-Pierre Poulin 7]

Bonjour chers amis de Bear Bull Traders!

As your newest lifelong member, thank you for the warm welcome, for the truthful and vibrant community, and for these two awesome books on Day Trading that saved me much heartache!

 

I devoured the first one (with hundreds of highlights and notes) and will finish its sequel this weekend before I engage with your trading group this Monday.  I look forward to joining you in the chat room when it opens on Monday morning.  (I'll leave a detailed review for both books on Amazon shortly)

 

A bit about myself:  I'm a Quebecois working as an engineer in San Francisco.  From working twelve hour days for a year, I have accumulated a nest egg of about $50K in my trading account, so now my top priority for foreseeable future is learning if I can live off the market using these savings before the inevitable cost of living dwindles my trading account to ineffectual levels.

 

My employment in San Francisco is ending in a couple weeks and am relocating to sunny Florida.  I will soon live in Coral Springs Florida (close to Boca Raton) and would *love* to connect with local Floridian Bear Bull Traders and do fun activities under the Florida sun!

 

I then intend to take a full six months off for an in-depth study of day trading with the hopes of making it my main source of income for the next cycle of life.  In dollar signs, my target is to earn a modest $150 per trading day with a $50K trading account. (Averaging a consistent 0.3% per day within six months.)  If I can do that my entire life changes and I now afford to invent for a living!  (I'm a uber-geek and professional inventor)

 

I pride myself on following a careful and scientific approach to learning complex topics and thus far day trading appears extremely challenging, confusing and opaque.  I intend this to be my next career and I intend to invest the same passion and precision that I invest in my engineering career.

 

So far in the two months of study on how to approach day trading, on many occasions I have been appalled to witness how 'manipulated' the market appears to be.  Just a couple weeks back as an example, when Trump decided to suddenly reverse course on Mexican tariffs, I invested many hours to understand why all the stocks that stood the most to gain had an huge unexplained gaps minutes after the Friday market close *before* Trump tweeted his decision.  Having witnessed on several stocks price action that made no sense minutes after the Friday close, I accelerated my study of Dark pools and the unfair influence of the sophisticated automated systems Wall Street professionals use.  Reading in your books your regular warnings to 'stay away from common stocks' and your mistrust of market manipulations, I decided to join your group in the hopes of learning from traders more experienced than I am on how to select the best 'stock in play' that have the best odds of avoiding shady market manipulators.

 

There are four key things I hope to learn from Bear Bull Trading:

1. How to best avoid market manipulations.

2. How to master the stock scanning tools and find my own 'stocks in play'

3. How to develop semi-automated trading helpers that can reduce the tedium.

4. Form friendships with a community of great traders and participate in the growth of the group.

 

For the immediate future however my goals for the next month are 1) absorb as much as I can from your morning trading sessions, 2) duplicate your trades in a simulated account (while trying to understand them), 3) gain mastery of effective scanner tools to attempt to find great stocks in play and 4) gradually phase into my real-money account as simulated results warrant.

 

However my real fascination with this (as a lifelong coder) is what can I do to create automated scripts that can 1) ease the tedium and 2) hopefully help me trade on stocks in play of secondary importance (while my attention is focused on stocks of primary interest)

 

For the last two months I have been studying the (very impressive) NinjaTrader 8 platform and I'm eager to apply my coding skills to the platform so that (hopefully) I can teach the platform to properly scrape manually-seletcted stocks in play and (if things go well) even automate some trades on stocks of secondary interest while I manually trade stocks of primary interest myself.

 

One a key issue I'd like to get some feedback from the community so I approach my very first trades properly.  In my reading so far I have grown increasingly wary of short positions and intend to engage the first leg of my trading journey limiting myself to only long positions.  As a result, I was thinking of using my RobinHood account to avoid commission fees and possibly open the door to free programmatic scalping that would otherwise result in prohibitive commission fees.

 

This strategy would enable me to create over time a programmatic tool on top of the NinjaTrader 8 platform to do some scalping on stocks of secondary importance by taking long positions only without facing prohibitive commission fees.

 

Some questions remain however:

1. Do you think RobinHood is too slow to fill day trading orders?

2. How do you feel about shorting stocks?  (What is your short / long ratio?)

3. Do you use any automated or semi-automated trading helpers to ease the tedium?

4. Are there any NinjaTrader users / developers in here?

 

Thank you so much for the warm welcome.  I sincerely hope to invest in this community and give back to the best of my ability.

 

   Jean-Pierre

 

P.S. I'm open to making Day Trading friends and love to connect with people sharing my DT passion.  To save some typing feel free to call me anytime at 415-666-6997 (or contact me via email at JeanPierrePoulin -at- gmail.com)

Update: I've since abandoned RobinHood as several people mention it is too slow & unsuitable for scalping and day trading.  I'm currently attempting to find the best broker for me and the higher fees will probably really damped my attempts at semi-automated scraping... but will try it in simulation nonetheless.

Edited July 14, 2019 by Jean-Pierre Poulin

[Jean-Pierre Poulin 7]

Hello double-o-seven!

Yes I'm seriously getting lots of signals that I have to carefully ease into this and I heavily will make use of simulators as I 1) attempt to understand what how/why the moderators are trading and 2) I test various theories and programmatic helping tools that I can trust to help point the various buy / sell indicators.

Have you accumulated much experience with simulators?  Can you attest on how accurate they are?  (I would usually trade 1000-2000 shares on the usual high-volume gapping 'stocks in play' the moderators are investigating.