Do any if you have experience with futures trading? What was your experience?

Do any if you have experience with futures trading? What was your experience?
I have been paper trading for a couple days now and I've made about $4,000 on commission.
It seems like something I could be good at after a while and a lot of learning, just wanted to know if any of you had any advice.

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>made 4k commission demo trading

Sorry if this seems like a really stupid post, first time on this board.

What do you use to paper trade?

Is this bad?

TDAmeritrade's paper money app.

Anyone?

im just here for answers as well

No, it's just that people don't always act/trade the same on paper & IRL.

I keep learning and paper trade for 2-3 months, and then transition into real markets, provided you have money to do so.

This. It's great you are actually paper trading first to get the basics down, but when it is real money your trading psychology will change a lot. A couple of days is not a lot of time to paper trade, ideally you should paper trade for a month at least to get some sense for the ups and downs you will experience.

I'd say come up with a conservative system that works for you in paper trading and then live trade. Analyze your bad trades and figure out why you made them so you can avoid those mistakes again.

If you are successful early on, you will get the urge to start increasing your contract size to make more profit. This is where many get caught, because people start to trade differently when there are greater fluctuations due to the increase in contract size.

Stick with one or two types of futures so you can become familiar with them since different markets act quite differently.

If you have any gambling genes, then trading will bring them out.

probably since you said you made $4000 on commission which doesn't really make sense unless you paid $4000 in commission.

$4000 after commission is what you should have said if you subtracted commission.

also my tip would be: make sure whatever edge you are trading is confirmed in the demo account but try to move into a real account as soon as possible.

I'm using Gold, E-mini Nasdaq 100 Index futures, dabbling in oil as well.
Gold seems to be highly volatile and just has huge highs and lows over a short period.
I don't have any gambling issues.

I don't know anything about trading whatsoever, I got into this on a whim after a guy mentioned it to me at a social gathering.
I don't quite know what im doing but i am doing a lot of research now as it seems very interesting as a possible "career".
I dont really have any capital to invest right now but thats not a huge problem, i can get it.
Im just trying to figure out what direction to head.
So far this seems like it's been overly easy to make money but im sure thats extremely deceptive.

To be quite honest im not entirely sure how all this works. Just trying to learn.
I have no degree or knowledge that would really help me in any of this, but id be willing to put in the time to learn before jumping into live trading.

>gold, /NQ, crude
those are 3 very different markets that have very different behaviors/personalities. If I were you, just start with /NQ for a while, then start dabbling in others later once. Both gold and crude can rape you up the ass in a hot minute, I wouldn't hold either over a weekend because in an impulsive move they can completely overrun your stop orders with a gap move. Also volume on /GC can be thin at night, so that allows for some crazy moves which always seem to take out all the nearby stops too.

If you have very high discipline you can do quite well. Most people don't have much if any discipline and often what they have gets overtaken by emotional decisions many time.

>So far this seems like it's been overly easy to make money but im sure thats extremely deceptive.
>seems very interesting as a possible "career".
Right now you sound like the guy who just made a few hundred dollars at Vegas and is thinking of becoming a full time gambler because he feels he's got a knack for it. Just be careful and try to trade non-emotionally.

Im not sure of the proper terminology but i bought 20 futures of Gold, let it sit overnight just to see what would happen and woke up to a p/l of (-$3,200) rode it out for a couple hours and it dropped to (-$11,000), sat on it for two more hours and it jumped 5 points and i made everything back plus a huge amount.
That was the most pants on head transaction ive done, but i,ve been successful thus far buying 20 contracts of Gold at say, 1266.5, selling at 1266.9 = $800, selling/shorting(?) the same at say 1268.1 and buying at 1267.6 = $1,000.

Not sure what actual profit is off this shit because almost none of this makes sense to me.
I assume its commission im making off these contracts and not actually $1,800, but like i said in a fucking newfag to this shit.
I'm not looking for a quick buck, i understand 95% of this is minimizing risk, patience and being smart, just seems like a very fascinating way to make a living.

Im also not looking to just jump head first into this as that is how im sure everyone loses their life savings and ends up suck-starting a 12gauge.

>i bought 20 futures of Gold, let it sit overnight
This is a good way to get proper fucked. The other day gold was down over $20 overnight, and that's not an extreme move by any means. In your example, you could easily have waited another couple of hours and it could have been down another few bucks. For the last few months gold has been relatively well behaved, but I'm thinking it is about to get volatile again real soon, that means wild swings and raped assholes.

You can only take on a certain number of contracts based on the amount of funds in your account. Each diff contract has its own margin amount needed per contract, its on the CBOE site. You want to be conservative with the amount of contracts you have at any moment, since a wild move could force you to sell on a margin call if you are fully maxed out.

Yeah i figured i would get fucked with the overnight shit i did with gold, i would never, ever do that with real money. Like i said just testing it out.
Pretty much your whole second paragraph was all things i had just started realizing today. I kept maxing my contracts out at 20 and throwing all my eggs in one basket so to speak, which really fucked me a few times and I learned that wasn't really a good play.
I feel if i just sat and did this 8 hours a day with a lot of small but smart plays, much smaller than i have been doing, that i could end the day ahead.
Still unsure if this is something I want to pursue, just fun learning. As ive already said i barely understand half of whats going on but its slowly making more sense.

>I assume its commission im making off these contracts and not actually $1,800, but like i said in a fucking newfag to this shit.

you're not making any commission, you'd pay commission to a broker to trade these contracts

you make a profit or a loss depending on whether the price goes against you

you should probably do a bit of background reading before trying this... even the basics of what a futures contract is and how they are traded are things that would seem to be new to you - start with the exchange websites, most of them have education material - understand how the exchanges work, understand the products you're trading, how margin works etc.. then start learning about the various markets that interest you, what influences the price in those markets, who are the hedgers, end users etc.. then start looking at ways that people attempt to speculate/gain an edge etc..

jumping straight in and taking random punts on a sim isn't going to teach you anything other than maybe highlight to you that taking random punts on a bunch of contracts and holding overnight can cause your pnl to swing up and down rather wildly

Just trade futures options instead, and naver sell call or puts without a buy leg

First time back on /biz since I started trading and I was searching for a thread like this!

I quit watching this forum because there was a trader who posted a couple of books that were must reads and then how to get started. I've been trading ever since with both ups and downs. I'd like to share the book list with you if you're interested and if there's any questions that can't be answered in the books then research on the web because most of it can be found for free!

Here is the book list + links that I gathered from the Trading thread last time!

Trade Your Way to Personal Freedom

Market Wizards & The New Market Wizards Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

Perry Kaufman – Smarter trading
Cynthia Kase – Trading with the odds
William O’Niel How to make money in stocks
Tuschar Chande – Beyond Technlical Analysis
James Sloman – Nothing – When you’re troubled
Roland Barach – Mindtraps: Mastering the inner world of investing
The 5 Secrets To Highly Profitable Swing Trading
The Psychology of Trading
a random walk down wallstreet
Computer Analysis of the Futures Market

West of Wall Street - George Angell (Sweet)
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (Great Read)
Studies in Tape Reading - Wyckoff (The Master)
Tape Reading & Market Analytics (A classic)
The Traders Edge - Grant Noble (kool)
Mindful Trading:- Mastering Your Emotions & The Inner Game (Brilliant Psyco stuff)
Market Wizards (Real Good)
Quants (Educational)

Anything by Michael Lewis or Jack Schwager is a must read as well.

Check out Chat With Traders and branch out from there. This guy has a podcast where he interviews traders every week.

One site I really like is ThePatternSite for learning to spot patterns. That helped me a lot when I was starting out.

pmkingtrading.com/id17.html

mytradersstateofmind.com/

Oh and another thing! Start out small because if you can't make money with 1 contract.. You probably can't make money trading 100 contracts. I'd recommend anyone who does paper trading right now to treat the money as if it was real money and only risk what you could stand to lose in real life event. There is no point of paper trading 100k accounts if you can only afford a 5k account in real life. So be as brutally realistic as possible and hold yourself accountable to every trade. Start small and go from there when you get the hang of it. And if you profit in the long run on SIM (30+ days) then try out live and see the difference.

If anyone gets inspired to start learning this skill I hope that you'll pass it on to someone else like I just did in the future!

Peace out - see you all in another year ;)

I dont agree about the jumping right in thing. Pain is a mighty force for forging behaviour. But pain can also break someone.
I would say a win win situation. You will either lose and feel such immense pain, that you will realize, that you will not be able to handle it, or you will lose and realize, that you dont like the painfull feeling of a razorblade tuned dilldo in your ass and will do everything to stop that from happening.

Both is better, than wasting your time reading books and demotrading, just so you can realize to youre mentally unable to succeed in this biz.

I wouldn't bet

the OP is demo trading


taking random punts with real money is a silly idea too - you've inherently got -EV on random trades but you'd advocate it out of some subjective desire to experience pain

actually understanding what you're trading is a waste of time? sounds like really bad advice to me

I'm not saying, that it is the best way and there are certainly people, who accomplish success through self imposed discipline, but my experience in all kinds of business, in which loss is a regular thing, have shown again and again, that it's not working this way for most people. They need extern force to push them into the right direction or they bust. And if you have to bust then i'd prefer to bust early.

I don't think you actually trade anything bud. You sound like an inexperienced high school kid giving someone advice that is not sound in either logic or idealism.

well that would happen anyway if trading live and not having +EV, it is just utterly pointless and leads to nothing if doing so with no concept of what you're doing or what you're trading

I'm sorry to dissapoint your view, that reading books and studiing theory is a solid approach, but trial and error is as important also. No pain no gain, every financially succesfull man will tell you this. So test your pain tolerance as early as possible. Thats the only thing i'm saing m8.

but there is no gain anyway if you don't know what you're doing and just decide to take a few random punts... seems like a very expensive and pointless way to 'test your pain tollerance' for no apparent reason other than some random anecdote

you'll experience plenty of stress/pressure when live trading anyway after you've actually developed some idea of what you're doing

>if you can't make money with 1 contract.. You probably can't make money trading 100 contracts.
Good point, deserves to be reiterated. See how you perform with 1 or 2 contracts max for a while, then only gradually move up only if your account grows significantly and you feel like you have actually learned something. If your account shrinks, drop your contract size down and rebuild, don't go for the gold and make a big bet to recapitalize. Remember, the bigger your position, the greater the potential ups AND downs. Increasing position size is when many people fuck themselves up, due to the change in psychology (you can easily end up making emotional or panicked decisions due to the larger money amounts involved.)

Also, have some sort of system or rules that dictate when you exit a trade, when you take partial profits, etc.

others things to point out are that the fills will vary when trading size live

on a sim they'll try to guess your queue position and simulate fills but it is hardly accurate

even then when trading live, with size, you have an effect on the orderbook, the sim doesn't simulate that - simply executing orders efficiently becomes another problem to solve in addition to the signal/edge you're trying to exploit. you're not always going to get the fills you want and the price can start running away from you while you're partially filled