I spent much of the morning trying to set up my real money trading account to match my simulated account. This was, in one word, trying. I typically don't mess with the IB setup and yet I managed to screw up both the paper-trade acct and the real money acct in ways I still don't understand. Over the week-end, I decided that I'd try to get some trading time on the live account but with reduced position sizes. This is only natural as I still think that I'll be fighting my"head" when the switch occurs to real-money trading. Small positions=small worries, I say. After finally getting my paper-trade acct back to normal, I practiced with it, found some more bugs, fixed them, then tried it out some. Before, I was using 1000 share trades. I am now using 250 share lots. I made two paper-trades for winners in SKF, netting $82.50 & $113.50 . then, I went to the live account and messed with the settings to match it to the simulated account. Then, I tried it for real... and it was still screwed! :-) It traded 100 share lots and not 250. It didn't make the "one-click" trade that I prefer... it asked for trade confirmations instead. So, I found and fixed the problem (I had made the correct changes earlier but apparently didn't click on "APPLY" to save them). Needless to say, my trade was more than a safe one as it netted out a whopping $21.02! Ha! Had it been correct, it would have netted out $52.50. Had I been trading my 1000 share lots from the past few months, it would have netted out $105. Basically, I took 12 cents out of it. The need for a new cellphone required a visit to the Verizon store and then a day-job project estimate took the remainder of my afternoon. Was it just me or were the stocks pretty lackluster after the early drop? Sort of like a bunch of wet dish rags, I think. I didn't check charts to see if the close offered any momo. I'm worn out and I'm leaving the computer now. I'll check on today's closing action tomorrow morning.
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3 for 3, a 100% win rate. Gain of $217 in 4.25 hours of paper ($196) and real ($21) trading.
Nice to see you still going at it BC. I made $32 in real cash so we're really raking it in between the two of us today, the markets are trembling with the size of these profits!
ReplyDeleteI know 250 shares is considered an odd lot, and I can't trade odd lots with my prop firm but could with TD Ameritrade. Maybe that was something that was snagging things up the odd share size, I guess 100 is the standard.
Yeah Charlie. Still grinding away...
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, we're making a killing! Ha! Pretty soon we'll need plows to move all the cash away from our computer work-stations! Speaking of work stations, I like your set-up, btw. How is it working out for you, now that it appears you've worked out all the kinks from moving?
Hey BC, things are going ok. Though like you saw on my post yesterday, my platform was freezing up.
ReplyDeleteI like the physical set up - everything's in place.
Now I'm battling some mental environmental things!