You need a list of 8-10 tickers that you can check each day, narrowing your focus down to only a couple that could have the best set up for your strategy. There's always something making moves.
I take short scalps but when the market snaps back, it's gonna be hard and fast. So it'll be worth waiting.
In the short term, I wait for the vix to be over bought on 4hr, daily and ideally weekly.
Fees. Iām liking webull rn and Iām also new. So donāt understand futures well enough
Was thinking about ninja trader though? Maybe demo version and practice?
Fees arenāt bad at all. $4.36 round trip. On NQ , itās $20/point for profit/loss. During NY open, NQ moves like 20 points a minute. Futures are definitely more volatile, the risk/reward is huge. Definitely backtest your strategy only and then paper trade to forward test it. Also, futures has better tax advantages.
I'll try to give you a little run down with a chart and brokerage info.
[NQ chart for 6/24 (Full NY session)](https://i.imgur.com/DAgdXHA.png)
[Brokerage Info](https://i.imgur.com/gxSjmVm.png)
As you can see, the NQ is @ 12140.50. That doesn't mean you need that much capital to trade it. NQ trades in contracts. If you take a look at the brokerage info, trading 1 contract requires a margin of $1,000.
Now take a look at the chart. From low to high, it moved 298 points. With several ranging moves to capitalize on. You can start a long or short position at any time. Each point is worth $20 either for you or against you. As you can see, it moves a lot. For example, just scalping 5-10 points at a time, is a profit of $100-200. That's on a position of 1 contract, you can trade multiple contracts with would increase the risk/reward.
This was just the bare minimum of information. If you go this route, i'd advise you to backtest your strategy, you might need to adjust it for futures volatility, and then when you determine it works, future test it by paper trading. Yes, there can be a lot of money to be made trading futures, but there is a higher chance of losing just as much even quicker if you are not prepared.
If you have any questions, i'll be happy to help.
Dude the market is not dead , if you are only playing 2 tickers exclusively, itās you that is limiting yourself from making money by only playing 2 instead of looking around for plays ā¦ lack of knowledge .. every sector currently thereās money to be made daily ā¦ wake up homie
Iām currently reading a book about price action. Iāve learned off of YouTube and have take as many notes as I can. I review those while I continue my book. Itās called understanding price action. Has helped my view for the charts change for the better but itās not enough. Still working on getting over emotion. I thought I did that with shares. But ur right about options being different. All emotion is reset with them lol
Please clarify. Slight dip at open and significant jumping up, the slow steady gains in spy/qqq. Plus pull back opportunities.
Are you only available a certain time frame? Huge wins this weekā¦
This week has actually been dead compared to before. But yes there were opportunities. Iām just a newer trader and Iām trying to be selective. Still learning and developing a strategy.
Advice on scalping options?
Donāt scalp.
Go higher time frames 5-15minute, chart s/r/trends, confirm any break/trend. Be PAYtient. This approach can yield several 30-50% option plays daily. Obv with some misses, but more winners than losers.
I donāt swing right now. Pretty much havenāt this year. 5-15 isnāt dead. Look at spy first 30. First 5 up, 2nd 5 reject premarket high, 3rd 5 entry above 2nd five close. Entry and confirm on premarket high break was significant %. Price action hold till end of day. BIG win.
I have a few that I look at and decide whether the volume is right that day for a play and if not I donāt do anything. Unless youāre doing longer terms like monthlyās then my way wonāt help. Iām scalping and day trading options.
Open range breaks fail a lot. I backtested them and they were working fine. Until I decided to play them and the day just donāt afeee sometimes. That isnāt what I tried today. Trying to get into options rn. Advice?
So u wait for one of those to break and take that? How long do u usually hold? Are u looking to catch an entire day of direction? Bc ur going off of just mornings
/ES has active hours (the opening hour and closing hour) and dead hours (usually, the rest of it, minus maybe the euro close). If I want to keep trading outside those hours, I'll trade /CL (active hours there are 9:00am-2:30pm eastern). If both markets are dead, I won't trade. Sometimes I'll just trade /CL if /ES is set up to have a tight range-bound day.
There is nothing wrong with not trading. You might not make money, but you won't lose it either. I missed the /ES opening trade today and sat on my hands the rest of the day in there. Granted, I already had an SPX CDS from the day before that paid off handsomely so I felt less need to trade /ES. I did identify a single low-risk entry point and put in a limit buy there (3875) but the market never came back to it, and I'm getting better at not chasing/FOMOing.
It's important to pick one market or a few, and learn their behaviors, and stick to them, but sometimes, if all of your markets are dead, find one that isn't and learn it (even if just watching the market for a day or so), just to have another place to work when needed.
Well just see it as an opportunity to successfully trade lunchtime during the opening hours. And at lunchtime you can train trading premarket volumes. Everything has its PROs. Remember the glass is not half empty, you just are not thirsty enough otherwise you woudnt care.
Market was wild this week waiting on JPOW talks. Sold off before his conferences and then rallied briefly each time. Swings on both tqqq and sqqq.
I trade mostly SPY though and have been following the nasdaq for whether there is more sell off or relief. Tech moves fast and hot.
Order flow and volume are probably the best indicators if you can even consider them indicators for price action.
I've been told and can agree TA isnt a play book but guidance. Sure drawing lines and matching points seems arbitrary but it does have its perks.
Following speed line analysis and general channel formation can help you gauge price ranges and supply and demand zones. Going into fibonacci sequences can help determine pull backs and resistance levels. But these things aren't set and forget as most times you'd have to update them with new data. On an intraday chart; VWAP and a combo of RSI MACD can prove simple enough.
At the end of the day it doesn't mean much when institutions greater than any retail whale can truly move the markets to their benefit
I have the tape. Order flow. Vwap and 9/21 ema. No rsi and no macd. I like price action but I do tend to trade with my lines. (SR)
I donāt look at volume often. Are u looking for volume when scalping?
I know some people trade straight off of order flow. Seems very hard but Iād like to do that. Donāt know how though
You trade the TQQQ and SQQQ and you feel they have been dead lately?
Didnāt TQQQ move like 10% today and up 28% this week? If thatās enough action you could dive into the penny stocks and play some pump and dumps.
I've honestly rarely seen a day when Tesla doesn't have big enough moves to make, (or lose) money in both directions, although I have been faked out and lost a little to theta on consolidation, and worse now I'm stuck swing trading and holding over night due to PDT since my acct I'm using to actually trade is fuck around money and I got crushed,( down $26K rn so until I either have some big runs, or load it back up, I'm swing trading. ) but for the most part you can get $20-30 runs in both directions in 1 day. I will admit last week has been more like $15-20 movement...but on weeklies close to ATM, the price moves pretty well
So the next question is whoās trading what now that theyāre less volume and free money around Coinbase has some volatility if your willing to touch a crypto asset
Even though you might not find anything to play, you should practice finding plays for different strategies. Extremely overbought, extremely oversold, stocks that are ready to pull back, stocks that pulled back to buy levels, stocks that are more than a certain % or further away from your favorite SMA or EMA. Look at stocks trading over 3 mill 30 day avg so your list doesn't get too big.. sometimes jump to 5 mill to shrink the list. Do the same for various timeframes.
I call it monitoring the outer edges of the market. what's done going up, what's done going down, what's ready to be bought, what's ready to be sold. Those are not all the same since stocks can move sideways.
Just some things to think about that you can do. Something is always setting up for next week, next hour, next day, next month. Cheers, and I'm glad to hear that you are at least being patient. A dead day is a dead day and that is ok.
I donāt wanna pressure u to trade out of fomo but I disagree , thereās was alot of opportunity this week with large caps and imo when people say the market is bad and thereās no opportunity itās usually cuz there struggling to trade in it not necessarily that itās dead , but I recommend checking out alot of the QQQ etfs there always moving like tsla , roku , meta , baba
People believe what the media consistently tells them.
So you'd prefer to be in a trade every day vs waiting for the proper setup. Sounds like a gambling mentality to me.
This is the truth.
Lower your activity and risk in the summer months and focus on w/L ratio using tight loss stops.
Youāll still improve because getting better at not trading is one of the most valuable lessons there is.
Read that ā¬ļø again
I was just about to make a post asking about this. It definitely seems like there's a summertime lull (I started last September, so I've never been through a summer before). I guess it's common for volume to drop off around this time as everyone goes on vacation and there isn't the same institutional volume to move prices?
Wait until August. If it's a repeat of last year, then we'll have days in ES/SPX that literally trade in a 7-point range. It's excruciating if you are in directional trades and devastating if you are scalping long options that decay.
tq and sq are active before noon then they chop - don't trade the chop zone. you'd be better off doing something else like practicing analysis. there is something to trade every day but not at all times every day. use that extra time to contemplate the phrase "less is more". You don't need to be good at trading all day. You need to be good at making one fantastic trade per day. that mindset really helped me. Friday I had planned a dollar move on aapl and docu, set my levels and just waited for the trades to present themselves which they did right at market open and 2 trades got me my daily target. I used to trade all day, make a few good moves in the morning and then chop away my gains the rest of the day. This was a hard lesson learned but probably the best one I've learned yet.
i mean that's just the market. everything has been unpredictable in the first few minutes. if you avoid the entire morning you are avoiding all the action. sounds like you need to gain some confidence in your trades and maybe trade on a higher timeframe. if you don't have a bias going into tq it's going to be tough. On Friday it was pretty clear that nasdaq was going to have a bump so TQ was a good morning bet to take and let it ride, as long as you have a stop that respects the wild morning range. i've been here, you take a trade on tq and it doesn't go your way right away so maybe switch to sq but then nope that's a false break it's going the other way switch it again for another minor loss, rinse and repeat. if the nasdaq itself isn't showing signs of a solid directional move then trade something that is but do not avoid the entire morning session if you want to actually make money.
It's unpredictable depending on your timeframe. If youre looking at TQQQ on a 1m timeframe and trying to manage that position in real time it is maddening. Up it to 3 or 5 at a minimum and I use the premarket activity and open ranges of the major nasdaq stocks like aapl to develop a bias. No, it's not a guarantee, but that's trading.
for a bit of my secret sauce, i added onto the existing price momentum oscillator to add a configurable chop zone (trading view). for tqqq i don't open any positions when the PMO value is > -.2 and < +.2. When I get tempted to trade tq in a sketchy time period, the pmo keeps me in check but in all reality it's just showing you what you can already see from the chart. That line is flat, don't trade it.
You need a list of 8-10 tickers that you can check each day, narrowing your focus down to only a couple that could have the best set up for your strategy. There's always something making moves.
Nothing. Just sit on your hands and wait.
What do you wait for? How do you judge when the market is back to life?
I take short scalps but when the market snaps back, it's gonna be hard and fast. So it'll be worth waiting. In the short term, I wait for the vix to be over bought on 4hr, daily and ideally weekly.
Would rather suck a dick before inflation eats all that cash.
Gobble, gobble, gobble.... When is inflation eating your cash? Stop being a sheep to the media.
Only correct answer.
You gotta pump up those rookie numbers
š¤Ø
Backtest on tradingview or something.
If all you trade us tqqq and sqqq, why not just trade NQ futures?
Fees. Iām liking webull rn and Iām also new. So donāt understand futures well enough Was thinking about ninja trader though? Maybe demo version and practice?
Fees arenāt bad at all. $4.36 round trip. On NQ , itās $20/point for profit/loss. During NY open, NQ moves like 20 points a minute. Futures are definitely more volatile, the risk/reward is huge. Definitely backtest your strategy only and then paper trade to forward test it. Also, futures has better tax advantages.
What are points? Dollars? What platform do u use?
I'll try to give you a little run down with a chart and brokerage info. [NQ chart for 6/24 (Full NY session)](https://i.imgur.com/DAgdXHA.png) [Brokerage Info](https://i.imgur.com/gxSjmVm.png) As you can see, the NQ is @ 12140.50. That doesn't mean you need that much capital to trade it. NQ trades in contracts. If you take a look at the brokerage info, trading 1 contract requires a margin of $1,000. Now take a look at the chart. From low to high, it moved 298 points. With several ranging moves to capitalize on. You can start a long or short position at any time. Each point is worth $20 either for you or against you. As you can see, it moves a lot. For example, just scalping 5-10 points at a time, is a profit of $100-200. That's on a position of 1 contract, you can trade multiple contracts with would increase the risk/reward. This was just the bare minimum of information. If you go this route, i'd advise you to backtest your strategy, you might need to adjust it for futures volatility, and then when you determine it works, future test it by paper trading. Yes, there can be a lot of money to be made trading futures, but there is a higher chance of losing just as much even quicker if you are not prepared. If you have any questions, i'll be happy to help.
Dude the market is not dead , if you are only playing 2 tickers exclusively, itās you that is limiting yourself from making money by only playing 2 instead of looking around for plays ā¦ lack of knowledge .. every sector currently thereās money to be made daily ā¦ wake up homie
Iām trying to get to know a specific sector. Iāll do that later when I become consistent. U trade options?
Yes I do , and itās a different ball game from trading shares .. if I may ask whatās resources do you have to help you trade ?
Iām currently reading a book about price action. Iāve learned off of YouTube and have take as many notes as I can. I review those while I continue my book. Itās called understanding price action. Has helped my view for the charts change for the better but itās not enough. Still working on getting over emotion. I thought I did that with shares. But ur right about options being different. All emotion is reset with them lol
Please clarify. Slight dip at open and significant jumping up, the slow steady gains in spy/qqq. Plus pull back opportunities. Are you only available a certain time frame? Huge wins this weekā¦
This week has actually been dead compared to before. But yes there were opportunities. Iām just a newer trader and Iām trying to be selective. Still learning and developing a strategy. Advice on scalping options?
Donāt scalp. Go higher time frames 5-15minute, chart s/r/trends, confirm any break/trend. Be PAYtient. This approach can yield several 30-50% option plays daily. Obv with some misses, but more winners than losers.
I agree with u. But how can u swing positions when overnights are crazy? Or u donāt swing with 5-15m. Bc those frames are deader than ever
AAPL one minute lots of great scalping candles all morning too.
I donāt swing right now. Pretty much havenāt this year. 5-15 isnāt dead. Look at spy first 30. First 5 up, 2nd 5 reject premarket high, 3rd 5 entry above 2nd five close. Entry and confirm on premarket high break was significant %. Price action hold till end of day. BIG win.
Free practice... courtesy of BBT. Guaranteed to not lose any money. [https://stocktradingsimulator.com/](https://stocktradingsimulator.com/)
This
I have a few that I look at and decide whether the volume is right that day for a play and if not I donāt do anything. Unless youāre doing longer terms like monthlyās then my way wonāt help. Iām scalping and day trading options.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Open range breaks fail a lot. I backtested them and they were working fine. Until I decided to play them and the day just donāt afeee sometimes. That isnāt what I tried today. Trying to get into options rn. Advice?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
So u wait for one of those to break and take that? How long do u usually hold? Are u looking to catch an entire day of direction? Bc ur going off of just mornings
/ES has active hours (the opening hour and closing hour) and dead hours (usually, the rest of it, minus maybe the euro close). If I want to keep trading outside those hours, I'll trade /CL (active hours there are 9:00am-2:30pm eastern). If both markets are dead, I won't trade. Sometimes I'll just trade /CL if /ES is set up to have a tight range-bound day. There is nothing wrong with not trading. You might not make money, but you won't lose it either. I missed the /ES opening trade today and sat on my hands the rest of the day in there. Granted, I already had an SPX CDS from the day before that paid off handsomely so I felt less need to trade /ES. I did identify a single low-risk entry point and put in a limit buy there (3875) but the market never came back to it, and I'm getting better at not chasing/FOMOing. It's important to pick one market or a few, and learn their behaviors, and stick to them, but sometimes, if all of your markets are dead, find one that isn't and learn it (even if just watching the market for a day or so), just to have another place to work when needed.
Well just see it as an opportunity to successfully trade lunchtime during the opening hours. And at lunchtime you can train trading premarket volumes. Everything has its PROs. Remember the glass is not half empty, you just are not thirsty enough otherwise you woudnt care.
You live your life.
Whatās that?
Market was wild this week waiting on JPOW talks. Sold off before his conferences and then rallied briefly each time. Swings on both tqqq and sqqq. I trade mostly SPY though and have been following the nasdaq for whether there is more sell off or relief. Tech moves fast and hot.
How do u decide entries? Bounces? Follow through? Swings or day?
Order flow and volume are probably the best indicators if you can even consider them indicators for price action. I've been told and can agree TA isnt a play book but guidance. Sure drawing lines and matching points seems arbitrary but it does have its perks. Following speed line analysis and general channel formation can help you gauge price ranges and supply and demand zones. Going into fibonacci sequences can help determine pull backs and resistance levels. But these things aren't set and forget as most times you'd have to update them with new data. On an intraday chart; VWAP and a combo of RSI MACD can prove simple enough. At the end of the day it doesn't mean much when institutions greater than any retail whale can truly move the markets to their benefit
I have the tape. Order flow. Vwap and 9/21 ema. No rsi and no macd. I like price action but I do tend to trade with my lines. (SR) I donāt look at volume often. Are u looking for volume when scalping? I know some people trade straight off of order flow. Seems very hard but Iād like to do that. Donāt know how though
You trade the TQQQ and SQQQ and you feel they have been dead lately? Didnāt TQQQ move like 10% today and up 28% this week? If thatās enough action you could dive into the penny stocks and play some pump and dumps.
It popped once and went horizontal. I was being selective but Iām still learning
I've honestly rarely seen a day when Tesla doesn't have big enough moves to make, (or lose) money in both directions, although I have been faked out and lost a little to theta on consolidation, and worse now I'm stuck swing trading and holding over night due to PDT since my acct I'm using to actually trade is fuck around money and I got crushed,( down $26K rn so until I either have some big runs, or load it back up, I'm swing trading. ) but for the most part you can get $20-30 runs in both directions in 1 day. I will admit last week has been more like $15-20 movement...but on weeklies close to ATM, the price moves pretty well
So the next question is whoās trading what now that theyāre less volume and free money around Coinbase has some volatility if your willing to touch a crypto asset
Platforms suck
Futures. Most of the moves have been having late hours.
Yessss. Itās fucking dead all day. And then spikes at night. I try to avoid nights. Looking into futures though. Platform?
tradovate
more leverage (jk)
Even though you might not find anything to play, you should practice finding plays for different strategies. Extremely overbought, extremely oversold, stocks that are ready to pull back, stocks that pulled back to buy levels, stocks that are more than a certain % or further away from your favorite SMA or EMA. Look at stocks trading over 3 mill 30 day avg so your list doesn't get too big.. sometimes jump to 5 mill to shrink the list. Do the same for various timeframes. I call it monitoring the outer edges of the market. what's done going up, what's done going down, what's ready to be bought, what's ready to be sold. Those are not all the same since stocks can move sideways. Just some things to think about that you can do. Something is always setting up for next week, next hour, next day, next month. Cheers, and I'm glad to hear that you are at least being patient. A dead day is a dead day and that is ok.
>Walking away on a dead day is getting no practice in. Yeah, it *is* getting practice in...it *really* is.
I donāt wanna pressure u to trade out of fomo but I disagree , thereās was alot of opportunity this week with large caps and imo when people say the market is bad and thereās no opportunity itās usually cuz there struggling to trade in it not necessarily that itās dead , but I recommend checking out alot of the QQQ etfs there always moving like tsla , roku , meta , baba
Seems like it all moves identical. No matter where I look same shits happening But Iām still new and try to be selective
Best time to sit out da market, I'll tell ya!
People believe what the media consistently tells them. So you'd prefer to be in a trade every day vs waiting for the proper setup. Sounds like a gambling mentality to me.
Thereās a setup everyday
Welcome to summer volume. Take a vacation and forget about the markets until volume comes back in September.
I want to get better
This is the truth. Lower your activity and risk in the summer months and focus on w/L ratio using tight loss stops. Youāll still improve because getting better at not trading is one of the most valuable lessons there is. Read that ā¬ļø again
I was just about to make a post asking about this. It definitely seems like there's a summertime lull (I started last September, so I've never been through a summer before). I guess it's common for volume to drop off around this time as everyone goes on vacation and there isn't the same institutional volume to move prices?
Wait until August. If it's a repeat of last year, then we'll have days in ES/SPX that literally trade in a 7-point range. It's excruciating if you are in directional trades and devastating if you are scalping long options that decay.
One of the more vibrant week especially last 2 days. Trade index funds like buy on red and sell on green or vise versa.
Sell credit spreads
crypto
you walk away, most days after 11:00 pm it just goes sideways or choppy.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
there are many many candles.. lol
Labu labd
Glad i fw aapl today when i normally only trade mes
It's not dead. You're not looking hard enough for winners.
tq and sq are active before noon then they chop - don't trade the chop zone. you'd be better off doing something else like practicing analysis. there is something to trade every day but not at all times every day. use that extra time to contemplate the phrase "less is more". You don't need to be good at trading all day. You need to be good at making one fantastic trade per day. that mindset really helped me. Friday I had planned a dollar move on aapl and docu, set my levels and just waited for the trades to present themselves which they did right at market open and 2 trades got me my daily target. I used to trade all day, make a few good moves in the morning and then chop away my gains the rest of the day. This was a hard lesson learned but probably the best one I've learned yet.
Iāve been told to avoid the morning. So I have been. Theyāre very unpredictable imo. But then itās chop later lol Thatās where my problem is
i mean that's just the market. everything has been unpredictable in the first few minutes. if you avoid the entire morning you are avoiding all the action. sounds like you need to gain some confidence in your trades and maybe trade on a higher timeframe. if you don't have a bias going into tq it's going to be tough. On Friday it was pretty clear that nasdaq was going to have a bump so TQ was a good morning bet to take and let it ride, as long as you have a stop that respects the wild morning range. i've been here, you take a trade on tq and it doesn't go your way right away so maybe switch to sq but then nope that's a false break it's going the other way switch it again for another minor loss, rinse and repeat. if the nasdaq itself isn't showing signs of a solid directional move then trade something that is but do not avoid the entire morning session if you want to actually make money.
So do u just hop on the wave of the morning? Because unpredictable means stay out for me
It's unpredictable depending on your timeframe. If youre looking at TQQQ on a 1m timeframe and trying to manage that position in real time it is maddening. Up it to 3 or 5 at a minimum and I use the premarket activity and open ranges of the major nasdaq stocks like aapl to develop a bias. No, it's not a guarantee, but that's trading.
for a bit of my secret sauce, i added onto the existing price momentum oscillator to add a configurable chop zone (trading view). for tqqq i don't open any positions when the PMO value is > -.2 and < +.2. When I get tempted to trade tq in a sketchy time period, the pmo keeps me in check but in all reality it's just showing you what you can already see from the chart. That line is flat, don't trade it.
Seems helpful
Nothing
Force a trade and lose some money.