Big Mike who has had very extensive experience with NinjaTrader came to the same conclusion I have: the myriad of problems and hassles surrounding NinjaTrader – all versions: 6.5 beta and 7 alpha – are just not worth the effort and investment of time. Check out his blog post: Big Mike’s Trading Blog: Tired of NinjaTrader?. There are several good reads in his forum about alternatives for anyone trading with a DOM.

One good solution I haven’t seen mentioned is a combination of InteractiveBrokers and ZeroLineTrader. I like this combo for a number of reasons:

1. IB’s TWS is rock solid, excellent stability and the broker itself is one of the more reliable ones (most of the time).

2. IB’s commissions are very reasonable, at $2 they might not be the cheapest around but not that far off for a small retail trader either. For a nice comparison of commissions see HPT’s post here.

3. IB’s universal account means I don’t need to split my account, I can trade stocks and futures in the same place. Including most futures contracts around the world.

4. ZeroLine Trader platform itself has been rock solid with a lot of very nice options for a very reasonable price. There are other alternatives like the cheaper BracketTrader but it’s bare bones, and ButtonTrader which is too complicated and expensive to my taste.

Anyways, this topic of IB TWS+DOM (ZLT or others) probably merits a proper separate post of its own. But the main point is that there are many alternatives and options available that one should spend some time to find what works for them, which is a better approach then trying to force their trading on something that doesn’t work too well.

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I was thinking about trading strengths, weakness and was going to create a list for myself but found it hard to decide where to start. So I just started with brainstorming all the positive trading skills and traits, personal attributes and characteristics I could think of that successful traders might have. Here’s the list, see if I missed out on anything.

Discipline
Resilience in the face of adversity
Desire to continue and improve
Persistence
Curiosity
Creativity
Networking
Calmness
Courage
Competitiveness
Pattern recognition
Numerical skills
Practical (as opposed to idealistic)
Self confidence

Btw, INO is hosting a webinar and offering free access to MarketClub for 2 weeks, this isn’t one of those offers where you have to pay up front and cancel withing a certain amount of time, this requires no payment
info and cancels automatically in 2 weeks. Sign up here.

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Finally, what I’ve known for a long time, games are good for you!

Men’s Health Lists : MensHealth.com

. . . grab your joystick.

Not that joystick, but the one attached to your kid’s Xbox. British researchers found that the longer people play video games, the higher their levels of concentration, sometimes equaling a trained athlete’s ability to focus. “Playing video games requires a high level of concentration to be successful, and that seems to transfer to the real world,” says Jo Bryce, Ph.D., the study coauthor.

P.S. The Men’s Health lists breakdown by 1 paragraph per page to make people click their site more is just terrible, absolutely terrible!

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I remember I bumped into Phantom of the Pits mini book document (110 pages) a couple of years ago. I don’t even remember when or where exactly. Anyway I thought it was kind of cheesy and with a weird mystery created just for the hype. Over the last 2 days two individuals mentioned it to me again, both of whom are not the noobs falling for hype type of people. So I thought I’d check it out again, and there are indeed some interesting ideas in there that made me look at some aspects of trading in a slightly different way. For example this paragraph:

What criteria in your day-trading plan says you are right? Most say what determines you are wrong. Not us! We only want to know the criteria for being right. Okay, for us our program says, “If in the first half hour the market opens lower than yesterday and moves higher, expect a move above the prior day’s high within the first half day of trading.” Our program also says the position is only correct if the market stays in the prior day’s top half in the first half hour. Our last criteria for the trade is that it must show a 3-point profit by the close. Now, I ask you, what is your next step?

If you haven’t read it before I would recommend going over it if only to get some new perspectives on things. It’s very easy to find the file PDF online, it’s free and widely available so just google it.

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So I’ve been spending the whole summer getting some education, opening my horizons, getting exposure to different speakers, trading instruments, methods and styles. I thought it will be useful for someone out there to list all the resources I’ve come across over the last couple of months.

Before I do that though I need to caution that not all trading webinars are created equal, some were really good and gave ideas I could pursue almost straight away, and some were just pure sales pitch. It’s difficult to know in advance which would be which, a lot also depends on your areas of interest, current level of trading expertise and which type of trading you’re attracted to and trying to pick up or improve on. Nevertheless I think it’s been a really good summer in terms of going beyond my usual trading style and comfort zone.

If you know of other relevant trading webinars sources, either free or with minimal cost such as opening a brokerage account (no $4995 webinars please) then feel free to leave a comment and I will add it to the list.

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So I’m using NinjaTrader daily and really like the application, it’s got some performance issues when you load up too many charts and squiggly lines (which I’m trying to limit to the minimum) but other than that it’s a great trading platform. The ability to connect to various data sources, the chart trader, performance metrics and data playback are awesome.

One thing I hate though about NT is the sounds, not only are they terse and boring but the volume level is really high, so if you’ve got any other alerts or sounds you need you have these choices:

1. Keep the volume at normal level and cringe every time NT notifies about something.
2. Keep the volume way down and barely hear the other sounds.
3. Turn off sounds in NT.

I like getting alerted, so I decided to go with option 4. Change the sounds. You can’t do it from within NT but it’s quite simple to just go to the folder where the sound wavs sit, on my machine it’s here: C:\Program Files\NinjaTrader 6.5\sounds and then replace the sound files with your own while keeping the naming the same.

After searching online a bit I found a few files to replace the original alerts. Here’s what I’ve set for my NinjaTrader sound alerts.

P.S. I forgot to mention, I doubt anyone who will ever read this post is likely to botch such a simple operation as changing sound files but juuuust in case: if you don’t know what you’re doing, ignore everything I said above, don’t make any changes to your files. You are fully responsible for any screw ups.

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I’ve been spending some time online researching various trading strategies and methods. Many traders, I believe, tend to go into a bricklaying routine when they become profitable and just put those bricks one on top of the other again, and again and again. Nothing wrong with that but expanding trading horizons can be useful in both enhancing and augmenting your current “bricklaying” activities.

Anyways, a couple of resources I use are Elitetrader.com and Inotv.com. On ET I found an interesting thread called Something very simplistic. It’s 146 pages long so I’m sitll reading it but it showcases an unusual approach which I think can help in looking at things from different angles.

• Linda Raschke: A Little Keltner, a Little Wyckoff, and a Lot of Street Smarts

• Glen Ring: Building a Better Trader – Volume 1 to 3

• Tom Cronin: How to Use Spreads to Construct a Trading Roadmap