Interim - progress

I made several mistakes on the paper trading account which have not allowed any trades the last two days. Pretty bummed.

However - remembering that NT had a simulation account, I booted it up and was pleasantly surprised to find the latest beta ready for public release: NT7 B14. I upgraded and spent most of the day yesterday getting things going. And as it turns out, today as well.

First thoughts? Awesome - the upgrades are significant and I am finding that I really like the chart trader application. Coupled with the ATM strategy (which allows for a fairly complex stop loss setup), great charts, and in-depth account analysis, it is a very sweet platform. There are some bugs in their Market Analyzer, but I had a fairly stable afternoon. I am hoping the MA will work as a substitute for the TDA screeners.

Here is an example of a failed short term breakout on AIG:

Here is some ADSK action (with order marker and labels turned on):

One of the new features: multi-instrument charts. I have QQQQ and SPY on this one:

I am still trying to figure out the ATM strategy, but so far I have something like: hold stop loss order on my computer until touched (simulated stop limit), set initial stop loss at 12 ticks, when profit reaches 8 ticks set stop loss to break even, when profit reaches 10 ticks set stop loss to 8 ticks, then update 8 tick stop loss for every 3 ticks in profit. And - on top of that, I have the volume trigger set to 200 shares which helps to avoid spikes (In addition to the stop loss trigger, the ask volume must be less than 200 shares). I am sure I will need to play around with it, but pretty cool stuff. As per FNG, I have no profit target set.

I think that automatically setting the stop loss will help lend some gravitas to the entry decision, forcing me to think about entry with respect to near term candlestick action. Time will tell.

But: I had 6 crashes (about), 2 re-boots, and 2 database repairs, which was very frustrating. It seemed to be tied to the TDA data connection and refreshing a loaded MA data set (e.g., changing the columns). This afternoon saw one crash when I tried to disconnect IB. For some reason ask/bid were very slow to load using IB as the primary. Anyhoo, if it works well next week I may subscribe for a quarter.