I was born 20 years too late...
When I first got bitten by the market bug in the early 90's, I started off as many do with the culturally accepted and "conservative" fundamental analysis approach to stock market investment.
It took a few years, but I began to realize that this "buy and hope" style of money management was ANYTHING but low risk.
This reality was slapped home hard at age 17 when an account that I was managing for a family friend went from +30% YTD to flat in just a few weeks.
I had done the work, (Hard and boring work!) and found a new sector that was about to catch fire (Cell phones...it was 1995). I was right, and I still didn't make any money.
More to the point, I had let my profits slip through my fingers.
Act II:
I'm interning at an asset management firm, and they are in trouble...Their "Value" approach is only up 10% YTD, and the clients are pulling their accounts because the Internet bubble is here and they see steller stocks like CMGI and INKT running 10% per week.
I started to realize that while stocks eventually were connected to their fundamental value, the price action on a day to day level was driven by order flow.
Thus the seeds of a price action driven "Tape Reader" was born.
I realized after I achieved consistent profitability and had been trading stocks full time that the skill of trading is a universal one, and can be applied to all markets. I branched out and began to trade futures and currencies as well.
As I started to learn more about the futures markets, I fell in love with open outcry. I am a highly competitive person, played sports at an elite level, and I wished I could end up on the floor in Chicago as a "Local" flipping contracts.
But I was born too late...the electronic trading revolution had arrived, and the pits were dying.
With them has died their trading style which I hadn't realized until recently. I have been "Flipping" like a pit scalper for a long time, and don't see much discussion in the online communities about this fun and consistent style of active trading.
I am going to change that here.
First you have to define the goal of a "Flipper".
To start trading, the Flipper defines a bullish or bearish bias, then seeks to find areas where order flow is undergoing the process of change, where the orders are waffling back and forth from the bid to the offer. The Flipper accumulates inventory from those who are buying, and "flips" it out for a few pips profit to those who are selling or vice versa.
This is blue collar trading, stupid simple in concept...but takes focus and commitment to do it well.
The payoff?
* Unparalleled daily consistency of profits.
* The ability to create exceptional levels of return which allow for rapid compounding of your account capital.
* The ability to reach into the order flow and access a steady stream of opportunity virtually at will. (As long as their is steady liquidity, you have opportunity and edge.)
The goal here is to make a million dollars by taking 100,000 trades.
This is a high accuracy, high volume, instant gratification way to trade...
The best way to introduce you to it is to offer some examples, which I will do in the next posting...
When I first got bitten by the market bug in the early 90's, I started off as many do with the culturally accepted and "conservative" fundamental analysis approach to stock market investment.
It took a few years, but I began to realize that this "buy and hope" style of money management was ANYTHING but low risk.
This reality was slapped home hard at age 17 when an account that I was managing for a family friend went from +30% YTD to flat in just a few weeks.
I had done the work, (Hard and boring work!) and found a new sector that was about to catch fire (Cell phones...it was 1995). I was right, and I still didn't make any money.
More to the point, I had let my profits slip through my fingers.
Act II:
I'm interning at an asset management firm, and they are in trouble...Their "Value" approach is only up 10% YTD, and the clients are pulling their accounts because the Internet bubble is here and they see steller stocks like CMGI and INKT running 10% per week.
I started to realize that while stocks eventually were connected to their fundamental value, the price action on a day to day level was driven by order flow.
Thus the seeds of a price action driven "Tape Reader" was born.
I realized after I achieved consistent profitability and had been trading stocks full time that the skill of trading is a universal one, and can be applied to all markets. I branched out and began to trade futures and currencies as well.
As I started to learn more about the futures markets, I fell in love with open outcry. I am a highly competitive person, played sports at an elite level, and I wished I could end up on the floor in Chicago as a "Local" flipping contracts.
But I was born too late...the electronic trading revolution had arrived, and the pits were dying.
With them has died their trading style which I hadn't realized until recently. I have been "Flipping" like a pit scalper for a long time, and don't see much discussion in the online communities about this fun and consistent style of active trading.
I am going to change that here.
First you have to define the goal of a "Flipper".
To start trading, the Flipper defines a bullish or bearish bias, then seeks to find areas where order flow is undergoing the process of change, where the orders are waffling back and forth from the bid to the offer. The Flipper accumulates inventory from those who are buying, and "flips" it out for a few pips profit to those who are selling or vice versa.
This is blue collar trading, stupid simple in concept...but takes focus and commitment to do it well.
The payoff?
* Unparalleled daily consistency of profits.
* The ability to create exceptional levels of return which allow for rapid compounding of your account capital.
* The ability to reach into the order flow and access a steady stream of opportunity virtually at will. (As long as their is steady liquidity, you have opportunity and edge.)
The goal here is to make a million dollars by taking 100,000 trades.
This is a high accuracy, high volume, instant gratification way to trade...
The best way to introduce you to it is to offer some examples, which I will do in the next posting...