StockTickr Trading Journal Blog » Tools

A Proper Trading Desk Lets You See Less not More

Dave — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:24:04 +0000

I came across this article by Alan Farley (who I interviewed a while back). In the article he describes his trading desk and how he has things arranged, what subscriptions he has, etc. I’m always interested in hearing how other traders’ have things arranged – I devote a good deal of thought to my trading routine and am always looking for ways to improve it.

What struck me as I read about his setup was how similar it is to mine – from the chart layout even down to the columns I sort by in my watchlist. The other thing that struck me was this quote:

Seriously, though, just a few stocks on a big watch list will trigger decent opportunities during a typical trading day. It’s our job to uncover these hidden gems and to avoid getting eyestrain looking at everything else. Sadly, this is a task at which most traders fail, i.e., they get so overwhelmed by randomness, there’s no brain space left for the real thing.

This underscores the main purpose of your trading desk – to allow you to easily focus on the small subset of data that you can profit from. This is the opposite of a lot of new traders that try to fill up their trading desk with as much data as possible as if they’ll miss something if they don’t cram 20 indicators onto a chart. There’s an infinite amount of data out there that you could look at. Your better off ignoring everything by default and deciding what not to ignore instead of the other way around.

Hat tip to Trader Mike for the article link.

Projected Volume in QuoteTracker

Dave — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:18:15 +0000

I’ve recently started using QuoteTracker as my charting platform to see how I’d like it. So far I think it’s fantastic – every bit as good as eSignal (for most things). Here’s a great feature that’s in QuoteTracker that, after using it for a couple days, makes me think it should be in every charting platform.

Before a candle completes, QuoteTracker displays the “projected volume” of the candle. So at the current rate of volume during the current candle it projects how large the volume bar will be when the candle completes. What a great, intuitive feature – I love it.

I’m still clinging to a couple different charting platforms, which I’ll discuss in a future post. For now, though, QuoteTracker is working well. Hat tip to Eyal for turning me on to this.

Replay the Trading Day Using Automatic Screenshots

Dave — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:37:20 +0000

Here’s an article that I wrote for the CyberTrader Newsletter a couple months ago:

Have you ever looked back at the end of a trading day and thought “Why in the world did I do that?” Everything seems so obvious at the end of the day, but, of course, traders have to make decisions without the benefit of hindsight. It can be quite helpful to “replay” the day to figure out why you made certain decisions at certain times to determine whether you made mistakes. Taking an honest look at yourself can help you discover ways to improve your trading. Many traders are too quick to sulk about their losses instead of using them for what they are: extremely valuable opportunities for future trading success.

Take a Video? Probably Too Much
There are several ways to record your trading session for future review. It is possible to use a video recording application (such as Camtasia Studio) to capture the tick by tick action of your trading. While this approach would be able to record every possible data point, the videos would result in very large files that would require too much space to store them.

Screenshots – Much More Practical
A far more practical strategy is to take screenshots of your trading platform at regular intervals. There are a few software packages that can be setup to do this automatically without lifting a finger. What you’ll end up with is several image files (in the folder of your choosing) on your computer.

IrfanView Software
You might be surprised to learn that there is a free software package that can do almost everything you need from automatically taking the screenshots of your desktop to replaying them. It is called IrfanView and it’s available as a free download for Windows. Once you’ve installed it, just start IrfanView from the windows start menu. From the Options menu, choose Capture/Screenshot. Here’s the screen that appears.

Select Automatic – timer delay for the capture method and specify the frequency of the screenshots in seconds. Depending on your time frame for trading, you’ll want to specify a frequency that captures enough screenshots, but not so many that it’s too overwhelming to go back and review. I use 5 minutes (300 seconds) which is suitable for my style of trading. Under the Saving method section, choose Save captured image as file and specify the file name format and the destination directory where you’d like the image files stored. I’d suggest using the format “capture_%Y%m%d_%H%M%S” for the file names since sorting by the file name in Windows explorer will also sort them chronologically.

Replaying The Screenshots
IrfanView also comes with a nifty slideshow which is perfect for reviewing your screenshots. From the File menu, choose Slideshow and browse for your screenshots in the Look in section. In the Slide advancement section, choose Automatic after mouse/keyboard input then click Play Slideshow. You can use the left click mouse button to advance to the next screenshot and the right button to go back to the previous one. Hit the Escape key to exit the slideshow.

Capturing Screenshots on Computers with Multiple Monitors
While IrfanView is great for single monitor systems, using it on computers with multiple monitors will only capture the screen from the “primary” monitor, not your entire desktop. To capture your entire viewable desktop on a multiple monitor system you can use a program called Snagit from Techsmith. The current version of Snagit is $39.95 although previous versions are free. Snagit it is a great tool in itself for marking up and drawing on image files (great for taking notes on charts). Snagit does not come with a slideshow viewer, so even if you have multiple monitors you’ll still want to install IrfanView to view your screenshots.

An Example of What You Might Learn
After capturing screenshots of my trading for just a short time, I discovered that the way I had organized my charts during the trading day prevented me from seeing certain opportunities and that I wasn’t utilizing all my screen space effectively. I came up with a strategy to improve the way I situate my charts and it’s given me more confidence knowing that I’ll find more profitable opportunities in the future.

Mark Up Your Charts for Free

Dave — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 15:42:47 +0000

I’ve just noticed that you can get a fully licensed copy of Snagit – the software I use (and most people) to mark up image files. I use it to capture image files of my charts and draw arrows for the entries and comments on the charts and then post them to the blog. I still rely mainly on the charts that StockTickr creates for me automatically, but I like to be able to go back and review the actual charts that I trade off of every day.

Here’s a good example of a chart that I created using Snagit back in August:

Couple Losing Trades, One I’ll Prevent in Future

Dave — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 21:13:33 +0000

I took a couple losing trades today – small bets, but losses nonetheless. Here’s one that caused me to take some action.

In the above chart, I was looking for FMCN to break 45.00, so I entered a buy stop limit order for 50.05 with the stop at 50.01. Well, as you probably know the stop price gets triggered by the ask for buy stops (bid for sell stops) and you can probably guess what happened. The ask went to 50.01 for a split second (I’m just assuming since I didn’t see it on level 2) and my order was triggered and filled at 50.00.

Of course, the price soon retreated and I was stuck with something I didn’t want. This has happened to me a couple times before, but this time I decided to do something about it.

CyberTrader has some great alert templates that you can use to set up all types of complex conditions for orders. If you don’t use CyberTrader now, don’t, I repeat, don’t start using them because you’ll wonder how you ever traded without the Alert Templates once you start.

I set up an alert template to execute an order when the ask reaches a certain point AND the trade price reaches a certain point. Once you save the template, you can use it for any stock and you only have to fill in the shares and price levels that you want. A huge time saver. Here’s a screenshot of the order I’ll be entering next time around. I just right click on the FMCN’s chart or level II screen or the entry for FMCN in a trading list and choose my alert template that I called “Buy Stop Limit Order”.

What Have You Permatabbed?

Dave — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 13:18:38 +0000

I’m pretty sure it was Maoxian that introduced me to the Faviconizetab Firefox extension. I’ve combined that with the Permatab Firefox extension for a few select sites that I have open all the time. I’ve just added WallStreak to this group, which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to post about this.

Here’s a screenshot of my browser:

Here’s the list of the sites that have made this elite group from left to right in case you don’t recognize the favicons (I bet some of you can):

Gmail – best web based email ever.
Google Reader – best blog aggregator
Jaiku
WallStreak (Ugly’s latest creation)
My StockTickr Journal

What deserves a place in your Permatab list?

Speaking of WallStreak, I find myself using it more and more. It took me a while to warm up to the idea, but WallStreak is sort of a niche Jaiku for traders which I think makes sense, especially since Jaiku struggles to keep up with surging demand.

StockTickr Broker Plugin Screencast

Dave — Thu, 10 May 2007 16:34:22 +0000

Here’s a video showing the StockTickr Broker Plugin at work. It currently comes in two flavors: CyberTrader and Interactive Brokers. As I’ve picked up my trading pace, this plugin has been a huge time saver by automating my record keeping. So now StockTickr automatically enters my trades into my journal and generates all my charts with my entry, exit, and stops plotted on them.

This only becomes more valuable with time as my database of performance history in my journal gets larger and larger. I can filter my journal on all sorts of fields – daytrades versus holding overnight, uptrend days in the overall market versus downtrend days, and a ton of other useful parameters.

Interactive Brokers / StockTickr Beta Plugin Available

Dave — Mon, 07 May 2007 11:03:09 +0000

Data entry is boring and error-prone – wouldn’t it be nice to be able to pull your trade executions right from your broker into your journal automatically? That’s exactly what you can do if you’re a CyberTrader client or now an Interactive Brokers client.

One StockTickr Pro subscriber says with this plugin along with automatic chart review that he’ll save 30 to 45 minutes every day that he used to spend manually keeping records.

Here’s how it works:

Sign up for StockTickr Pro if you’re not already.
Download and install the StockTickr/IB Plugin.
When you’re ready to upload your trades to StockTickr, simply start the plugin from your start menu.
Click Logon to connect to TWS and StockTickr.
Click Load Executions to load the executions into the plugin window.
Click Send to StockTickr to automatically send your executions into your journal.

The plugin will automatically compact your executions into trades. For example, let’s say you put in a trade of 200 shares and got filled for 100 shares at 50.10 and the other 100 shares at 50.12. The plugin automatically determines that was a single trade and loads 200 shares at 50.11.

There’s a free trial for StockTickr Pro, so sign up today.

Here’s a screenshot of the plugin in action:

Automatically Generating My Watchlist with the Trade-Ideas API

Dave — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 11:39:05 +0000

I’m always looking for ways to cut down on the time I spend on my daily trading routine. Many of my various trading tasks are performed much better by a computer. In my experience, if there’s some task that you do that can be safely performed by a computer, then I believe it’s worth a one-time chunk of your time figuring out how to automate it. I’ve spent sometimes a few hours automating a task that only takes me a few seconds to do manually. There are many benefits to doing this:

Removes the chance for human error
Saves your time so you can do something more meaningful (this adds up over time)
Forces you to take a hard look at your task – often you’ll figure out a better way to do it
Sense of accomplishment

I’ve automated a few of my tasks, but most recently I’ve automated the creation of my morning gap list. Here’s the way I used to generate it:

Use Trade-Ideas Pro to create 3 long alert windows and 3 short alert windows
Bring up Trade-Ideas Pro just before the market open and just let it run
At 10:00AM, export the history of each alert window to a csv file
Run a script that knows the file names of my export files, reads them, and spits out a unique list of symbols
Import them into CyberTrader

For many weeks I performed the steps above and thought it was pretty efficient. It worked well and trading life was good. But over time, as I did these steps over and over I realized there should be a way to automate the entire process. Sometimes I was distracted at 10AM and couldn’t perform the steps until a little later, putting me in “catch-up” mode when I did get around to it.

I sent David from Trade-Ideas a note asking if, perhaps, keyboard shortcuts could be added to Trade-Ideas Pro for the history export function in each window. He added it to the list of feature requests, but also pointed me to the Trade-Ideas API. After browsing the docs for a while, I realized it was possible to automate much of my 10AM routine.

I set out to create an app that uses the Trade-Ideas API to automatically generate my watchlist. I set a timer in the app which automatically creates a CyberTrader stocklist file that is easily imported into my trading platform. That timer fires first at 10AM. Every half hour for the rest of the trading day it fires again but creates a separate stocklist file that contains new symbols that have appeared since 10AM. This allows me to optionally look through an additional list during the day if there seems to be a relatively small number of stocks that initially fit my criteria after the 10AM run.

As I started coding the app, I realized this was also an opportunity to implement some features that Trade-Ideas Pro lacked that I thought would help me out. I created counters on each of the windows that show the number of alerts generated so far and a count of unique stocks that have produced those alerts. Also, I added some sound support for the alerts much like TI Pro, but with an important twist: the sounds only play when a symbol appears in the alert window for the first time. If you’re using the Percent Up Alert, for example, one stock could produce many of those alerts during the day – if it’s not something you’re going to trade do you want it playing a sound each time it comes up in an alert window? I didn’t. I want to be alerted only if there’s a new symbol in the window since it’s likely I’ve already looked at any symbol that’s appeared previously.

Here’s a screencast showing the app I created. Comments and suggestions welcome!

New R Tables in StockTickr Journal

Dave — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 12:10:32 +0000

A few subscribers have already noticed, but I added some “R tables” to each entry in your StockTickr Journal. The reason I added them is because I use R values as a guide for moving my stop. For example, when I reach 1R of profit in a trade, I’ll move my stop to breakeven. As my trade reaches 2R, I’ll usually move my stop again. How far I’ll move it depends on a few factors, but these whole number R thresholds are where I make my decisions.

I used to compute these numbers in my head and write them down on a sticky note when it looked like my trade was approaching 1R. The math is not hard, but I don’t like doing even simple things that could be more easily done by a computer. This is why I added the tables to the StockTickr Journal. Now, I enter my trade into the journal as soon as I make it and this R table is immediately available without my human error factor.

Just hover your mouse over the green dollar icon in the journal next to the ticker symbol to see the R table.