> Hi,

> Before I forget, I joined Bill Myers's
> member's site today and I really like it.

> You wrote:

> Thanks for the excellent ideas!

> Attached you'll see a screen-cap of
> September 21, 1995. The bars are 5-minute
> bars of the SP 500 futures, which was in the
> 500s at the time. Volatility was extremely
> low by today's standards. Also shown are two
> moving averages and a Bollinger Bands.

> Looking at this picture we didn't do a very
> good job of trading. Early in the day we
> imagined two trades that weren't really
> there (we were trading congestion like it
> was a trend) and when it did start moving we
> couldn't figure out how to get in for a long
> time. When it started moving up we did a
> good buy. Then we did a trade way too late
> in the day. All these mistakes probably help
> explain why I didn't make money as a trader.
> (OTOH, it's harder than it may look.)

> I was daytrading with an Austin trader at
> the time. After every day's trading I'd take
> all the trade forms and enter about 30
> fields of data per trade into an Access
> database. I even took screen shots of our
> TradeStation screen, and mark them up with
> our trade entries, as you can see below.
> Then I'd add the screen capture to the
> database. This database only covered part of
> my career as a trader, and yet at the end it
> held the records of 756 daytrades. To this
> day I've never posed questions to this
> database looking for winning combinations of
> signals and technical indicators. For all I
> know the much-sought-after Holy Grail of
> trading lies hidden in my database. (I don't
> know why I never sifted through this
> database--maybe I should....) :-)

> So a day of daytrading consists of sitting
> in front of a screen that looks sort of like
> the picture below, watching as the bars form
> and waiting for a setup to form. Then
> grabbing the phone and taking decisive
> action! Daytrading must use the same skills
> as our hunter ancestors employed who spent
> hours in a tree, waiting for a pig to wander
> below so they could spring on it.

> Anyway, I really really want to get back
> into the daytrading business, and I'm sure I
> will somehow.

> Hope this was useful or interesting!

> Best,

> - Boyd

Boyd,

I have some questions about what other data you recorded for that day. Could you email me? I would like to know if you also have a chart for the NYSE TICKS for that day. Did you record the PREMIUM on the open? Was it + or - ?
Thanks.