For Boyd Stone, our charting expert

Hi,

> May I ask, how often were you trading? Was
> it something like a trade every few minutes,
> or every few hours?

Some days I had so much fear about entering trades that I couldn't make myself pick up the phone and call in the orders. On these days I usually started out an emotional wreck and became more of one as the day progressed because I could see, in many cases, that I would have won bigtime if I'd just phoned in the order.

The most daytrades I did in one day was around ten. That is hard work, let me tell you.

Need and Greed are the trader's enemies. I wasn't greedy, but I needed to win since I had a small account. $200,000 is a good account size for an S&P daytrader who trades 1-3 contracts, believe it or not. I say this based on the account sizes of winning S&P daytraders that I talked to or knew about.

Generally I did three to five trades a day, on the days when I could force myself to pick up the phone. I did this, off and on, from 1993 through mid-1995, with a 6-month break in 1994 during which I worked in Joe Ross's Bahamas office; if you called Joe's office anytime in 1994 the chances are 1 in 3 that you talked to me. I worked with another trader from November 1994 through mid-1995.

I created an Access database into which I entered over 800 real-money trades (I filled out about 25 fields of data per trade, most of which were the readings of various technical indicators--I used Omega TradeStation, and I displayed a 2-minute, a 5-minute and a 10-minute intraday barchart, onto each was plotted a 15-bar SMAC, a 40-bar SMAC, and some special Bollinger Bands that I created). Many of my Access trade entries had screen captures attached showing what the chart looked like after I exited.

I created my database so I could analyze the workability of my trading signals.

One finding that you may find useful, that my database clearly pointed out, is that intraday stock index futures traders can do well by trading the first hour-and-a-half of the day, and the last hour-and-a-half of the day (after the Bonds close), and goofing off the rest of the time. Three hours a day of real-time tick-by-tick chart reading is enough work, anyway.

With my typical luck, I was trading during a time of low market volatility and I stopped trading right before it "got good." [Expletive deleted]!!

Best,

-Boyd