Professional Trader Ltd

One of the big mistakes that people make about trading the markets is that they believe that they have to be doing something original or indeed very clever in order to make money from the markets. This really is not the case. In fact, in many ways, it is the exact opposite. The basic concepts that are being used today by both small home-based traders and bigger funds are pretty well exactly the same as they were 40 years ago. For instance, breakout strategies were being used by Richard Donchian in the 1920s and were subsequently used by the famous turtles in the 1980s and are still being used, in one shape or another, today. So that the basic concept has remained valid for pretty well 100 years. One simple concept or bias that you can use immediately in your own trading on the indexes is to simply trade the volatile days. Most of the time the market is meandering a little up and then a little down and making no real progress. However, occasionally some big news event occurs or ch...

The markets are constantly changing and evolving and never more so than where short term day trading systems are involved. One of the big changes over recent years has been the increase in overnight trading in the indexes. In the old days, most day traders would just ignore the overnight session and concentrate on trading during just the day sessions. Whilst we can still trade very successfully in this manner we would now be missing an opportunity to trade the larger price movements that more recently now take place outside of the normal day sessions.  These sorts of changes that occur present us with new trading opportunities which when combined with our existing strategies can significantly enhance portfolio performance. For instance one of the keys to trading success is harnessing the power of portfolio diversification. This means trying to trade systems or markets or timeframes that are uncorrelated to each other or better still negatively correlated to each other. Cle...

Over 95% of institutional money is now being traded using mechanical trading systems or fully automated algorithmic trading systems. Nearly 90% of Private home based traders use discretionary trading techniques. Approximately 95% of home based traders lose money in trading whilst most institutions make money in trading. The importance of these statistics should not be lost on any of us! Our opinion at Pro-trader is that  we believe that home based traders are missing a trick if they do not at least look at mechanical trading systems or better still using fully automated algorithmic trading systems. This is especially the case when traders start trading the E-mini futures contracts.  So what is the difference between a discretionary trading system and a mechanical trading system. There are a couple of short videos on our website demonstrating the difference but essentially a discretionary trading system requires a degree of individual judgment in making the trading...