ELN experience - A few hours later

Posted on May 21, 2007
Tags: Day Trading |

I take the train every morning to go to the office for my day-behhhhh-job. It takes me about 30min door to door so I usually just plug into my iPod, put my favourite band of the month on and kind of drift into lala land. This morning was no exception. When it was almost time to get off the train though and my conscious brain was starting to kick back in and take command I realized 2 ideas were implanted there related to my ELN nightmare.

1. Richard mentioned he typically uses up his buying power so this sort of order would be rejected by his broker. That reminded me that IB’s TWS has a lot of risk control checks and balances settings you can configure. I used to get confirmation boxes appear when my stop entry price was “too far” from the current price but I disabled it as sometimes I did need to enter that kind of order and the extra reading and clicking it away slowed me down. I think I will be configuring some measures though for size related risk control.

2. Thinking back to those few seconds when the position was entered and exited I couldn’t remember anything special about the orders being filled. It was thousands of shares with R size of several thousand dollars. Not a small amount but yet the order was filled in much the same way as my other orders, it wasn’t being worked for a prolonged period of time and no significant slippage beyond the usual few cents I get every now and then. That made me realize that with the liquid and active stock candidates of the day it appears very possible to day-trade far larger amounts than I am already doing, in fact an account size 10 times what I have now would still be tradeable in more or less the same way. That’s quite an interesting and important observation for the long term. It may sound trivial to some, but hey I’m a newbie when it comes to this kind of size.

Lastly, this state of pensive sub-conscious “lala land” is proving quite useful. Especially with my sleep (or no-sleep) patterns I don’t get a lot of brain downtime that allows my sub-conscious to process what’s happening around me. I used to scoff at myself for not utilizing that train-ride time for “more productive” things but maybe I should cement those instead as regular periods of staring blankly into thin air :-)

Comments

5 Responses to “ELN experience - A few hours later”

Caravaggio on May 22nd, 2007 5:25 am

Exactly, we don’t have to be ‘doing’ all the time.

I used to get some of the best sleep when I took the tube/train back from work!
Carlton on May 22nd, 2007 6:21 am

I agree, taking breaks is crucial for creative thinking. Then again, in some places people take it to the extreme. In Thailand, for example, people don’t understand that a break should come *between* two work intervals, it can’t just fill the whole day :-)
eyal on May 22nd, 2007 11:12 am

Caravaggio - I wish I could sleep on the train here but it’s only about 20min and there’s usually no seats where I get on it.

Carlton - lol, I’ve seen it quite often. People just stop for a nap everywhere, shops, road works even some hotel workers. I didn’t realize though it could be the bulk of their day :-)
Zoomie on May 22nd, 2007 6:59 pm

You just made me realize that I will have a seperate trading account for daytrades. This could prevent a huge position being put on by imistake. Good for you for exiting immediately.
Eyal on May 22nd, 2007 10:58 pm

Zoomie - My funds are all consolidated so that I can use the BP. Which is a bit scary but that’s how it is for now. I’ve already implemented a crude size control in TWS, when I get back I plan to work through it more in-depth.