Friday 01/23/09 - AT Platform

I downloaded the AT trading platform from Infinity Futures last night, and tested it out today. It's a very simple and easy-to-use platform, with the necessary features like bracket orders, trailing stops, etc. Here's something interesting: I was testing the AT platform on my train ride in to the city this morning, and didn't want to clog up the bandwidth on the mobile air card, so I didn't run Trade Station (my charting platform). I was making Sim trades on the AT platform using Joe Baker's support/resistance levels and watching the price action on the market depth screen in AT, and was up +$500 in less than 20 minutes.

This got me thinking that maybe trading is relatively simple, and I'm over complicating it for myself. Over the next week, I'm going to make an effort to simplify trading as much as possible. I was also thinking about how pit traders figure out where to enter/exit their trades. From what I know, they don't have live charting with indicators like the screen traders, and yet, the pit/floor traders make huge profits. So, are they simply keeping track of pivots and s/r levels, and placing their trades around those areas?

So I tried keeping it simple and simply playing the momentum today. I would enter with market orders, and exit on pre-set limit orders or get stopped out (6 tick stop). Again, I would wait for the momentum to come into the market, and then ride it out by entering on market, and having automatic target orders placed at +2 ticks, +4 ticks and +6 ticks. Many times the +2 and +4 would get hit in less than a minute. I was up over $1000 in a short period of time trading 3-6 contracts on AT using this method.

AT Depth of Market Screen


ES/TICK (3-min)


Market Balance (5-min)