Trader Fostering Program on Futures Day Trading
I am a bit at a loss as to how you can read the same book, that inspired Warren Buffet, and take away that trading 600 contracts per month is a way to prosperity.  As a fellow engineer I can say with assurance this speculation scheme is doomed to failure.  Crossing out the word gamble was a mistake.   Instead you should focus on two things.  The first is your core business, which is signal processing.  Work and strive to be the best you can.  Seek out opportunities to increase your income while keeping your costs low.  As an engineer you have an opportunity to earn an above average salary with very low costs. Second would be to warehouse some of those earning and let others who are good at other things work for you.  You may want to read the Jack Bogle books and seek an asset allocation model.  I tend to be more aggressive then he would suggest, but that is a matter of preference.    You don't really have the time, when you focus on your core business, to manage 6 trades a month let alone 600.  Put your contributions on auto pilot and a surprisingly short time you will have a pile of cash. a) Contracts are for future delivery of said underlying. So if you are trading CL (crude oil) futures and don't sell before delivery date, you will be contacted about where you want the oil to be delivered (a warehouse presumably). 1 contract is the equivalent of 1000 barrels. b) 600 contracts depends entirely on what you are trading and how you are trading. If you are trading ES (S&P 500 e-Mini), you can do the 600 contracts in less than a second. c) No fees does not make particular sense. It's entirely possible that you are not trading anything, it's just a fake platform so they can judge your performance. d) The catch typically is that when it's time to pay you, they will avoid you or worst case, disappear. e) Trading is a full-time job, especially for the first 4-5 years when you're only learning the basics. Remember, in futures trading you are trading against all the other professionals who do only this 24/7 for decades. If you are only risking your time with the reward being learning and possibly money, it seems like a good deal. There's typically a catch with these things - like you would have to pay for your data which is very expensive or withdrawing funds is possible only months later.
Generally not, however some brokers may allow it. My previous CFD Broker - CMC Markets, used to allow you to adjust the leverage from the maximum allowed for that stock (say 5%) to 100% of your own money before you place a trade. So obviously if you set it at 100% you pay no interest on holding open long positions overnight. If you can't find a broker that allows this (as I don't think there would be too many around), you can always trade within your account size. For example, if you have an account size of $20,000 then you only take out trades that have a face value up to the $20,000. When you become more experienced and confident you can increase this to 2 or 3 time your account size. Maybe, if you are just starting out, you should first open a virtual account to test your strategies out and get used to using leverage. You should put together a trading plan with position sizing and risk management before starting real trading, and you can test these in your virtual trading before putting real money on the table. Also, if you want to avoid leverage when first starting out, you could always start trading the underlying without any leverage, but you should still have a trading plan in place first. "Of course, which is why you need to have a scoring function / utility function for the ""filters"", i.e. Are you going to value it by rate of accuracy hor by a metric where wins = +2, losses = -1, such that it uses a criteria like that to decide whether or not a filter adds value, (some even use a compound effect i.e. wins = 2+e^(1+w) where w is the consecutive wins).  A metric like the above would capture the trade off between predictive power and profit. Also some traders watch their Max DD very carefully so they may be very risk averse." Recommended? There's really no perfect answer. You need to know the motivations of the participants in the markets that you will be participating in. For instance, the stock market's purpose is to raise capital (make as much money as possible), whereas the commodities-futures market's purpose is to hedge against producing actual goods. The participants in both markets have different reactions to changes in price. Here's how this works in the United States. There's no law regarding your behavior in this matter and you haven't broken any laws. But your broker-dealer has a law that they must follow. It's documented here: The issue is if you buy stock before your sell has settled (before you've received cash) then you're creating money where before none existed (even though it is just for a day or two). The government fears that this excess will cause undue speculation in the security markets. The SEC calls this practice freeriding, because you're spending money you have not yet received. In summary: your broker is not allowed to loan money to an account than is not set-up for loans; it must be a margin account. People with margin account are able to day-trade because they have the ability to use margin (borrow money). Margin Accounts are subject to Pattern Daytrading Rules. The Rules are set forth by FINRA (The Financial Industry Reporting Authority) and are here: No, CFD is not viable as a long term trading strategy.  You have a minimum margin to maintain, and you are given X days to top up your margin should you not meet the margin requirements. Failure to meet margin requirements will result in a forced sell where you are no longer able to hold onto the stock. A long term trading strategy is where you hold onto the stock through the bad times of the company and keep it long enough to see the good times. However, with CFD, you may be forced to sell before you see the good times. In addition, you incur additional lending charges (e.g. 4%-6%) for the ability to leverage. Both of these are futures contracts on the Ibovespa Brasil Sao Paulo Stock Exchange Index; the mini being exactly that, a mini version (or portion) of the regular futures contract. The mini counterpart makes trading the index more affordable to individual investors and hence increase liquidity. From my 15 years of experience, no technical indicator actually ever works. Those teaching technical indicators are either mostly brokers or broker promoted so called technical analysts. And what you really lose in disciplined trading over longer period is the taxes and brokerages. That is why you will see that teachers involved in this field are mostly technical analysts because they can never make money in real markets and believe that they did not adhere to rules or it was an exception case and they are not ready to accept facts. The graph given above for coin flip is really very interesting and proves that every trade you enter has 50% probability of win and lose. Now when you remove the brokerage and taxes from win side of your game, you will always lose. That is why the Warren Buffets of the world are never technical analysts. In fact, they buy when all technical analysts fails. Holding a stock may give pain over longer period but still that is only way to really earn. Diversification is a good friend of all bulls. Another friend of bull is the fact that you can lose 100% but gain any much as 1000%. So if one can work in his limits and keep investing, he can surely make money. So, if you have to invest 100 grand in 10 stocks, but 10 grand in each and then one of the stocks will multiply 10 times in long term to take out cost and others will give profit too... 1-2 stocks will fail totally, 2-3 will remain there where they were, 2-3 will double and 2-3 will multiply 3-4 times. Investor can get approx 15% CAGR earning from stock markets... Cheers !!! If you have your long positions established and are investing responsibly (assuming you know the risks and can accept them), the next step IMO is typically learning hedging - using options or option strategies to solidify positions. Collars (zero cost) and put options are a good place to start your education and they can be put to use to both speculate (what you are effectively doing with short-position trading) or long-term oriented edging. Day trading equites can be lucrative but it is a difficult game to play - learning options (while more complex on speculation) can provide opportunities to solidify positions. Options trading is difficult grounds. I just think the payoff long term to knowing options is much greater than day-trading tactics (because of versatility) There's a whole industry devoted to this.  Professionals use Bloomberg terminals. High Frequency Traders have computers read news feeds for them. Amateurs use trading consoles (like Thinkorswim) to get headlines quickly on stocks. Thanks for your reply. I’m not familiar with the term “Held-For-Trading Security”. My securities are generally held as collateral against my shorts. To clarify, I am just trying to track the “money in” and “money out” entries in my account for the shorts I write. The transaction is relatively straight forward, except there is a ton of information attached! In simple terms, for the ticker CSR and short contract CSRUQ8, the relevant entries look something like this: There are no entries for expiries. I need to ensure that funds are available for future margin calls and assignments. The sale side using covered calls is as involved. "Ignoring the complexities of a standardised and regulated market, a futures contract is simply a contract that requires party A to buy a given amount of a commodity from party B at a specified price. The future can be over something tangible like pork bellies or oil, in which case there is a physical transfer of ""stuff"" or it can be over something intangible like shares. The purpose of the contract is to allow the seller to ""lock-in"" a price so that they are not subject to price fluctuations between the date the contract is entered and the date it is complete; this risk is transferred to the seller who will therefore generally pay a discounted rate from the spot price on the original day. In many cases, the buyer actually wants the ""stuff""; futures contracts between farmers and manufacturers being one example. The farmer who is growing, say, wool will enter a contract to supply 3000kg at $10 per kg (of a given quality etc. there are generally price adjustments detailed for varying quality) with a textile manufacturer to be delivered in 6 months. The spot price today may be $11 - the farmer gives up $1 now to shift the risk of price fluctuations to the manufacturer. When the strike date rolls around the farmer delivers the 3000kg and takes the money - if he has failed to grow at least 3000kg then he must buy it from someone or trigger whatever the penalty clauses in the contract are. For futures over shares and other securities the principle is exactly the same. Say the contract is for 1000 shares of XYZ stock. Party A agrees to sell these for $10 each on a given day to party B. When that day rolls around party A transfers the shares and gets the money. Party A may have owned the shares all along, may have bought them before the settlement day or, if push comes to shove, must buy them on the day of settlement. Notwithstanding when they bought them, if they paid less than $10 they make a profit if they pay more they make a loss.  Generally speaking, you can't settle a futures contract with another futures contract - you have to deliver up what you promised - be it wool or shares." I'm not sure if they're less risky. Maybe I'm being naive, but I feel they're less manipulated.   I wouldn't say I have any hard resources other than dicking around on cmegroup,com. I pay a ton for my daily newsletters so I can't just start forwarding those.   I tend to stay away from strategy books, but Mark Fisher's The Logical Trader is decent. Futures I feel are more of an experience than strategy trade. Especially the spreads. This is where systems come to die. I just called options express, and apparently you need a margin account for futures and options, but you don't NEED margin to trade futures. I will have to debate the merits, but I think I may try playing with it once I build up my regular stock account. Yes it is viable but uncommon. As with everything to do with investment, you have to know what you are doing and must have a plan. I have been successful with long term trading of CFDs for about 4 years now. It is true that the cost of financing to hold positions long term cuts into profits but so do the spreads when you trade frequently. What I have found works well for me is maintaining a portfolio that is low volatility, (e.g. picking a mix of positions that are negatively correlated) has a good sharpe ratio, sound fundamentals (i.e. co-integrated assets - or at least fairly stable correlations) then leveraging a modest amount. "A couple options that I know of: Interactive Brokers offers a ""paper trading"" mode to its account holders that allows you to start with a pretend stack of money and place simulated trades to test trading ideas. They also provide an API that allows you to interface with their platform programmatically for retrieving quotes, placing orders, and the such. As you noted, however, it's not free; you must hold a funded brokerage account in order to qualify for access to their platform. In order to maintain an account, there are minimums for required equity and monthly activity (measured in dollars that you spend on commissions), so you won't get access to their platform without having a decent amount of skin in the game. IB's native API is Java-based; IbPy is an unofficial wrapper that makes the interface available in Python. I've not used IB at all myself, but I've heard good things about their API and its accessibility via IbPy. Edit: IB now supports Python natively via their published API, so using IbPy is no longer needed, unless you wish to use Python 2.x. The officially supported API is based on Python 3. TD Ameritrade also offers an API that is usable by its brokerage clients. They do not offer any such ""paper trading"" mode, so you would need to ""execute"" transactions based on quotes at the corresponding trade times and then keep track of your simulated account history yourself. The API supports quote retrieval, price history, and trade execution, among other functions. TDA might be more attractive than IB if you're looking for a low-cost link into market data, as I believe their minimum-equity levels are lower. To get access, you'll need to sign up for an API developer account, which I believe requires an NDA. I don't believe there is an official Python implementation of the API, but if you're a capable Python writer, you shouldn't have trouble hooking up to the published interfaces. Some caveats: as when doing any strategy backtesting, you'll want to be sure to be pessimistic when doing so, so your optimism doesn't make your trades look more successful than they would be in the real world. At a minimum, you'll want to ensure that your simulations transact at the posted bid/ask prices, not necessarily the last trade's price, as well as any commissions and fees associated with the trade. A more robust scheme would also take into account the depth of the order book (also known as level 2 quotes), which can cause additional slippage in the prices at which you buy/sell your security. An even more robust scheme would take into account the potential latency of trade execution, looking at all prices over some time period that covers the maximum expected latency and simulating the trade at the worst-possible price."