@PandaWarrior: your thinking is completely counter-intuitive: the quantity you trade is a function of your equity, not your expectation of the trade. you want to constantly increase your size as you increase your equity, so that you get the maximum geometric growth of your capital given the characteristics of the return stream, and your tolerance for risk. you may want to reduce your size, when there's greater volatility, and increase your size when there's less volatility, but you want to be trading the optimal size relative your account size, whether you are in a range trade looking for 3 or 4 points, or in a trend trade looking for 10 or more points. in fact, if you are able to catch a trend, you should be adding aggressively, and levering up a fairly good multiple of your normal unit size. this is crucial, if you are going to be pulling a percentage of your profits out of your account to live on. otherwise, you can kiss your account adios, my friend.

adding to a winner is probably the hardest thing to do in trading, at least emotionally. I'm doing ok managing my initial position, but whenever I add to it, my pulse increases, and every tick in the wrong direction induces nightmarish visions and a feeling of pending disaster. I quite accept the truth that the outcome of my last trade has no bearings whatsoever with the new one, but I just cant seem to implement this belief when I have an active position (maybe I just don't believe it enough yet). this is so irrational and I've tried to analyze the cause of it but couldn't reach any productive conclusion, apart from the obvious one that I'm just a coward. however, despite this irrational behavior my account has been growing and it doesn't look like I'll blow it any time soon. maybe I just haven't traded long enough. anyway what I'm trying to say is that I recognize the importance of adding to winners, and I applaud/admire you for being able to do it flawlessly. may I ask how? any secret that you don't mind sharing?

So I had an unrecoverable computer crash this week....which meant I had to buy a new computer. Being a Mac fan , I was loath to spend money on a PC and wanted to buy something that would take care of my trading needs and nothing more. I do everything else on my Mac.

Its been 6-7 years since I bought a computer and was unprepared for the trauma this entails. I spent some time researching online using my 10 year old Macbook Pro which has never once given me even the slightest problem and simply couldn't find anything I thought I would want in the price range I wanted.

So off to Best Buy I went after stopping at Staples and even Walmart to look at machines.

At Best Buy I found a reasonably priced machine, with 6GB of Ram, a nice hard drive and an i5 processor. More than enough for my needs. It was on sale and they even gave me $100 trade in for my old machine. Nice

Got it home and thats when the evil empire struck. I have to say, setting up the new machine was at first, a nightmare of fighting microsoft for the rights to my own property. They wanted me to be locked into their ecosystem even more than Apple does. I couldn't even begin to set it up without creating microsoft accounts. But eventually I got around all that and got the new thing set up.

I have to say, other than the strong arm tactics of microsoft, I like the new computer, its pretty fast, runs NT nicely, and once I got rid of the silly 8.1 interface, it was super easy to use. IT doesn't reproduce color the same way my old machine did. Actually not even close but I suppose there are settings for that. I'll dive into those settings next week.

I tried for windows 7 but no one had them in stock locally and I didn't want to wait for one to be shipped so I just capitulated and got 8.1. I don't like much about its user interface. It came preinstalled with all kinds of useless apps and attempts to get me to buy subscriptions for several different programs. To me, these kinds of tactics should be outlawed. If I want those apps, I'll find them and buy them, don't try to force me to buy them.

It does have a sense of humor though, I'm downloading my backups from drop box and the little drop box icon says in place of the time remaining "a long time, grab a snickers". I thought that was funny.

Anyway, I have a new machine for better or worse.

Well don't leave us hanging, man !! What brand machine did you get? ... desktop or notebook?

i5 with 8g ram... Is plenty for a dedicated trading computer. Trading data is a lot like audio. It comes in at real time, so not computing power is needed for average trading / audio recording ... My i5 Maxine runs an average of 10%....


Aj

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

You need DisplayPort instead of HDMI.

Sent from my LG Optimus G Pro

The only option i have is an HDMI output and my monitor is DVI. Its 6 years old.

The laptop has HD capability but apparently can only support the monitor at 1200X800