The Prop Trader's Chronicles: Short-Term Proprietary Trading Strategies for Both Bull and Bear Markets

CHAPTER 7

Week One on Live Trading

It's probably not entirely rare for beginner traders to experience something of a honeymoon period in the markets. For some, it might have come from the experience of taking long positions (buying) on tech stocks during the tech boom of the 1990s. For others, it might have been options or the resource sector bull market on the Toronto Stock Exchange. For me, it was the experience of scalping General Electric at a time when the uptick rule was still in effect on the stock. Something about the intraday market action simply clicked for me right off the bat, whether it was a combination of beginner's luck and optimal market conditions for my psychological makeup or a pure lucky streak that triggered just the right mindset to continue the streak under those market conditions. Before anything clicked, however, there was a period that I would consider a combination of luck and a level of extreme focus bred by nervous determination.

The basic level of the trading style taught at my branch of Swift was fairly straightforward.

Liz had explained that the Time & Sales of the S&P 500 index futures contract was an excellent indicator of market sentiment, which made perfect sense, especially for a large conglomerate like GE. I had never checked the statistics behind this assertion, but it sounded logical to me at the time. After all, this was the widely traded stock of a massive multinational conglomerate, whose name was familiar to me on everything from its ...