www.EMINIZ.com
Want to sit at home and trade for a few hours and then spend the rest of your time enjoying life? Who wouldn't want to? My guess is that if you didn't have this daydream at least once in your life, you wouldn't be reading this magazine. It isn't difficult to open up a futures trading account, online or otherwise, but before you do, you'll have to decide what you want to trade and how you want to trade it. Just like with anything else, you need a game plan. To help you create that game plan, longtime STOCKS & COMMODITIES contributor John F. Ehlers has set up a website, www.eMiniZ.com, for those who trade or wish to trade emini futures contracts. The tradables include emini Standard & Poor's 500, emini NASDAQ 100, emini S&P Midcap 400, emini Russell 2000, and the emini Dow. There are three levels you can choose from: silver, gold, and platinum, depending on which index you wish to trade plus your trading account size. The prices can be found on the website.
INTERFACE
The site has an easy-to-follow interface prominently displaying the
end-of-day update. This includes the current positions together with a
chart displaying the dollar gain (Figure 1). Across the top of the page
are tabs for charts, performances, trades, and statistics (in addition
to the start page). The chart tab displays price charts with the buy/sell
signals for each of the indexes. You can view them individually or for
your portfolio. You also have the option to change the periodicity (three
months, six months, nine months, and one year). The trade tab displays
the trades with their profit/loss as a bar chart as well as a table format.
The performance of the system for each index or your portfolio can be seen
under the performance tab. And if you want to see the probability of the
performance of your system, you can find it under the statistics tab.
FIGURE 1: WWW.EMINIZ.COM
Subscribers to the website receive a daily email stating the current positions based on your portfolio. Those of you who think that a solid trading system will bring forth profits at all times will get a shot of reality when you visit this site. Here, you have a system that shows great results based on the performance reports, one that has been developed by someone who is very knowledgeable about trading systems.
Still, you will notice times when the system will experience drawdowns. Any trader who trades the mini contracts or intends to at some time in the near future should visit eMiniZ.com. This website reduces the learning curve and helps you create your game plan.
--Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan, Editor
www.TRADINGTHECHARTS.com
What's in a message-board? Well, if that message-board is TradingTheCharts.com, then the answer is "A boon for technical traders," that's what.
FIGURE 2: TRADINGTHECHARTS.COM HOME PAGE
Increasingly, certain forms of communication like message-boards and personal webpages (or blogs) seem to have become the veritable architecture of the Internet cityscape. And the near-ubiquity of these two forms says a great deal about what people find most useful about the Internet. Insofar as I have pointed to a few of what I consider the most interesting personal webpages and blogs out there for traders--with more to come--it is also worth pointing out those places where traders spend time together talking shop, comparing notes, and plotting their next move in the market.
TradingTheCharts.com is one of those places. On the surface, TradingTheCharts appears to be just like any other message-board you might find on the Internet where fans get together to learn, speculate and gossip about the home team's winning streak, the latest LINUX kernel improvement, or the best time to plant dahlias for the summer garden. TradingTheCharts.com consists of five main forums--a welcome forum (which includes a chat room and a set of "featured charts and posts" accessible for free for nonsubscribers), a financial forum, market commentary, commodities, and tools of the trade. Each forum is further divided--for example, the financial forum is divided into subject areas: "Indices," "Cycles," "Currencies," "Interest rates," "Stocks," and "Options." And each of these subject areas is further subdivided into what TradingTheCharts calls "subforums"--for example, the "Cycles" subject area currently has "Market Turning Points by Andre," "Delta Phenomenon," "Gann," "Astro," and "Bradley, Kondratieff Wave, 4-Year Cycle."
Judging by where user posts turn up most often, the most popular threads at TradingTheCharts.com can be found in the financial and commodities forums, with topics on indexes, cycles, and metals being where most of the action is. Overall, the message-boards appear to have a nice distribution of comment across a variety of topics. When I visited TradingTheCharts.com in early July, there were more than 30 members online (membership, by the way, is $30 a month as part of a special introductory offer, with $50 the regular price) out of a total membership of more than 1,500.
The main focus of our Websites For Traders column is on those resources available to traders for free (or on websites that have significant resources available to nonpaying visitors). As such, some attention should be drawn to the welcome forum's "Featured Charts and Posts" section. As of early July, these featured charts and posts included such threads as "Astro comments," "The ending diagonal starting in April 2006" (an Elliott wave-oriented article), "W.D. Gann is back," and "The bull trap triangle strikes again!" Each of these threads was initiated by "spwaver," who is the site administrator and host of TradingTheCharts.com, and the posts include a variety of charts interspersed with the author's commentary as well as those from forum members.
All that said, I did want to peek inside TradingTheCharts.com to get an idea of what those who decide to subscribe could look forward to-for example, the real-time chat room, which is probably one of the first places a new subscriber would want to check out during market hours.
What stands out in the subscribers' area (which makes up most of the website's offerings) is the amount of participation by the site's host, Dominick, who goes by "spwaver." In most message-boards, moderators and hosts tend to be relatively shadowy figures or, like the police, entities that tend to show up only when there is bad news. So it is interesting to come across a message-board in which the host is a regular presence, providing charts and asking challenging questions of his subscribers, as well as addressing the sort of maintenance issues that invariably come up in an online forum ("fake names," valid email addresses, patroling for "trolls," and so on).
Recently, TradingTheCharts.com offered a small, six-month trial subscription for prospective new members. I can only hope that Dominick will consider another free trial period sometime in the future, because while my jury is still out on the idea of paid message-boards in general, the amount of technical information exchange possible at TradingTheCharts is almost staggering.
Post after post and page after page of the message-board are filled with charts (or, often, links to charts) with all manner of annotation. Imagine taking snapshots of the cluttered and crowded work desks of some of your favorite technicians, group them by topic and theme, and somehow display them in front of you; then you'd begin to come close to what TradingTheCharts offers the technical trader. The fact that no manner of sound analysis is looked down on helps promote the kind of online atmosphere that is almost mandatory for insightful, fresh ideas to emerge. And if you've ever thought about starting your own financial/trading blog, or your own newsletter, or even just contributing to a financial publication like Working-Money.com (hint hint), then a message-board like TradingTheCharts.com would be an excellent way of cutting your teeth on the game of making clear, concise observations on market behavior and backing those observations up with well-annotated, explanatory charts.
It is said that trading the markets is a lonely lot. Market Wizard Linda Bradford Raschke once noted in an interview that after years of being a successful floor trader, one of the things that surprised her after setting up her home trading office was the isolation. "I got lonely," she commented.
I don't doubt that many at-home traders-whether winning or losing-often feel this way. When a trader is winning she wants to share the good news with the world. And when a trader is losing, well, nothing loves company like misery. TradingTheCharts.com may not replace the kind of trader's bar that many at-home traders like to imagine exists for traders to get together at the end of the trading day to cheer their victories and drown their losses. But it might be a far better alternative to trying to beat the markets alone.
--David Penn, Technical Writer
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Originally published in the September 2006 issue of Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES magazine.
All rights reserved. © Copyright 2006, Technical Analysis, Inc.