Monday, March 1, 2010

The Shit Storm that is my Life

I'll try and keep this short, but the past 12 hours have been hellish. Had a great weekend and was looking forward to going live today (I did, more on that in a bit). Last night I logged onto my OEC Trader platform to check charts and just look at the moves. All of my futures data doesn't appear. WTF? I contact OEC support last night at midnight and they couldn't seem to replicate the issues.

In the meantime I had downloaded a new version of OEC (3.5 Demo) to see the new features and was pulling up the futures data with no problems, while 3.4 running concurrently could only reference spot Forex data. Hmmmm. My first thought was that they started filtering who got futures data (I only have a spot Forex account with them). Those fears were soon realized.

Lets get one thing clear - the only reason I opened an account with OEC was because I was explicitly told that no matter what account I had (spot, futures, equity) I could access ALL data. So I opened the account and had spent the last 3 months trading off their futures data with no issues.

Today I was told by customer service that you only get data for your specified account type and that it has always been this way. (I'm not insane, i've been using their data for months). They were befuddled at 1. That I was told all users got all data, and 2. That I had had access to futures data over the past 3 months.

Regardless - imagine my surprise when i'm all ready to go and today of all days the one reliable portion of my trading plan (data and platform) conks out and I'm left out in the cold.

To make matters worse the new versions of OEC have a bug that doesn't allow additional fractional digits to be added to the data box (so my moving average says 135.897 rather than being rounded up to 135.90). I use this functionality in all of my trades and now it was broken.

So now i've got a platform that doesn't work as it did on Friday, and i'm without futures data, and oh yea, today was supposed to be my first day live.

Long story short I did try to trade live today but between getting the data running and fixing platform calculation errors my performance suffered greatly. And it wasn't taking bad trades - it was missing AWESOME trades. So as of 10:30AM i'm calling it quits for the day. I still caught two winners but I conservatively missed $187.50 of profit to this point in time this morning. Were not talking woulda coulda shoulda trades, were talking they were there for the plucking but outside issues (customer support, data, and platform calculations) prevented them being taken as they were all last week.

So i'm just a bit stressed, pissed, and frazzled from the day and it had nothing to do with my trading. So hopefully i'll get things in order and the rest of the week goes smoothly.

I have to say I am amazed at the irony of the situation. This would have to happen to me today. Its like how all of us go out with our new methods and the first trade is always a loser? As if the markets are trying to smack you back down for trying to beat them. And now that I can beat them the only way to sabotage me was through killing my trade platform.

As far as today, I took two great trades, one smaller winner and one runner that I admittedly mismanaged. I thought price was stalling and I jammed my stop up and got +10 but it continued on in favor and the textbook exit was +15. Pretty big mistake but i've got the "live jitters" out of my trading now and we are good to go!


Trade Results:
2 Trades, 2 Wins
Gross P/L: $106.25/per

5 comments:

E-Mini Player said...

Considering the platform issues, I'd say you did damn well!

Matt said...

I'm just trying to get established so I can give you a little competition for most $/contract each week come april! ;)

E-Mini Player said...

You're on ;)

Anonymous said...

that must a v3.5 feature, have had an OEC account for about 2years now (through Daniels) and all 3 equity groups were exclusive to one another.

And the MT4 Forex stuff actually comes from Gain Capital if I am not mistaken. They definitely getting better, although their charting is still a generation behind. But their control center rocks.
Using that control center with their DOM plus third party charting is a great combination.

A lot of folks use that plus Multicharts that you can feed OC data for free..Its another great combination.

Best of luck, your plan looks promising.

randomguy said...

cool. I definitely want to see your trading plan applied to the forex market..