So I’m working my way through videos with the time I have. Confused how someone puts this all together. I have the open house access, watching as many vids as possible. I have demo’d on Nadex and on the Apex Scanner. But what do MOST people do? Trade with a Ninja Trader account? I have the free NT software, downloaded the toolkit, and entered the Elite room. Most of it is just way beyond my level now. So when it’s time to start demo trading using Walls or whatever concept I choose, what is the EASIEST or most common method? Do folks use NinjaTrader looking at charts/prints/indicators then switch to the scanner to enter trades? Or do they just trade off NT after opening an account with them. Sounds like a dumb question, but seems like I need about 9 monitors and twelve eyeballs! I’m re-posting this from another thread of mine due to inactivity, sorry for the very basic question.
Scanner or NinjaTrader?
You basically got it. If trading actual futures contracts or forex, most people trade directly within the NT platform, as it’s just more efficient that way since those are the charts we’re looking at. But you could very well place trades using whatever broker/platform you want. (However, Ninja is recommended not only for the ease of trading within the charts you’re already watching, but also the fees tend to be lower.)
If you’re trading Nadex, you’ll want to use the scanner.
In my opinion, trading futures/forex within the NT platform is more straightforward and a bit easier to handle than having to go between the NT charts and a web browser to place Nadex trades. You can see the advantages of both methods here. More here.
As for screen real estate, it is highly recommended to have at least 2 monitors. People sometimes say “I’m not advanced enough for that,” but in reality it’s not advanced, it just makes your life much easier. If you haven’t tried a multi-monitor setup before, spend a normal day working with it (not even trading, just in your normal computer use) and not only will you never want to go back, you’ll wonder how you got anything done before, using only one.
That is very helpful, thank you for the links to other threads. I can’t seem to ever find what I’m looking for in a search so I apologize for that. As convenient as a NT platform might be, I may start with Nadex to limit risk. Thank you again for you always excellent help.
Think about the most useful keywords for whatever you’re interested in learning about and use the magnifying glass on the top right of the page. For this one I searched for “nadex or futures” and “nadex or ninja” (without quotes). This forum software is actually pretty good with the search results.
Here’s another that may help you, or others in a similar boat…
NinjaTrader, Apex, Nadex, Brokerages, Clearing Houses - What’s the difference between them all?
As for which to start with, in my opinion the only reason to start with Nadex is low account size. That is, if you simply don’t yet have enough funds to setup and trade a futures/forex account. Aside from that, I think the latter is actually a better place to start. It’s kind of like how Darrell describes binary options vs. spreads…binary options tend to be more appealing because they’re easier to understand, but are actually more difficult to trade profitably. Conversely, spreads are a bit harder to grasp, but once you do, they are easier to trade than binaries.
Trading forex/futures contracts is a bit more complex to set up, but I’d say ultimately easier to trade. It’s more difficult to setup because not only do you need more funds to get started than with Nadex, but there’s also a few more considerations to be made (who do I use, what should the fees be, what platform should I use, etc.) In addition, there’s the aspect of learning how to manage stops during your trading. (Although, if you’d be using the scanner to trade spreads on Nadex, you’d want to learn how to use stops there as well anyway.)
In any case, these initial hurdles aren’t very difficult to get over, and once you do get all that set up, and have enough practice using the Chart Trader, as I said, I’m inclined to say it’s easier than trading on Nadex (if you’re using Apex trading systems, at least.)
Recommendations for broker and clearing house can be gained from here or the elite room, and there’s limited options anyway, if you want to trade within the NT platform, which, as mentioned earlier is recommended for ease of trading. NT brokers page is here. Here’s a decent webinar from a NinjaTrader representative going over some of the account setup basics.
If you will have the appropriate amount of funds available for trading forex/futures contracts when you’re ready to go live, then you might simply start off by practicing the Power Trading with Walls system in simulation mode on NinjaTrader (free), and not worry about Nadex. Once you’ve proven yourself profitable, and are ready to transition to live trading with real money, you can then fund an account and just continue within NinjaTrader.
Another aspect that makes forex/futures a bit easier is that you can practice at any time. If you recall, I mentioned in the other thread that there is no “market replay” with Nadex, meaning you can only place Nadex trades (even in demo) using live price action. But with the Market Replay function on NT, you can replay a market any time you want, and place trades on that chart just as if you were trading live. So not only is it a bit more straightforward to place the trades, it’s much easier to get practice doing so as well.
So if you have the funds to comfortably setup a forex/futures account to trade with, you might actually leave Nadex for later.
You have been incredibly helpful and I thank you. As much information as Apex has, they need to hire someone to organize that site! I am literally drowning in information. Just when I’ve gotten the order of videos down I should watch, I get confused as to how to trade and what vehicle. You cleared a lot up here. I was intending to trade Nadex when ready to go live (spreads) to limit risk and I think I read that Darrell prefers that (?) himself. But, while looking charts and indicators over, I find it difficult to anticipate price action or buy points, switch to the scanner, place a demo trade…etc. It’s tedious. For that reason alone trading off NT is appealing. I want to be sure I am profitable in demo before daring to put money out there to lose.
Yes you have it. Darrell does recommend starting with spreads, but only over binary options. If you have the funds to open and trade with a forex/futures account, I don’t think he would try to dissuade you from doing that in favor of starting with Nadex. I think Nadex is just the more popular starting point because of the lower barrier to entry (it’s literally a matter of creating an account and depositing $250 from a debit card, and you can start trading instantly.)
But as for ease of trading and following Apex systems, I think you’ll find using the Chart Trader and the Advanced Trade Management feature on the NinjaTrader platform much easier. You can see how Lori uses it to place and manage trades here.
I think you’ll find that a bit simpler than working with Nadex and the scanner. Of course all of this is not to say it’s not worth trading on Nadex, or that the scanner doesn’t make things much easier. On the contrary, Nadex offers highly useful and unique arrangements that allow traders to take advantage of edges in creative ways, as well as provide hedges for managing risk. And the scanner makes all of that exponentially more accessible. The point is that when compared to a straightforward system like the Power Trading with Walls, and the straightforward mechanics of placing trades within the NinjaTrader platform, Nadex trading takes a bit more to learn and get used to.
So like I was saying, if you have the funds to comfortably setup and trade a forex/futures account, I would focus on that and venture into learning Nadex once you have that down.
I would still recommend the order I listed here. You really don’t have to worry about anything else on the site at this point:
- the “Order Prints for any system” course
- those four selected Open House webinars (one, two, three, four)
- the 4 Powerful Entries “Additional Powerful Setups”
- the “wall” component “Power Trading with “Walls”” (the THT webinar at the top first)
From there, if any of that seemed fuzzy or didn’t make complete sense, the SEES course might help by providing a foundation for those trading strategies.
That’s basically all you need in terms of understanding the Power Trading with Walls system. The only other component you would need is some basic instruction on using the platforms.
If trading within NinjaTrader, you just need to understand how to use Chart Trader (and perhaps Advanced Trade Management (ATM))…
Ninja Trader Blog - Trade Directly on your Charts Chart Trader - NinjaTrader 7 Training NinjaTrader Help - Order Entry
NinjaTrader ATM (don’t need to view all here, maybe just first few) NinjaTrader Help - Advanced Trade Management (ATM)
If trading with Nadex, you would first want to fully understand what spreads (and/or binary options) are, and how they work, then the scanner and how it works, (and perhaps the stop trigger function, and the trailing stop function), and from there it’s just managing trades between the NT charts you’re watching and the scanner where you determine the right contract and execute trades.
As you can see, there’s just a little more to it with Nadex.
Thanks for dropping out of the sky and helping me, holy cow. I never thought funds were a big issue on my end, more so the learning to do what I need to so so I don’t lose all of my capital. When Darrell uses his 5% rule, is he talking trading the scanner/Nadex or NT or both? I’m not even sure at this point what the minimum entry to be “sufficient” is in NT, but would hope it’s less than $5,000. Anything more than that I start banking towards real estate until I’m very solid with this. Thank you again so much.
Yeah obviously it’s sound practice to get everything down first. They say “If you’re not profitable in demo, it’ll be pretty difficult to be profitable live.”
The 5% management model is applicable to anything, really. If you get through the details of that post you’ll see that’s because it doesn’t rely on anything other than the math. It doesn’t matter what you’re talking about trading, because it’s all about risk management based on just your account size. So you just figure 5% of your account and divide by 6. The result is a conservative amount to be risking on each trade. Of course you can do more or less, but this is the recommendation (for reasons explained in the post.)
So to determine how much you would need in your account, you can work backwards from the minimum amount you would risk on a trade. The most ticks for the latest Apex systems is 25 (enter 3 ticks beyond the close of a bar, and the stop is 2 ticks beyond the high/low of that bar, and 10 tick bars). At $5 per tick (NQ), that’s $125 risk per trade. Multiplied by 6, then by 20 (5%), that’s $15k account size.
However, there is flexibility…the “divide by 6” is to allow your trading day to begin with 6 losing trades in a row before you stop. (Or more accurately, you stop once you have a net loss of 6 trades.) There’s nothing that says you have to be able to take that many trades. You could still maintain the same “5% net loss max per day” with less. So for example, you could have an account half that size ($7500) and simply stop once you net 3 losing trades.
Also, as Darrell mentions in the post, the other alternatives are (1) Trade something with lower risk (list of examples in that post), (2) trade a larger percentage with the knowledge that you could potentially have to re-fund the account, (3) trade demo and save your money until you can get the proper account size for what you want to trade.
As he says, the latter takes a lot of discipline, but it costs you nothing but time.
Obviously that’s the way to do it. Or, at the very least, trade demo until you’re consistently profitable, in which case you could start trading live with a smaller account, and be confident that you won’t need so much of a safety buffer.
With $5k account and the 5% model with $125 risk per trade, that would be “if you start your day with two losses in a row, stop until tomorrow.” That’s not terrible. Remember, every win goes toward allowing another trade (of course you have to earn a full $125 plus fees to fully even out a loss), but it’s not like you only get 2, or 3, or 6 trades…it’s about your net earnings for the day. You only have to stop when your account is down by 5%. So if I lose the first trade, but earn that same amount back on the second trade, my account balance is the same, which means I can take at least another 2 trades.
As mentioned, you could also just do a higher percentage. If you proved profitable in demo, you might be comfortable doing a 10% risk per day instead, in which case even with a $5k account, that gives you 4 net losses before you had to stop. (Bear in mind this is figuring 25 tick stop loss on an instrument that features $5/tick. Other instruments may be different.)
As you can see, this is all really just a system to keep a really bad day or two from wiping out an account. As Darrell mentioned, it helps to ensure that it would take a month of losing 6 (or whatever you divide by) net trades every day to wipe out an entire account. “Even for a monkey with a dart board, losing 6 net trades in a day 20 days in a row is hard to do!”
All that being said, we go back to the beginning where we said you don’t really want to be trading with real money until you’re profitable in demo anyway. So if you have some timely investment for your trade money now, you might go ahead and use it for that while you work on learning the system and becoming profitable with it. You can be saving up to fund an account for when you’re ready in the meantime.
Well that cleared up a LOT. Thank you! I’ll read the linked thread later, I do appreciate it.