[ official 2023 sonatine heater thread ] week 2: $3100 -> $64,542

[sonatine]

so yeahhhh its been quite a week.

remember that apex sale i posted about? the 90% off shit? yeah i just kinda martingaled 10 paid accounts out of that (cost $800'ish, lololol) and then paid another $140 per account to get it a lifetime datafeed subscription for live funded trading aaaaand then i spent the last 5 days trading NQ.

each account started with "$50,000" balance which of course is meaningless, they get margin called if i drop below $47500 basically, and now that ive accrued more than $2500 profit in each one, i believe they get margined if i drop below $50,000... something like that. hopefully i dont find out. but yeah thats just something prop firms do.

anyway:






note the bottom 3 accounts i somehow fucked up getting paperwork on so they went live a day or two late. hence the lower balances.

but yeah those are the 10 accounts im currently trading. i have some more that should be funded by late january but we will address that later.


per prop rules at apex, for the first 3 months i can cash out every 10 traded days for up to $2000 per account. and per the special they were offering, im getting a 20% cashout bonus if i cash out during the feb 3 window. so basically i could be cashing out $24k then. after that i need to cash out at least 2 more times in the following 2 months before i am able to withdraw the entire balance of the accounts, if i choose to. which i believe would be around may 1.

which i expect i will because the tax exposure on these is going to be horrific; prop account traders get taxed as contract workers. if i shift money to a cash broker and trade from there, my tax liability drops by half.

anyway a lot can happen between now and then so im not counting chickens / eggs but its looking good tbh.

3 things are really driving this heater;

1) i only take 3 trades a day or less.

2) i _generally_ work off a very specific / bespoke alg for signal generation. occasionally i overrule it if i think i see an auction imbalance or a support/resistance play thats compelling.

3) i havent gotten unlucky so far. ive placed about 15 trades and i think only one of them was an actual loser. and a lot of the others were pretty fucking red before they reversed into sympathy with the signals/thesis that i was working off.

in any case, $46,430.88 profit is my new high score for run-ups. so yeah.

[sonatine]

todays trading. i had fucked up my trade copying software and ended up with only one account entering instead of all 10 so i stopped the stream, fixed it, and restarted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cplplgJof3I

[sonatine]

here's the first trading session, fwiw:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXBHadfGqpI


apologies for any weird narration mistakes but im not at my best at that hour.

[sonatine]

so today is MLK day and the markets are closed but futures are open from 6pm last night until i think noon today... took a couple of very light scalps, trying to maintain $200 profit per day per account minimum until the feb 1 cashout window to make sure i have enough to work with after the fact.




will update PnL in topic at end of the week.

[sonatine]

started off the week with a pretty severe ass whipping... was minding my own business during pajama trading hours when ES shot up like 20 points in about 2 seconds, and i figured someone had just fat fingered a massive market order, so i throw 2 contracts into it short on all 10 accounts and to my horror it shot up another 13 points before i hit the eject button. so yeah that was $13k ethered.

funny thing about that trade... i was watching the tape that night and about an hour or two earlier, someone out of nowhere showed up to buy 200 long ES contracts. normally you see between 1 and 10 lots being bought/sold at night. so to see a 200 lot purchase should have told me that some shit was gonna go down. by my math they probably made about $300k off that event, whatever it was.

anyway currently sitting on +$40,650.

done for the day/week. starting next week with 14 accounts, should have another 4 live by end of the week.

im going to be pretty conservative for the next 2 weeks in my sizing... i want the 20% cashout bonus on feb 1 so theres no point in taking risks that could jeopardize $4000.

[sonatine]

interesting day. i had 4 fresh funded accounts and decided to grossly overplay them because i wanted to add them to the cashout pool coming up in 2 weeks, and because today was the last day of the 80% off sale and i knew i could qualify for fresh accounts for about $800 and 7 days of trading so the hell with it, i was getting like 10-1 in my head.

anyway i spent last night reading about fair value gap (fvg) theory and had an indicator running at night that was just like, Nostradamus time on price action. anyway as is so often the case i blew them up and kissed off about $3800 that i had built up on them last thurs/friday.

no crying in baseball. i think using them on a 10s tick timeframe was an extreme loser choice however, at least during early market session. ill look into it more for pajama trading tho, interesting stuff.

anyway. ran the 10 core accounts up another $500 each for a gross $1200 profit, then registered more test accounts and managed to get them all above the $3000 profit limit to get funded, so in 7 days i'll have 20 funded accounts, 10 will be ready for the full $2000 each cashout in time for the 20% bonus this friday.

good days work overall.

more importantly perhaps i can afford to lose about $750 on each ($7500) and still cash out $24k next week, and 7 of them will still have over $2000 on them after the fact, so things are stable and good.

bit nervous because theres a rumor that apex is going to slow way down on dishing out 80%+ off sales quite so very much so i actually need to preserve/cultivate these accounts.

but yeah fuck it, so far so good.

[sonatine]

still trading 10 accounts, balance sitting at $59,398.


4 new accounts coming online tomorrow, with another 6 funded middle of next week.

lowest balance on the core accounts is $4,690.. im going to put them on ice until after i submit my cashout request on feb 1, that will take their balance down to $2500'ish, effectively giving them the same logical drawdown as the new accounts. from a scaling perspective this would simplify things a great deal.

implementing a 3 point stop loss moving forward because ive found myself staring at -$13,000 or more on the boards on a few occasions and with a $50k bankroll, thats completely ludicrous and emotionally unsustainable.

i should in theory be betting at most 1 emini per $2500, which puts me at something close to a 10% bankroll risk per bet once you factor in slippage and fees. doing so, with an ambitious average of 4 points a day, i dont scale into my full 4 contract per account goal for 46 trading days or about 10 weeks.

by sticking with 2 contracts minimum until i can scale to 3 at $7500, i scale into capacity at just over 5 weeks. and since ive already cashed out $24k when i start trading the full 20 accounts next week, honestly if shit blows up i can just reload and scale normally and charge it to the game.

btw i dont see myself trading more than 4 contracts per account because that gives me an aggregate 80 contracts per bet, which is a really, really big block to be putting in play for a retail trader; i want to see first hand how the market handles absorbing an order like that. is there slippage from market buys/sells? am i getting targetted by algs? do i need to write something to chop up / distribute my entries to avoid becoming a target of opportunity on the tape? these are real concerns.

[sonatine]

ok, i think im done for the week.

paid fees on 4 new accounts last night, so my up front investment is sitting at around $3100, current account balance is $64,542.

trading today was really kinda fucked up. logged in around 10:30am and was just like




i could have and should have probably just waited for market conditions to change, everything was intensely squeezy/trappy with lots of less than explicable high velocity swings and no apparent way to stay in front of them.

for the third time this week the heatmap on bookmaker was just the biggest fucking liar. liquidity would evaporate on the long side of the auction and price action would just hurdle dick first into it. as i type this its doing it again, its fucking absurd.

but i have a quota and i was pretty sure i could catch some quick reversals and i would generally get up 2 points then end up deep into a reversal and down 3 points, and then id scalp my way back to even and this cycle repeated a couple of times until i hit a few good licks in a row called it a day with about $375 profit on each of 14 accounts for about $5250 in the bag.

some general thoughts on the last week;

i have to get out of losing trades quicker. im getting snakecharmed into being down 5+ points on a open position and it will suddenly swing towards whatever my idea of fair value is and i exit even or up a point or two. its happened way too many fucking times and sooner or later its going to go the opposite route and dip another 5 points off that 5 point deficit and im going to be like "lol oops im down $13,000" again.

so i need to unlearn that before it becomes a bigger problem.

regarding indicators / signals, whenever i start trading on a funded account, i definitely try to be aggressive. thats a calculated risk. once i get over the $2500 profit point i can afford to go big game hunting and stay in the pocket for these big 10+ point swings. but early on i just take base hits for a point or two and try to close out every day with an average of 3 points profit per. 3 points profit on 14 accounts is $4200 a day. on the full 20 accounts ill be trading after next week, its $6000. the goal is to hit 10k on each account and loosen up a bit with 4 cons on each. once you start moving more than 80 contracts per position, you turn into more than a snack for predatory algs, you turn into a meal, so ill just keep it mellow and reassess as things evolve.

but yeah real talk, so far the most powerful indicator has proven to be these two:




the graph on the left is the current order book. those are all the pending orders in the auction. price will generally gravitate towards the greater mass of orders waiting to be filled.

on the right, thats 'chart range volume profile'. basically you set the chart so it starts at the 9:30am auction open and what you end up with in that chart, is the accumulated volume of trades executed. and what it tells you, is what price levels the action is taking place at.

areas on CVP with slender zones represent price points where price doesnt stick around, there arent a lot of buyers/sellers in those areas. areas with thick zones represent areas where buyers/seller are doing a ton of biz. price will always naturally gravitate towards those high volume biz areas, but macro or institutional influences will supersede that. so when if price gets pushed north of 4088 here, its because there is a very firm bullish conviction thats compelling buyers to snatch up contracts. sometimes thats news related, sometimes its a huge support level being it that everyone is keeping an eye on. but for example if we trade at 4089 here, im personally long until 4094. why? look at the CVP chart; theres a huge block of orders waiting to be filled there. youve got like 339 orders at 4094 and another 177 orders at 4095 waiting to be filled, price will be attracted to that zone, pending the influence of some event driven change in mood.

or for example, and i see this a lot, price might creep up and the person/desk/alg who submitted that 377 resting order block will decide they arent feeling it and pull the orders. price will almost certainly dip immediately if that happens. algs absolutely feast off those resting order book changes.

and btw, to be clear, when we talk about spoofing, we are talking about people creating huge resting orders on the books that attract price, and then cancelling those orders once price responds to them. to do it occasionally is fine but when you do it systemically, the SEC throws you in pound-you-in-the-ass prison and harvests your money.

i know, tricky balancing act there right?

unless you work for the goldman gold desk, in which case you do it anyway and make 5.5 bn USD from it in a year and then the SEC catches you and the GS lawyers place some calls to all the old friends they used to work with at the SEC and suddenly you just end up paying a "fine" which is somehow less than you made manipulating the market and everyone gets their year end bonuses and the cycle of life continues.


lol. lmao.