mile high'ish prospectus:

im going to drink alg milkshakes one tiny sip at a time until i run 1k up to a whole ass bar.

obviously i wont be doing this correctly, safely, or sanely by any reasonable metric because its been my experience that if you want to make a million dollars in 3 years, you better have some gamble in you. and so...

this is the way:

phase 1: getting from 1k to 10k.

PDT rules mean i can place 3 day trades (ruthless scalps) in a 5 business day period, essentially. so right off the bat i need to be super selective where i enter positions, and i need to be super risk averse regarding exits. so, for the first 16 weeks or so is going to be trying to walk away from 3 trades 15% richer every week. obviously this is insane and impossible, so to keep things fair for the algs i'll be max betting my entire roll every single time.

target selection is generated from a proprietary hidden markov alg using candidates generated from ThinkOrSwim filters, btw.

also one of the hallmarks of this phase is going to be exiting positions FAST. like first hint of momentum lost and i rack up and dip. honestly this is pretty much the hardest part because getting out of a position with .5% growth booked and watching it jump another 2% is going to be emotionally taxing potentially. see FOMO. so this is really where target selection gets even more important; stocks with long smooth upswings are ideal here, schitzy stocks that are like leaves in the wind from minute to minute are avoided.

phase 2: 10k to 25k

so at this point ill likely limit my max bets to 10k and probably spend a little more time in a position before i exit. estimated time to get to 25k here is about 10 weeks.

phase 3: 25k to 1m

so at this point, PDT restrictions drop entirely so i can place as many day trades as i want. effectively im swapping one form of risk for another however. i can now leave a trade thats going sideways with zero concerns, which is great. but it can also make me less discriminating regarding entries, and thats a potential death sentence.

so my goal here is to limit myself to 1 or maybe 2 large plays a day, tops, which is easier said than done of course, but to entertain more risk regarding exit points.

so the strat here is basically to stick with 5k max bets, rack up a meaningful safety cushion to stay above the 25k PDT limit, and then take larger and larger positions that scale in proportion to that cushion.

the other big x factor at this point is who knows wtf the markets going to be doing in 28 weeks. if things are fallow, i need to be adapt to that. but assuming its acting anything like its acting now as a baseline, i should be able to chip up to 1m in about 2.5 years.

first scalp in the books at +142 profit, or about +16%.

Could you explain this a bit more? Does ThinkOrSwim let you export data? You're then feeding this into a machine learning model that you wrote yourself?

For context I have been making rudimentary RNNs as a hobby, so I'm not a complete noob, but close enough to one.

first off, hello and welcome <3

so first off let me say that i primarily use HMMs for swing trading, not scalps, because i only recently set something up to start grabbing intraday stock prices via an API call to ally.com, so im pretty much relying on finance.yahoo.com for snapshots of daily price movement and finviz for broader trends.. so the shorter term stuff is very much a work in progress, and my hope eventually is to get a paid T&S feed from someone and start going apeshit with that but until then im kinda hamstrung. but what ive found is that very often, stocks that tend to play well for swing trades often have intraday momentum which plays well into scalp opportunities, so i cherry pick swing opportunities to place in a ToS scalp watchlist basically.

btw whether or not the alg approach is within measurable distance of being superior to just hunting MACD crossovers is debatable. jim simons renaissance fund has been seeing like 140% returns using HMM iirc so its clearly viable but he also hires away talent from NSA gigs to tune his algs and hunt for patterns and all that so ymmv.

ToS can export Scan filter results but i cant hook into it to monitor T&S in real time, for example, which is frustrating. honestly if you want to fetch a particular securities price every minute or so, i suggest you sign up with ally.com because for all their faults, their API is well documented.

Where's the popcorn emoji when I need it? GLGL

oooooooo good call, and thank you!

I have been playing the start with grand and try and double it as many times in a year game for years, never ends badly, and have had a couple of pretty good years, although it can become very scary when your roll starts becoming "real" money. My two best years, I chickened out at the end because it was too much money to play fast and loose with.
My end game is similar to Sonatine's except I am shooting for rich, oversexed, New Zealand cougar.

honestly your dream is beautiful and i might pivot to it.

on 2 occasions ive built low 4 digit rolls into mid 5 digit rolls in the market and on both occasions ive blown them up in less than 4 hours of trading. no, really.

since that time ive learned a lot about indicators, confirmation, so on, but ultimately this is a patience/emotional discipline issue and i wont know if ive got those licked until i get there again.

so im not going to beat myself up if i have to reload and start a new challenge, honestly. the goal is the goal, im not going to get hung up on how i get there.

ok, took my first big hit today. would have been nice to not have this happen on day 2 but it is what it is.

woke up, decided to make a play on AMD. looked really ripe, i liked my indicators, and everything was super hot because SPY blew up overnight. normally i dont like to do morning momentum plays because they go bad so, so, so fast but i felt confident.

so in thinkorswim... you can link your chart window, your watchlist, and your trade window together so they all are focused on the same stock at the same time. remember, this is a new account i set up specifically for this. no margin, etc.

so yeah i rack up an option contract, hit buy, go to my holdings window. where is the AMD option. why do i have an AMZN option.

i didnt link the trade window with the other windows. i was now balls deep in AMZN.

and AMZN was making money, as it happens. so im like ok cool lets just roll with this then.

and very, very quickly, AMZN stopped making money, reversed momentum, and i got VIX crushed down to $505 by the time i bailed.







charge it to the game. tomorrows another day.

hit AAPL for a quick $30. ill take a small green over a big red all day.

things felt really squishy, market movement wise. i wanted to hit PGNY but it has no volume behind it, so the spreads on its options are just pure dogshit.

shorted ROKU for another $17, cant be mad.

Ok first week wrap-up.

Today was green, not by much but green:




The YUMC play went great, couldnt be happier there. The ACB play just got caught in the wind and reversed on me so I hit eject. BSX was a tiny little lotto play, didnt shake out but it had potential.

Up about $20 today.


Big picture...:

4 days of trading. 3 green, 1 red. Red day was a massive, massive fuckup caused by a software configuration issue, that went extremely south extremely fast while I tried to figure out what the fuck had just happened and how I should respond. 100% my fault. Again, charge it to the game.

Looking more closely at the green days, I feel like I need to stop trying to surf the morning momentum waves. So far its not been as profitable or consistent as I need. If I wait a few hours, I can get a better read on behavior and make more informed decisions. So thats going to be my MO next week.


Numbers:

Starting roll: $1000

Losses: $-398

Fees: $44

Current roll: $568


LOLBARGIRLAMENTS FUND: -43.2%

+$93 off a ZM put.

could have made more if i stayed in the trade longer but +14% is a valid profit target. plus as i type this, its already climbed from -3.15% to -2.55% so i could have gotten stomped out here fast if i tried to get slick for another 3-4%. this was a good trade.

dumped a UAL call at -$2.00 because it lost momentum. never really went beyond .5% profit and didnt look like it was going to. basically rolled the dice on this trade in case it blew up another 4-5% but it wasnt on the menu, and we are still seeing articles about middle seat drama on planes so no point in fighting the current here.




roll: $655.84

holding TRIP call and MRNA put overnight. the MRNA put is going bad, real bad, but im hedged slightly by the TRIP positions. again normally i dont swing trade but when the market has this much momentum, im not averse to making some very minor plays on it.

roll $661.16