First, a quick update on my Tradestation application. Still have yet to receive confirmation of the account being open so I am unable to trade today. They have received the paperwork so it should be processed shortly.

The time off has given me some time to do a little studying and I recently finished a new and excellent book by John Carter entitled “Mastering the Trade”

It is different from most other trading books out there in that it doesn’t assume that you know absolutely nothing about how the market works and basic technical analysis already and dives right into some issue not usually covered by other books such as the kind of computer Workstation, Hardware, & Software that you should be running to both optimize your time & space as well as protect yourself in the case of the inevitable outage.

Helpful websites & resources are also included, but I’ll post a number of them here.

A great deal of the book deals with the setups that the Author uses in the Futures markets mainly (although most will work equally as well in the Equity markets too). This is of interest to me because for the first time, I am opening a futures account and trying to broaden my horizons beyond just stocks.

John Carter and Hubert Senters have a website that has some very informative free daily videos: www.tradethemarkets.com that I would highly recommend everyone take a look at. Their daily educational videos run 5-10 minutes and are totally free. For a taste of what their videos are like, here are the most recent ones by Hubert Senters:

part1- How to buy a pull back.

part2- How to use pit noise, internals and tape to gauge if it will continue.

part3- Progaming Ttrading.

part4- Put Call Ratio for Esiganl users, questions and how to add sound alert to Tradestion.

part5- PC Hardware, LCDs Screens, Desks, lcd arms, Chairs and other stuff.

John Carter’s Daily Video

I checked out their “Indicators” tab on TradeTheMarkets.com and watched those videos as well and got some useful info. I wouldn’t actually purchase their indicators from them, but you can make them yourself with Tradestation or try to find them in an Indicator Library

Hopefully you guys will find something usefull here. I took their advice on a video card and purchased a Matrox G200 MMS Quad off of Ebay (Retails for anywhere between $350-600) but I recently snagged one for $60 off of Ebay. Make sure you search for the QUAD and not the DUAL card as the former supports up to 4 monitors while the latter only 2. Check this link here for vendors & description if you’re interested.

I’ll let you know when I have access to RT Charts again. Until them, I’m going to just sort of lay low and do some reading and writing.

Good trading!

Jason