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Lightspeed Financial Trading Platform Demo: Behind The Trades | Ep. #3

Lightspeed Financial Trading Platform Demo: Behind The Trades | Ep. #3

 

Update: This podcast episode (transcribed below) was originally posted in 2017. Please note that Warrior Trading no longer offers free chat days or participates in rebate programs with brokerages. If you are interested in how you can explore our community before purchasing a full membership, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team.

Transcript from Lightspeed Financial Trading Platform Demo

All right guys, today is Friday and that means it’s time for another episode of Behind the Trades. Today we’re gonna be talking about Lightspeed Financial, I’m gonna do a platform demo where I’m gonna show you how to set up your Lightspeed desktop trading application, I’ll give you a walkthrough of how I’ve used it in the past. And we’re also gonna break down the benefits of using Lightspeed, but we’re also gonna talk about what active traders look for when we’re searching for a good broker. We have a list of the top stock brokers, the top brokers in my mind are SpeedTrader, SureTrader and Lightspeed. Interactive Brokers is also high on the list, because of the fact that you can use DAS Trader when you’re trading with Interactive Brokers.

So, before we do that, let’s do a little overview of the game plan for today. We’ll of course jump in to my weekly stats. I’ll give you a breakdown of what worked this week, what didn’t work, including my biggest winner and my biggest loser. We’re also gonna talk a little bit about technical analysis, but, primarily we’ll be inside the Lightspeed platform, going through how to get that set up, how to add your technicals to those charts, and how to get the hotkeys set up, and direct access routing.

Free Chat Monday Stats

Once again, we had another awesome free chat day on Monday which was fantastic. We had again just over 2,300 traders that came through, I think this Monday was closer to 2,500 traders, so, that was very exciting and we’ll be hosting another free chat day this coming Monday. But then remember, President’s Day weekend, there’ll be a Monday bank holiday on Monday the 20th, so we’ll be skipping that Monday. But, this coming Monday the 13th, we’ll have another free chat day, so you guys can join us in the chat room and get a sense of what it’s like to be a part of the Warrior Trading community.

Weekly Day Trading Statistics

My weekly stats. A little disappointing, honestly, I’m disappointed in my trading this week. This is not at all the way I was hoping to trade on I think the fifth week of this 100k challenge. It was good until yesterday and today, and yesterday and today I really gave back some profits. On Monday I made a thousand bucks, on Tuesday I made 3,000, on Wednesday I made 10,000. So, three really solid days up $14,000. And then yesterday I lost four grand, and today I lost 5,300. I really gave back almost everything I made on Wednesday, and that leaves me with just $5,104 profit this week. So, my starting balance … Actually, this is wrong. This is where I started this week and I will end this week right around $45,000, I forgot to update that.

So, starting balance on Monday will be $45,000. That’s fine, it’s good, $5,000 is a good 10% gain in one week, but I’m really not pleased with the fact that I had two back to back big red days. One of the trades that we’ll talk about today, my worst trade of the week, was the trade from yesterday. The trade today that I lost five grand on, it really wasn’t a bad trade, I just was being aggressive and I was looking for a bigger move, I had 20,000 shares, I was up maybe $8,000, I was thinking that it was going to squeeze through high of day and then it dropped 80 cents. And I got filled on the bottom with slippage. It’s pretty brutal, really brutal to go from up almost $10,000, to down five grand. Very disappointing, very frustrating, that’s the challenge with taking large size.

It’s the reason I was able to make 10,000 on Wednesday, and if that trade had worked, it could have been a $20,000 winner, very easily, I mean very easily, it could have even been more than that. And, this was me stepping up to the plate and wanting I suppose a grand slam. I didn’t just want to get on first base, or just get on second base, I wanted to really hit the ball out of the park, and that’s why I didn’t sell when I was up, I kept holding thinking that it was strong, it was gonna go through the highs, I was gonna see this pattern through. Unfortunately it ended up going the wrong way.

On the other hand, the best trade of the week, will be a trade where I did something very, very similar and it worked. The disappointing thing is that on that trade, I was only holding 6,000 shares, and so the best trade of the week was only a $3,000 winner. With 20,000 shares, it would’ve been a $10,000 winner, so, that’s just kind of the luck of the draw that the trade that I get sized up really heavily on, goes against me, and the one that I have smaller size on ends up working so well. But, the result is that this is a green week, $5,000 profit. I made about $8,000 last week. Actually, no, last week was more than that, let’s see. Last week was $26,000, I was looking at the week before.

But, in any case, this was a pretty decent week, it could’ve been better, but, green is good so we’ll just keep grinding along. If I have to scale back and trade with smaller size for a couple of days while we wait for momentum to come back into the market, that’s what I’ll do. Obviously though I would prefer to keep seeing really good opportunities. So, my profit/loss ratio this week, an improvement over last week, average winners were 16 cents per share and average losers were 11 cents, which is a 1.45:1 profit/loss ratio. That’s not bad. What’s disappointing is that my accuracy dropped from 95% last week, down to 57% this week. I just didn’t have the accuracy. Today I took four trades and I lost on three out of four. Yesterday I took four trades and I lost on three out of four.

The day before where I made 10 grand, I took five trades and made money on four out of five. So, it just seems like, I’m either hot or I’m not, and whether it’s me or the market or a combination of things, I’m not sure. But, when I have back to back days where I’m off my game, it’s a little annoying and can definitely get to me. This is not the way I like to go into the weekend. But, at the same time, I’m still the trader who took $583 and turned it into what’s now $45,000, so I don’t have any right to really sulk that much. But these losses will keep you humble. It’s a reminder that the market is not afraid to slap you in the face, and I got slapped in the face two days in a row.

So, I’ll be back on Monday, a little bit more humble as a result of losing $9,000 over the last two days. At the same time I’m not gonna really change my strategy, my strategy works, the strategy is what’s gotten me to where I am today. I just need to always be mindful of my position sizing, not size too heavily when the market is choppy, not be afraid to take profits when I have it. Although, the spreads were such an issue this morning on that one trade, that the profit, I don’t know that I could’ve really sold and taken that 10 grand or eight grand, or whatever it was.

The biggest challenge of doing this $100,000 challenge, the biggest frustration for me is that I’m doing it in such a public way and so there’s definitely ridicule when I have a couple of back to back red days. People like to trash talk. But, you know what, once they go and take 500 and turn it into 45 grand and show with the statements that they did it, I don’t know that there’s any validity to the stuff that they say. I’ll try not to let that get to me. You guys are here on a journey to 100 grand, through the ups, the downs, today’s a little a bit of a pull back and not happy about it, but we’ll bounce back.

 

“The Best Of” Behind The Trades Ep. 3

Let’s, on a happier note, talk about the best trade of the week. No one talk about the worst trade of the week. So the best trade of the week was on the 7th, on MYOS, this is a $2,900 winner. Disappointing that it was only with 6,000 shares, but this was such a clean five minute setup. We got this nice move here from 3.80, 3.60, all the way up to $5, and during that move I wanted to get in, I wanted to just jump in. I didn’t want to wait for the pull back, but I had told myself last week, after having that $13,000 loss on last Tuesday, that I would wait for five minute setups as much as I could, I would try to avoid chasing on the one minute chart.

This is one of those times where I would’ve done well if I had chased it, but that’s the way it always is. So I didn’t chase it, I wait for the pull back. We get the pull back down to the moving average, and as it taps that nine moving average I said, “Okay guys, first five minute candle to make a new high as my entry, that’s gonna be 4.60. Target is high of day.” Super simple. Got in, 6,000 shares, 4.60 pops up to 5.20, 2,900 bucks like that. Now that was about 45 cents per share, I certainly could’ve taken 10,000, I could’ve taken 20,000. I think I didn’t have as much of a cushion on the day, I was only up a couple hundred bucks on one trade and I was kind of like “Well let’s just see if it’ll work.”

I started with 6,000. I tried to add 3,000 to get me up to 9,000, and I was planning on going up to 12,000, but the two times I tried to add, either the price popped up before I could even press the buy button, or it popped up and I didn’t get filled. So, ended up with only 3 grand on that one, which is fine, that’s good money, but it had the potential to be a lot more. The good news is, it was a good quality setup and it worked almost exactly how I wanted it to.

 

“The Worst Of” Behind The Trades Ep. 3

Now, the trade that I took today on KBSF is not what I’m gonna call the worst trade of the week, I’m gonna call RESN the worst trade of the week. This was my trade yesterday. This one was my worst trade of the week because it’s not a very good pattern, and I really just probably shouldn’t have even taken the trade at all. I got in this with 12,500 shares at 4.98, right here, for the break at $5. It had already popped up 25 cents, and it popped and I thought it was really gonna go, I thought it had a lot more potential. I thought I’d get in, daily chart had room up towards 5.50, so I was like “Okay, we’re above the 200 on the daily, it looks strong, it’s on a high day scanner, I’m gonna jump in.”

I jump in, it pops up to 5.10, I’m up 1,200 bucks, and then in one minute candle it drops down to 4.68. Boom, I’m down four grand. And I was like, “Wow, all right, I guess I’m gonna see this through.” At this point it dropped so fast that even if I’d had a live stop, the slippage would’ve killed me, I would’ve filled at the bottom, so I would’ve lost probably 4,500 bucks. So I said, “All right, well I’ll just hold through this pullback.” It drops down, it pops back up, and so right in here I was like, “Okay, you know what? This is flagging, but my concern is that the volume is so low.” I ended up stopping out at the bottom of this candle wick right here, took the $3,400 loss. Then it ended up coming up before the end of the day back to $5.

I wouldn’t have held it all day long, but unfortunately it was one of those trades that, I had the right idea with this flag, it just didn’t work out because there wasn’t volume and my initial entry was way too high. Now I’m just gonna step out of this for one second, let’s see. Step out of the webinar and I’m gonna show you KBSF. Sorry, this one’s giving me a hard time. And show you what my thought process was on this little guy today. So on this little guy, I wanted to get in as soon as the bell rang. I tried to get in at 5.50 with 5,000 shares. I filled 85 shares, only 85 shares. It pops up to a high of 6.41, would’ve been $5,000, but no, of course not. Only $80. It’s halted, it resumes higher, and as it resumes I bought out of the halt, 7,500 shares. I buy out of the halt, it squeezes up to a high of around $8, 8.38. I sold into that move and I made $2,200.

And then it’s consolidating on the one minute, we’ll pull back the one minute chart here. I got back in right here, first one minute candle to make a new high at 8.80. We popped up to a high of 8.20, so I was up 40 cents. I only got a partial fill, and then it dropped back down and I stopped out and took a loss. So I was like, “All right, this is frustrating.” And then I got back in the third time. The third time was for the first five minute candle to make a new high, long 7,500 shares over 8.38. We pop up to a high of 8.63 and then drop down to 8.06. I stop out, I lost over 1,000 bucks, gave back more than half of my first trade. And I said, “Okay, you know what? I’m gonna sit tight. I think this is, I’m just gonna wait for a five minute pullback.” This pulls back.

First five minute candle to make a new high was at 10 a.m. as we broke over 7.49, 7.50. That really looked good to me. This looked so similar to the setup we saw in MYOS. So I jumped in this and I really thought this was gonna go from 7.50 all the way back up to the high of day. I really did, it looked solid. We popped up to eight, was up 50 cents. Didn’t work. Pulled back down to 7.15 and I held through the pullback. We come back a second time up to eight, up to a high of 8.15, and then we all of a sudden drop down to 7.10 and that’s where I lost almost a full point, or at least 50 cents in slippage.

So it’s not that this was even a bad quality setup, that’s why I’m not gonna call it the worst trade of the week, because the setup was fine. I could’ve sold sooner. I could’ve tried to take profit sooner. Maybe I shouldn’t have had so much size. But this could’ve also just as easily, I mean really toss of a coin, just as easily gone back to 8.50, 8.60, squeezed through $9, and been one of the biggest trades of the year. It was the right setup, just didn’t work. I think that one of the issues with this one, for some reason this one, I’m just gonna look at the high of day momo scanner. It was on the scanner, let’s see, 9.36. It was on the scanners. For whatever reason, it just didn’t catch people’s attention, and I’m not sure why that was.

 

Reverse Split Potential

It was a reverse split, and reverse splits are not always the cleanest setups, but we’ve seen some good action on GEVO and on GBSN, so we’ve seen some good reverse split opportunities, but unfortunately this one just didn’t work out. So I ended up giving back the profit I made on the first trade. I kind of missed the proper entry, chased a little bit, didn’t make as much as I wanted to. Got back in for the five minute setup, probably risking a little too much. And then I certainly wasn’t expecting to get that type of slippage. Maybe I should have expected that, but in any case took the loss on that one.

Definitely a little disappointing. Was not really what I was hoping to have happen on a Friday before the weekend, but on the other hand, when you step up to the plate, you stand tall, you know you’re either gonna be kind of a hero or a zero. It’s one or the other when you trade with that kind of size, and this one was definitely, that was the case. It was going to be either a big win or a pretty big loss and I just got on the wrong side of it. Maybe a little too aggressive, and since I’ve had two red days in a row I do need to shift gears just a little bit and switch my focus from getting a big winner to just breaking out of the down trend and getting back into making some money and having some green days, even if they’re only 500 or $1,000. Just put that little cold streak behind me.

I see KBSF moving back up now, up towards $8. Obviously I’m not gonna trade it at this time of day, and I’m already below my max loss. But anyways, on RESN, I’d say this was my worst trade of the week just because the entry really wasn’t that good. It wasn’t a good five minute setup, the one minute setup was a chase, I was just a little too aggressive on it.

 

Lightspeed Financial Trading Platform Review

That’s the best and worst trade of the week and now we’re gonna start talking a little bit about the trading platforms that we use as active traders. Today we’re gonna talk about Lightspeed Financial. I’m gonna do a platform demo. Lightspeed is one of the top brokers that we have, that we suggest to beginner traders and to day traders. One thing that’s important to realize is that the platform that’s right for me is not necessarily the platform that’s right for you or for trader number three or trader number four. This is one of those things, I kind of think of the platform as like a bicycle. If you wanna go on a mountain, you don’t wanna ride a road bike, right? If you want to ride on the road, a mountain bike is not really the right tool. That’s kind of the way I think of the platforms.

 

 

Most Important Tools for  a Day Trader

As a day trader, there are very specific things that we need, that we require from our trading platform. What do active traders look for in a trading platform? What do you guys think would be some of the most important things that you want to see? And yeah, Mike uses Lightspeed pretty much every day for his trading platform. And I’ve used Lightspeed over the years on and off, and I’ve always been really happy with them. I just have a slightly lower rate with SpeedTrader.

 

A Stable Trading Platform

I’m seeing some replies. Hotkeys, execution speed, low commissions, charts, accuracy, and direct access routing. In no particular order, I wrote these down. Number one, a stable platform. Stable platform is critical. You don’t want a platform that’s gonna crash on you. That’s why almost all day traders are going to want a desktop application. We’ve all had the Adobe crashes, the Flash crashes, the Adobe Flash, like the web browser crashes. You don’t wanna be day trading with a web browser. You don’t usually want to be day trading with your mobile phone. It’s not the right platform. You want a desktop application that’s stable. Lightspeed definitely has that.

 

Level 2 Data

Number two, you need Level 2 data. That gives you market depth, it tells you how many buyers you have on the bid, how many sellers you have lined up on the ask. It really paints this picture of what the market looks like for this stock, and trading without Level 2 as a day trader would be, it would be like riding your bike down the mountain with one eye closed. I mean, yes, you could do it. There’s really no point in doing it, you’re increasing your risk, you’re increasing the likelihood that something bad’s gonna happen. You’re not proving a point to anyone. There’s no common sense behind that, Level 2 is important.

 

Direct Access Routing

Number one, stable platform. Number two, Level 2. Number three, direct access routing. Now many brokers, including SureTrader, Ameritrade, and E-Trade, have somewhat limited options for direct access routing. Some actually have no options at all, which means that every route will be, you’re basically given two choices. You can either route as a limit order or a market order, those are two choices. The problem with that is they’re gonna do smart routing, and I’m saying this in quotes, “smart routing.” Well what’s smart is … There’s an inherent conflict of interest here. The route that is best for a broker may not be best for a trader. Because of that conflict of interest, and I’m not blaming them, I’m just saying that they’re going to route to whichever route gives them the best ECN credit or the biggest rebate for volume. That may not be the same route that gives you the fastest fill, or the best execution.

For me, I’ve always found that it’s better to direct route my orders. I can choose the ECN, I can choose the electronic communication network where I’m gonna send my order. Remember that the market is like an island, and there’s lots of different ways you can get on the island. You can choose to use your broker’s smart route, and they’re gonna go and find whichever way to the island. Or you can say, I wanna go directly through Arca. I wanna go through NYSE. I wanna go through Nasdaq. I wanna go through EDGX. And you can just route directly to that ECN and you’re gonna go straight to the market. All of these ECNs potentially will reroute your order, for various reasons, so it doesn’t mean your order won’t get rerouted. But I’ve always found that direct routing gives me faster fills, better executions.

Also on the same note is the ability to do dark pool routing, to ping the dark pools. Now today, with a 20,000 share position of a fairly thinly traded stock, it would’ve been nice if I could’ve pinged the dark pool and found liquidity. I wasn’t able to, there wasn’t any out there, but if I was trading at a firm that didn’t even let me try to do that, then even if there was a buyer sitting in a dark pool, not visible to their smart routing, I wouldn’t have known about it. And let’s say there was a 10,000 share buyer sitting at 7.50. Well, I can’t see him, he’s kind of behind this curtain. The dark pool is, I’m not pinging him with the route, so my sell order passes by him, goes to the next, the next, the next. And then finally I get filled at 7.10, I get a lot of slippage. So direct access routing, plus dark pool routing ideally, if possible.

 

The Importance of Hotkeys

Number four, hotkeys. The ability to get in quickly and get out quickly. Now a lot of traders are like Ross, I can’t believe that you’re able to trade as fast as you trade. But the reality is, you can trade as quickly as you can press buttons. It is literally that quick. You want to press a button? It’s that quick, you’re in the trade or you’re out of the trade. So hotkeys are a must. If you’re going to be an active trader, if you’re gonna be trading more than three times in a day and where your trades will sometimes be as short as one or two minutes long, you need those hotkeys. They’re gonna get you in, they’re gonna get you out. When you have that unrealized profit, you don’t have to fumble around, you don’t have to go through a web browser and then an order confirmation window and then an approve window. You just press Control + Z, like that, and you’re out of the trade, done. You really can’t beat that type of speed and the ability to customize hotkeys specifically to the type of trading you wanna do is really a great feature for any active trader.

 

Low Priced Trading Commissions

Now, of course also, and I didn’t include this specifically, but fast executions, definitely a requirement for any active day trader. Most of the firms that offer direct access routing with hotkeys inherently will have fast executions. And then the fifth item that I also didn’t mention is low cost commissions. This is important because, as traders, last year I generated, I think it was … Gosh, now I can’t remember off the top of my head. It was either 14,000 or 30,000 in ECN fees. Let’s see, I can pull this up. ECN fees and commissions. I just gotta look at my statement here. While I pull this up, but the fact is, last month in SureTrader I generated $3,000 in commissions. Well, you know, I traded with quite a lot of size, so $3,000, I guess that’s reasonable. But over the course of the year, that’s $36,000 in commissions and ECN fees. How many of us would like to make an extra $36,000 a year?

Well the fact is, those commissions at SureTrader are probably a 50% discount versus if I was trading at a kind of retail firm like E-Trade or Ameritrade, which is 9.99 per trade. Most of them start around $10 a trade. Anything you can do to reduce your commissions is gonna help you. Let’s see, total last year was $10,000 in commissions and 14,900 in ECN fees. Around $25,000 in total commissions last year, and I made 222,000 after commissions. Commissions were about 10% of my gains. That’s just kind of like, you gotta pay your toll. If you’re a truck driver you gotta pay the tolls, it’s part of the business. You can’t really complain about it, it is what it is. But if there’s an opportunity to trade at a firm that’s gonna give you a 70% discount versus another firm, it makes sense to take them up on that offer.

One of the things that’s really cool, all of the features that we’ve talked about so far, platform stability, Level 2, direct access routing, dark pool pings, hotkeys, great commissions, et cetera. These are all included in the top brokers that I’ve used over the years, including Lightspeed Financial, SpeedTrader, and SureTrader. These are the top brokers for day traders. Interactive Brokers is also really good because you can use that same platform, so they’re right up there as well.

Because we have worked closely with Lightspeed and Tradezero, they are offering 100% rebates for students who take our Warrior Pro course. And that rebate comes in the form of discounted commissions, which is a pretty cool thing. We’ve done a lot of webinars for different brokers, and also for a lot of big companies like eSignal and Lightspeed and so on. What they’ve done is they’ve created this 100% tuition rebate program. The way it works is if you guys take any of our classes, the Warrior Pro class for instance. Let’s say you sign up for the Warrior Pro class. SpeedTrader is going to give you a $1 per trade rebate. Lightspeed will give you a $1.50 per trade rebate. So every single trade you take you’re saving money, until you’ve recouped the total cost of your course. So if you bought the course for $3,000 or whatever it is, you’ll save $3,000 in commissions over the course of, whatever it is, six months of trading.

And we have that available with Lightspeed and Tradezero because these are three of really the best brokers for traders who are trading the same strategy as me. It allows you essentially to get our entire course paid for by the broker. All you’ve gotta do is take the course, send them a copy of your receipt, trade for 90 days in our simulator, graduate to trading with real money, and then they’ll be giving you that $1 to $1.50 per trade rebate until you’ve recouped the entire cost of the class. Just something that you guys should know about because that is an awesome opportunity for you to get your education essentially subsidized by your broker.

And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense for them to do this, offer this type of program because they’re thinking about client retention. How long does each average trader stay with the firm? Day traders, I’m sure, since there’s only a 10% success rate, have a lot of churn. They come in, they leave. They come in, they leave. And they want clients that come in and are gonna trade there for the next five years, 10 years, 20 years, et cetera. Long life span. The traders more apt to have a long life span are ones that have a good education, that have gotten training. So it really makes sense for them to invest a little bit with this rebate program for you guys, because they’ll end up having clients that are well trained.

 

Lightspeed Platform Demo

All right, so with that said, I’m gonna jump in here to the Lightspeed platform and kind of give you a walkthrough of how this works. And we’ll do this for SpeedTrader and SureTrader, which both use the same platform, Interactive Brokers as well. But we’re gonna start today with doing the Lightspeed platform demo. Now, for those of you listening on the podcast, this is gonna get pretty visual. I would definitely suggest that you watch on YouTube if you’re able to, but you can listen along on audio and then watch later on YouTube, I’ll do the best I can to articulate what I’m showing everyone.

This is the Lightspeed trading platform, and I’m just gonna go ahead and log in here. Got my password. And of course, those of you watching on Facebook Live, again, this is a fairly visual type of Behind the Trades episode as well, so you guys can also watch this when we get it up on YouTube. This is what the Lightspeed platform looks like. I’ll walk you through it, the way I’ve got it setup, but basically we’ve got our Level 2 windows and we’ve got charts in the middle. Some stats about our account up here in the corner, and up here would be our P&L for the day.

Now, this may look similar to some of you guys who’ve been trading with direct access platforms in the past. For those of you who have been trading at a firm like E-Trade or Ameritrade, this may look pretty foreign. I know that some of the … I mean, all of the platforms are fairly similar. I was saying this to a student before, he was asking, he said, “If I trade in the fantasy stock trading platform for the 90 days while I’m practicing the strategies, is that gonna be a hard adjustment when I go to trade live in SpeedTrader?” Or SureTrader if he trades there. And I said, “Here’s the deal. When you learn to trade on a platform, it’s kinda like learning to drive on a specific car.”

So let’s say you learn to drive on a Saab. Those of you who have driven Saabs, you know that the clutch is pretty tight. It’s really pretty finicky. You get used to driving on a Saab, you know how to drive that car, you get comfortable with it. And then you go into work and they’re like, “Hey, great news, you’ve got a new company car. It’s a manual transmission Ford F350 or something.” And you’re like, “Okay, that’s huge. Like I dunno how I’m gonna parallel park this, I don’t know how to use it, the clutch is different.” But you know what? You get used to it. A car’s a car. You know how to drive, you know the mechanics of it, you understand it. So yes, there’s a little learning curve, but after a few days whatever, a couple weeks, it’s gonna feel completely natural and it’s just gonna be like I’ve been driving this my whole life.

I sort of think of trading platforms in that way. Yes, you will notice a couple days of adjusting, there’s a little bit of a learning curve, but then once you get it you’re fine. And just for reference, this is the fantasy stock trading simulator. You can see here, we’ve got our same Level 2 window. Let’s see, FSLR’s put in a different symbol. For some reason I always am drawn to solar stocks. You’ve got your trades here, your open positions, your open orders. If I was to place an order here, a limit order, whatever it is, it’ll show up down here in my open orders window. These are orders that I’ve taken, canceled, the charts. That’s kind of compared with Lightspeed here, this is our Level 2, this is our order entry window. It’s in a slight different spot. Your open positions, this is right here, in Lightspeed it’s up at the top. So let’s say I wanna take a trade on, actually I’m gonna close this one. This one’s not, doesn’t look right to me, hang on. Let me open a new Level 2.

Let’s see if that’s gonna look right. All right, so we’ll put in KBSF. I’ll get my redemption on the simulator. All right, so KBSF, we’re looking at 7.75 here. Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, I’m just gonna get in in the simulator. So Shift + 1, look at how fast that went in. You can see my positions right here. Buy another 1,000, and I do this a lot. I look at these positions and I’m like, “Okay.” I’m watching the Level 2, I’m thinking about wanting to get in. If this breaks over 80 or if it breaks over 90 I’ll probably add, here’s Shift + 1 again. Gonna add it again. I’m not sure why we’re, I’ll press Control + Q. These will go through pretty quickly. I’m not sure if we’ve got a spread issue, this is obviously a slightly more thinly traded stock, so the spreads are a little bit bigger.

But in any case, what we have here is a very similar platform to any direct access platform. You’ve got your ability to route, you’ve got your Level 2s, you’ve got your open positions. You can track all the orders you’ve taken. Now, when you first set this up, as you guys know, I’m a big fan of using eSignal for my charts. Maybe it’s a little snobby that I wanna use this platform that’s, whatever, 150 bucks a month just for charting, because I could just as easily use the charts that are in the trading platform here. But they’re never quite the same.

Let’s see, I’m scrolling in here, I’m mousing over this. I’m not even seeing it telling me what the high is of these previous candles. There might be a way to do that, but to me, I’m not saying these charts are bad, they load pretty quickly, but they’re just not the same as what I’m used to on eSignal. And I guess it’s one of those things, you get used to what you get used to and I’m sure if I had to switch I’d be fine, but for the time being I have my charts over on eSignal and then I’ve got my broker window over on the side. And for my broker window, the one that I use with SpeedTrader, I don’t have any charts at all. I just have the four Level 2s back to back. But in this example here, what I did is I created these two charts, the daily and the five minute. This, actually I wanted it to be a daily chart, so let’s see. We can change that, chart parameters, we’ll change this to period is day, okay. And 52 weeks. Something like that.

These two charts are in focus, so if I click on this stock or this Level 2 window, they’re gonna update to this one. If I click on this Level 2 window, they’re gonna update to this one. Now you can change that. If you don’t want them to be that way, you can make it so this Level 2 window is always updating this chart. And then you could say, I want to have a new chart. You got to file, you go new chart, it’s gonna be over here for this Level 2 window. And you can link them together. You can right click this and you can say unlink, right now it’s linking to focus, whichever Level 2 is in focus, but you could say unlink and then you can go and you can link it specifically to whichever Level 2 window that you want. So if you want these to always be the same, you can link them so they’re always the same.

I have changed my Level 2, as you can see, to show green, salmon, cyan, yellow, and gray. I have the same on eSignal right here, and we programmed the same thing in Fantasy Stock Traders. That’s because, when I started trading, the broker that I was using was E-Trade, and these are the color schemes that E-Trade uses. But what you can do if you don’t like it is you can right click and you can go to Level 2, design and fonts and colors, and right in here you can change this.

Now, you have these two columns. One is active Level 2 and one is inactive Level 2. I changed the color of the active because this’ll tell me, when I’m highlighted on this window it’s gonna change to purple. If I use a hotkey, this is the stock the hotkeys are gonna work on. You don’t have to do this because it’s already highlighting it in yellow, but by doing that it helps you make sure, for instance, that you’re not going to accidentally send an order when you thought you were selected on a different stock. It just tells you, okay, this is the one I’m highlighted on, so the hotkeys are gonna work based on that symbol. So Shift + 1, Shift + 1, buying 1,000 shares, buying 2,000. You can see, boom boom boom, 5,000 shares. I want out? Control + Z, they’re gone.

Now, this is a little bit faster because it’s a demo, but we’re only talking about probably milliseconds of difference, it’s very, very quick. For those of you that want different color skews here, you can set up gradients and stuff like that. I think Mike has his setup as a gradient, which is fine, I just for whatever reason, I was never able to really see these super well when they’re gradients. This to me is not as easy to read. Although I know a lot of people like gradient, I just, I dunno. For me it’s not as easy, I like to see those levels. All right, so let’s see, we’ll close this one and replace it. I’ll just open a new one I think. Let’s see, SPY. Oh, looks like I’ll have to go in and update it. In any case, we don’t have to update that right now, but you guys know how to do that.

One of the other things I did is I go into design, the design column here, and I change the font to make it a little bit bolder, just to make it easier to read. That, to me, helps. I want to be able to see what’s going on here without any issues, so make it easier to read. And just while we’re here, we’ll go and change this to green. And then to kind of a salmon color. Okay. And then we’ll do a cyan color. And then, I guess the rest can be gradient, that’s fine.

One of the other things that you can do is change which order these all appear. The market maker, the price, or the last trade. And I’ll show you guys who are watching on Facebook. So right here you’ve got market maker, price, and last trade. If you prefer that to be in a different order, you can change that here, saying which one’s in position one, two, and three, and we’ll say okay. For me, having used this platform over the years, this seems relatively intuitive. It’s not maybe the most intuitive, but I know if I right click this I’ll get a dropdown with the settings, stuff like that. I can make some changes, hide column lines, you can hide them or you can show them, things like that are super easy. Let’s see, I’ll move this down a little bit.

Let’s say I want to put an order on this KBSF, which is still consolidating here, this is still flagging, so it still looks good to me. Who knows whether it’ll go, but let’s say I wanna put an order down at 45 or something like that. Actually, let’s do it this way. Let’s say I want to put a sell order at 8.38 or something like that. I put the sell order and there you go, the sell order is sitting right there and it’s waiting. One of the things that I really like to do is right click this with the settings and say, let’s see, where is it, display, only show active orders.

Now if you show executed and canceled orders, it starts to look like this. My problem is that I can get an active order buried, and I don’t realize I still have an active order that’s open. That’s a problem because you might go away to lunch and then come back and all of a sudden you have a positioN, you didn’t realize you left an order open. For me, the way I use an open order window in all my platforms is, I change the settings and I say only show currently active orders. It makes it very easy for me to see. And you can change the colors if you want, although these are fairly standard.

That order will sit there for a little while, we’ll keep an eye on this. High the last five minute candle is 74, so to me this looks good over 7.75. It’s not the right time of day that I would wanna trade it, but it’s interesting. Low volume, definitely lower volume than we had earlier in the day. Up here you’ve got your positions window. Right here you’ve got messages. This is gonna tell you, make this a little bit bigger, this is gonna tell you the fills that you got, it’ll give you error messages. Let’s say I tried to take a 100,000 share position. It’s gonna say, “Hold up cowboy, you can’t, you don’t have the buying power to do that.” So you get your error message there.

You’ve got your P&L up here, and you’ve also got it right here in this column. You can have these hot buttons, but to me if you’re gonna use hotkey, then those are gonna be faster than mousing over to here to click these buttons. We’ve gotten ourselves logged in, you’ve gotten your Level 2 windows set up. These are all order entry windows. So we go to new, we go to Level 2, and then we go to new, and we go down to order entry windows. We have these set up and each one of these will give us the opportunity to direct route our order. So you can see here, these are some of the routes that you can direct route to. You can say, well, I want to send to this one, I want to send to that one, et cetera. Let’s see, I’ll show you over on my other account in one second here, the options that are available on SpeedTrader. It’s the same type of thing though.

You can go in here and you can select, let’s see, where is it? Lost my mouse. So you can select all of these different routes right there. There’s a ton that are available. These allow you to direct route to basically wherever you want. You wanna go to this dark route, you can go to that dark route. You wanna go to Bats, you go to Bats. And that just gives you a lot of options. It allows you to get into the market quickly. So when we see, for instance, that we’ve got EDGX sitting right here, I may say, “You know what? I wanna route to EDGX. I wanna use that route.” I think I can go in here into settings, let’s see.

I think you can have it so it’ll change, I think that might actually be in Level 2 settings. So you can change the Level 2, the ECN, based on which one you click if you want to. And Mike could probably confirm that, but I’m pretty sure there’s a way that you can do that. So if you click on EDGX, it’ll change your route to EDGX. I know you can do it in SpeedTrader, I just can’t remember where you do it here in eSignal. Let’s see.

Now this is a pretty cool feature here, remove crossed quotes. If you guys have ever looked at Level 2, you’ve noticed that sometimes you’ve got a setup where the bid is like 4.50 and the ask is $4. And you’re like, why is the bid higher than the ask? It’s a stale order that got stuck there and basically this is gonna remove those crossed orders. It just makes it easier for you to see the Level 2 without having to look at those cross orders.

Now let’s look at this. All right, so this is looking good. Let’s say I want to add right there at $8 for the move through high of day. So just added a couple more thousand shares pressing Shift + 1. And we’ve got a high of $8, I mean this to me looks decent enough. I’ll put my sell order, let’s see, put a sell order at 8.10 or something like that. I don’t usually go and put these sell orders out in advance, but it’s something that you certainly could do if you wanted to. And this is obviously incredibly annoying because I’d be back up $10,000 on this trade right now. There we go, so you can see.

Now I’m gonna use my hotkey to sell, there we go. Sold the whole position on the bid at 17, and that’s how fast it went out. So 1,800 bucks, that would’ve been nice if it was real money. We’ll see what this does, high of day on this is 8.63. That’s just an example though of the way you can use your hotkeys. You can get in quick, you can get out quick, scalp those types of breakouts.

We’ve got our Level 2 window set up, we’ve got our order entry window set up, we know how to change the color schemes and stuff like that. You can pull the charts over, drop them down here. You’ve got your orders window, which we changed to only show active orders. The only thing you really need now is to set up your hotkeys. I’m gonna go click one of these little widget wheel things to set up the hotkeys, and this is not the most intuitive way to set up hotkeys. In SpeedTrader and SureTrader you go up to the setup bar and then you just scroll down to hotkey and click it. It’s a big kind of hotkey window, which allows you very easily to see all the hotkeys you have and to program them and to map them. The interesting thing here is that you create the hotkeys under your custom orders box, right here. I’m just gonna pull this back here. I’ll redeem myself just emotionally on this trade. Let’s see if we get a one minute pullback off the half dollar. So annoying.

Anyways, back into the platform. You’ve got a lot of options. The interesting thing here is that you have to click keyboard, and this shows you all of the keys. This is not the most intuitive thing if you just looked at it for the first time ever, but what you’re seeing here is, this is the 3 button, and the S. Let’s see, you’ve got 3 and you’ve got a couple different ways you can press 3, or 4 for instance. You can press Shift + 4, Shift + 4. You could have a hotkey mapped to that key. Or Control + 4, you could have a hotkey mapped to that key. Or Alt + 4, so that one key, the 4 button, can have three different hotkeys mapped to it, whether you press Shift + 4, Control + 4, or Alt + 4.

And then what you do is you go and pull down the commands. The custom commands are ones that you’ve created in the custom orders tab. And then all the prebuilt commands are from this dropdown menu. You can see here, for those of you watching on Facebook, you can drop down, you could just choose all these things. So like, cancel order keys, this is pretty simple. You want to cancel your selected order, you want to cancel the highest bid, highest ask, cancel the lowest. You can see, there’s a lot of options here for different types of cancel orders. Right now I’m using Control, this C is Control, + Q for cancel all for that stock.

The reason I do that is because, let’s say I have a position in this AQMS here. So let’s buy 1,000 shares. And then I want to put out a sell order on this to sell, let’s say 1,000 shares or whatever at 16.80. So I’ve got my profit target on this. We’re gonna put that out, it’s gonna show up here. Now if I go over here to take a quick scalp on KBSF, I get in and then I decided I don’t want to execute the order. So let’s say I just this order at 1,000 shares at 15. Now I decide at the last minute I actually don’t want it. I don’t wanna cancel the order for AQMS, right? I just want to cancel the one for KBSF. Canceling just for this specific stock using that script. On this one minute chart here on KBSF, I would watch the first one minute candle to make a new high, although be mindful that you’ve got what’s looking like a topping tail or a doji on the five minute chart.

So let’s go back into the settings, we’ll go back to the keyboard. Those were our cancel order hotkeys. But you’ve also got closeout hotkeys up to tier. So you can have orders to closeout positions, et cetera. What I like to do is go into my custom orders and just go ahead and build one. The way you build one is go over to new commands and we’re gonna say, let’s say we’re gonna do just a custom hotkey. And this hotkey will be to buy 5k shares, five cents above the ask. We’re gonna say this is gonna route through Arca. We’re gonna use a specific route. Create new command.

Okay, so now this is the window where we create it. Market, Arca. That’s where I type in. I could also type in EDGX or NYSE, but we’ll just use Arca for now. It’s a buy order, Arca. This is not gonna be an order that’s non-reroute. I don’t mind that it reroutes the order, that’s fine. Display is visible, that’s fine. Through, this is interesting. This is also known as offset. I wanna put this five cents through the ask price. The ask is the offset that I’m gonna use. If the current price is $8, we’re gonna put the order five cents above that, 8.05. All right, quantity. We gotta change the quantity here with position to close and without position to close. We’ll say this is gonna be 5,000 shares and 5,000 shares. Do I want a pop-up confirmation, and the answer is no because I wanna do this as a quick order.

All right, now I can say okay. I could also say map key now, but I can also just say done. And now this is gonna be right up here. If I wanted to change it, I could click it and click edit and then I could make changes. Let’s go and edit it now and map the key. Let’s map it, now it pulls me up to the keyboard. It highlights my custom command and now I have to choose which key I want to put it on. Let me press a key, let’s press the 2 button. The 2 right now has a super smart order, so let’s press the 3 button and let’s go with Shift + 3. So S + 3, here’s the hotkey. That’s where I want it. I press the map button, now it’s there. Press okay and now let’s see what happens if I press Shift + 3. There we go, I’ve got 5,000 shares of KBSF. All right, press it again, I’ve got 10,000. This is the first candle to make a new high, they’re over 8.20, so that’s a decent spot.

But I probably wouldn’t buy this one minute setup, not just because of the time of day, but because the last five minute candle is a doji. So now, if I want to get out of the trade. Now you know how to buy, you know how to create a buy order, and you can adjust those buy orders however you want. Also be mindful that you can use a super smart order where you can send to more than one market maker at the same time. You’re going to be able to get sometimes faster fills, but the ECNs are often a little higher on that. And Mike can explain that to you guys more in this week’s Warrior Pro session.

Now we’ll go back to custom orders and let’s create a sell order. Right now we have a sell order for sell whole position at the bid. Let’s look at what that looks like. It’s sell, it’s ARCA, it’s the bid, and it’s through five cents, five cents below the bid. And we’re gonna close out quantity, full position. This is pretty cool, you can actually choose, do I want to do full position, half position, or quarter position? Let’s go and say done. So we’ve got one for selling the whole position and I mapped that to Control + Z. So let’s say sell half position, bid minus 0.05. Create a new command, it’s a sell order. Let’s for this one, for the heck of it, just use a different one, EDGX. We’re gonna do five cents below, actually, let’s try doing 0.05 to make sure it’s not going $5. I don’t think it was, but let’s just try it just to be safe. Below the bid, close out will be half position, and we’ll leave that as that.

Tiers, say map key now. So we’re gonna press the X button and Control + X, I map it to that key. I press okay. And now let’s send the order. There we go, sold 5,000, half my position. Now I’ve got 5,000 shares left. Sold a half again, 2,500. Half again, 1,250. Half again, 625. Half again, 313. Again, 157. Again, 79. And now I press Control + Z to sell the whole thing. Did I really make $6,000 in the simulator? Wow. I guess that’s redemption, I don’t know. Doesn’t feel like it. You can see as that broke back through high of day. Back through high of day, $6,000 in the simulator.

In any case, it shows you how quickly you can either make money or lose money, right? These stocks are moving very, very quickly. There are definitely opportunities here. If you’re quick, you can get in, you can get out, you can capitalize on a profit. That really is the way I trade. I look for these setups, usually I’m not trading on the one minute time frame at one p.m. in the afternoon, but nevertheless, this is a good example of the way I trade. You need to be able to trade quickly. You need to be able to be quick on your toes. Having the right platform is a big part of that.

All right guys, so we’ve gone through the buy keys, we’ve gone through the sell keys. I’ve shown you about using direct access routing. You can also set up a hotkey specifically to change the route. So you could press something like Control + A to change this to a different route. We could go into custom orders, this would be simply route, create new command, and we’ll say, what’s one that we know we have? Well let’s say EDGX. Map the key, route. We’ll put this to the E and we’ll say Shift + E like that. I think that’ll work, I might have to change it a little bit. Yeah, I think I have to change it, but in any case, that gives you a sense of one of the things that you could do to quickly adjust your trades.

If I was still holding, I’d be up about $30,000 right now, so a little disappointing. But, you know, this is part of the deal with trading. Sometimes you’re a little early, you got the right idea, but you can’t hold through the pullback, gotta stop out. Ends up running the afternoon, it’s the luck of the draw. It is what it is. I’m up $5,000 on the week, I’ll take it. Bounce back next week, hopefully we’ll have some good trading. And I’ll be able to get a little bit of redemption as I make my way towards 100k.

Ask the Warrior Q&A

All right guys, so I wanted to give you that quick preview of the Lightspeed platform, again, a platform that a lot of our traders are currently using. A platform that I’ve used over the years, I’ve always been really happy with them, and one that I would happily recommend to any of our students, or anyone that is an active trader. Now why don’t we switch gears, do a little Q&A for a couple minutes as we wrap up this third episode of our Behind the Trades.

To answer your question on commissions, the commissions are, with the rebate program, I believe they are 3.50 per trade. I think they’re $3.50 per trade, plus you have ECN fees per share. Some simulators will show you commissions and some will not. I don’t think that one was showing commissions. You can basically use all of the hotkeys that are available in SpeedTrader and rewrite them inside Lightspeed, because you can customize. You really can create almost any of the hotkeys that you’d like.

Normal costs for ECN fees per thousand shares is between $1.50 and $3 at a high, it’s not usually above $3. 0.003 is the typical ECN fee. SureTrader and Lightspeed, these guys will give you a simulator, but it’s usually only for 14 days. I don’t think they’re set up to, and we had talked with Lightspeed about doing this, but they’re not set up to do long-term like three to six month access to the simulator, they’re just not set up to do that. Control + Z will not close a short position, I use Alt + Z close a short position. So my Alt key is the one scripted for shorts and the Control one is the one scripted for longs.

And yeah, another thing I could’ve mentioned is the fact that you can integrate the trade idea scanners with Lightspeed. So you click on the scanner alert and it populates that symbol over in Lightspeed. That makes it really quick to be able to jump from one platform to another. For me, I’ve got to type it in each place. I’ve got to type first in my charts and then type it in my platform, it can just be a little bit annoying. By the way, probably the longer I watch this KBSF, the deeper I’m gonna sink into a depression this afternoon. This is extremely disappointing. So maybe I’ll switch symbols. All right. Hey, you go lay down.

Okay guys, so any questions for those of you watching on the podcast, watching on Facebook, or watching on YouTube, I’d love to have you guys comment, thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. We’ll be doing Behind the Trades every Friday, right around noontime. At least Fridays that I’ve been trading, I know there’ll be one Friday that I’m out. But for the most part, every Friday at noontime. Lunchtime recaps will be Monday through Thursday at 12 noon. No recap for today, just because we’re doing the Behind the Trades episode. I broke it down for you a little bit during this episode anyways.

All right guys, I will see you all first thing Monday morning. I hope you all have a great weekend, get some rest, and study up. All right, thanks guys.