Beginner's Etcetera

[timmbbo]

At the start of my learning journey, I'm struggling to find answers to these questions

1) How does a contract translate into a dollar amount? Say I purchase one contract on the S&P Mini at 2000? Well, how much did I actually spend to purchase that contract?


2) How does selling a contract at profit translate into money? Say I purchase one contract on the S&P Mini at 2000, and then sell it at 2005. How much money did I actually make in profit?


3) How do I translate desired risk into quantity of contracts to purchase. Say I have $5000 in my account. I want to only risk 2% ($100) of my account per trade. I'm buying/selling contracts on the S&P Mini. So, how would I translate this $100 trade amount, into number of contracts to purchase?


4) What happens to an order with a time frame of End-of-Day, but neither the profit or stop-loss limits are hit? Say I enter at the market price, with a profit and stop-loss at 20 ticks away each. By the end of day, these limits have not been hit. So, do these limits just roll over to the next day, and the position remains open?


5) Is the forum appropriate for discussing trading strategies? I see all of the topics on here are how to use Ninja Trader. There are no topics about developing profitable trading strategies.


6) How do you determine which trading knowledge is valid and worth learning, and which can be safely discarded and ignored? Of course, this is a bigger philosophical question that I realize all traders struggle with, to a certain point.

When I go on YouTube, there's a bazillion videos for online-trading: how to spot candle-stick break-out patterns, how to interpret indices, how to spot support-and-resistance zones, and so on. Well, the challenge becomes, which one of these are worthy, have value, and relevant to developing my trading strategy. Likewise, how to spot the other videos that are crap, not relevant, and provide bad information.

I could spend thousands of hours going through all of the training material available, and of course, I need to identify and employ only a portion of it. So, in this topic sphere where there's a never-ending riving of education, how does one identify what's worthy of your time to learn, and what can be ignored?


Thanks folks. Oh, happy Easter.

[NinjaTrader_PatrickH]

Hello timmbbo,

Thank you for your post.

1. This is based on the instrument traded and the contract size used for the order. In general, the price of the instrument is the cost to buy in or sell short. However, this varies by instrument type. It is best to contact your broker for more information.

2. See the above, but in your example at a basic level it would be 5 dollars per contract traded minus fees through your brokerage.

3. The divide the risk by the cost of the instrument (see above).

4. You would need to discuss this item with your broker.

5. On developing strategies? Or advice on trading strategies?

6. I will leave this to our community as we cannot provide trading education.

Please let me know if you have any questions.