In your quest to learn all essential ingredients we offer the prime ingredients for taking your trading to the next level:

I've been trading since 1993 when a good friend handed me a book by Peter Lynch, "One Up on Wall Street," and ever since, I have enjoyed learning from some of the premier trading mentors in the world.  It was in 1997 when sold the mutual funds that were doing NOTHING for me but making the manager money.  Then, in 1998 I studied under Tony Oz [right after I completed the OTA Trading Course in October] before he wrote 3 books on stock trading, then in 2002 when I studied under Tom Busby, who has written 3 books on trading futures. Tom is the mentor who I credit for guiding toward the migration from trading stocks to trading futures!  Tom is President, Day Trading Institute, Mobile, Alabama.  It was because of Tom that I learned the value of understanding the financial markets as a 24 hour phenomenon as opposed to the mere 6 hour bell to bell trading day of the New York Stock Exchange [NYSE].  For these past many years, I have grown in my trading acumen exponentially! 

Today, when I sit down in front of the market at the "right" time of day "right time, for me," I can take money from the market.  Your right time of day may be different.  It is just something personal.  You will know when you find it.  Once you find it, use it.  Use it every day that trading occurs.  Make it a really short time of day because, if you string it out into hours and hours, like 24, you WILL give it back... just like to silly phools who sit in front of slot machines at Steve Wynn's place.  Remember, Steve has never gambled a day in his life.  I do not gamble, either!  I use carefully crafted tools for identifying high probability setups with at least a 70% probability of successful trade and a stop loss of about 10 ticks....

So, what is the "24 Hour Market"?  It's the market wherever the sun is shinning! 

In time zone order, just to name a few of the World's Financial Markets. Keep in mind:  there are dozens of Index Futures representing these markets that may be traded at various times of the day:

By Time Zone

Chicago
     New York
         London
             Frankfort
                 Zurich
                     Istanbul
     Hong Kong
          Singapore
               Shanghai
                    Seoul
                         Tokyo
                              Sydney

In addition to above financial centers, there are numerous instruments that may be traded on the ever present electronic markets. Even though there are markets everywhere, we concentrate on the 'provens' which continuously trade on exchanges hosted in America in Chicago or New York.  But, we watch London and Frankfort for direction in the early morning hours because U.S. instruments follow European instruments until daylight goes dim in Europe and rises in New York, USA.

Even though commodity futures are traded in Chicago and New York, they are delivered in some places you would never expect until you know. 

Ask me, if you are interested. 

They may be delivered in or near your own back yard, for example, Cushing Oklahoma!

Today's markets generally operate 24 hours save for a few minutes for daily closure and settlement numbers to be derived by the bean counters.  But today "open" and "close" are not standard in any sense of the word and "best trading time" varies from market to market, city to city around the globe.

Here is a link of one particular commodity instrument for your viewing confusion: 

This time we have chosen Gold and explain this chart's characteristics below:

The screen shot was taken on December 31, 2013 at a time between 5:00 and 6:00 AM Pacific. 

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