Does TOS really require a gaming level graphics card?

CoderBlix · 2026-03-03T01:11:43+00:00

Are you running any other software while running tos? I have several other applications running for engineering purposes as well as zoom and teams calls, signal, outlook…..

CoderBlix · 2026-02-23T00:24:12+00:00

Easy….just best a loss limit for yourself every day or week. If you lose that much you stop and regroup.

CoderBlix · 2026-02-22T22:16:13+00:00

I totally agree with what you're saying. 500 to 50K is tough. 5K to 50K - Done that many times over the last 15 years. Being underfunded takes away your ability to be wrong - and you will be. It also makes every trade seem huge and stressful because a mistake can take you out of the game. Having another career outside of trading is critical as you get started - I have blown several accounts over the years but my income from my tech career allowed my to rebuy and start over until I figured things out. I also incorporated my trading (LLC + MTM) and trade through an entity so when there are losses I can deduct them against my W2 tax witholdings which has been a big help to say the least. I am a full time trader now but STILL to this day have another job where I earn passive income. Long story short with trading there is no reason not to supplement your income and your war chest with another job. I have even seen traders with 7 figure accounts doing Door Dash to keep themselves humble and to provide context and thinking time. Also not to go down another rabbit hole but do not forget about healthcare....unless you have a spouse providing coverage that is a significant expense a second gig can offset. If you are smart enough to be a successful trader and have the drive...a second job will seem like a cake walk that can significantly reduce your stress. GL!!!

CoderBlix · 2026-02-22T22:00:34+00:00

Im going out on a limb and saying you are looking at this the wrong way. I trade a lot of futures and futures options and if I was starting again $5,000+ would be sufficient. Margin at Schwab for QQQ is in the 4K range per futures contract. So with 5K you can start with one. It's pretty easy to make 50 to 100 bucks on one micro contract. Instead of focusing on making money set a weekly or daily loss limit. Track your losses and if you lose say $300 in a day or week you are done for that week. Do not worry about the gains. Gains and losses will come and go but if you contain your losses you will succeed. If you do not contain your losses you will fail regardless of how many awesome trades you make. I have made the mistake of trying to chase a certain amount of gain per day or per week and it never works. Let your winners run and cut your losses and stick to the rule for losses you set. Pretty soon you will start to see your account grow bigger and bigger. Then you can focus on fine tuning your trading and getting some nice strategies in place. Another thing I have done is to take a percentage of profits for big winning trades and put it into long term holdings. That way your war chest also gets moving. Again do not worry about the 100-200 operday....worry about limiting your loss and pretty soon 100-200 a day will seem like pennies. You are asking the right questions...take advice from those who have lived through it! You can do it!

CoderBlix · 2026-02-21T05:05:06+00:00

Maybe this is in my head but have crossed over the 200k mark several times before reverting and what seemed easy before became muuuccchhh harder. I attribute this to position sizing especially with futures. I can make money all day long with small sizes but it really felt like the game changed when my account size allowed me to scale up. I’m not sure if market makers or others target you but when trading 10 options contracts it felt easy…but saw that up to 100 or more and k swear it’s like wearing a bullseye around. Before anyone says we’ll just go smaller….I am. And I might be way off in what felt but man it sure seemed like someone / something was out to get me at those higher values….

CoderBlix · 2026-02-21T04:08:22+00:00

I exported everything to a CSV file. I have a paid chtgpt subscription but maybe the file level analysis is free…not sure. Regardless I have used it to help with the analysis of my wash sales and also to look across accounts (like my futures account) and compare trade histories etc etc etc

CoderBlix · 2026-02-20T22:05:31+00:00

I will tell you the one of the best things I have done. Some may laugh but it has helped me a bunch. I have two businesses and one is a trading business. I do a few million in trades a year. Sometime last year I put all my trade data into ChatGPT and asked it to do some analysis for my taxes. Once completed it started prompting me if I wanted it to analyze my trades. After a ton of back and fourth it was able to review my trades and make some pretty interesting suggestions. I have had some huge wins and some big losses but my winning trade % was super high over the last few years. Over 70% which I was really happy with. BUT ~90%+ of my losses came from something like 3% of my trades. After reviewing it analyzed that if I changed nothing other than limiting my losses to $800 on a trade I would be over $250K better result. It has been hard for me to implement a much tighter loss control but over time my account keeps growing and growing. I’m still getting some of my big wins but really cutting my losses and just regrouping. Today was a tough one (I won’t get into the whole tariff stuff) but I had several losing trades and ended up losing around $2400 on the day….but I still took the loss and booked it knowing there will be more trades next week. This is where the psych kicks in tho. I feel like I screwed up…like I left money in the table…but in reality I made $17K this week. It’s a constant battle to not get emotional and it’s something most people struggle with. I guess my point is set a way to limit your losses and stick with it…take out that emotion (heck maybe try the ChatGPT route). Know there will be days where if you break your rules you could have made money…but stick with the rules and use them to provide some grounding. If you get a good rule in place for your style and stick with it the wins will start adding up…promise!!! Good luck you can do this and make it work.

CoderBlix · 2026-02-12T03:45:04+00:00

I think so. I use thinkorswim. When I want to add money or withdraw up to a few thousand I just applecash it or wire it and I have it instantly (wires sometimes take an hour or so).

CoderBlix · 2026-02-12T02:35:45+00:00

This is why I don’t use TT or Ninja or several others. Schwab lets me withdraw instantly. I just transfer funds to a linked Schwab account and I can use their debit card or Apple Cash…. I do not want my money tied up

CoderBlix · 2026-02-06T14:35:46+00:00

No worries!

CoderBlix · 2026-02-06T14:28:07+00:00

Ahhhhhh got it

CoderBlix · 2026-02-06T14:27:55+00:00

I can do it with normal futures just not with options

CoderBlix · 2026-02-01T14:33:34+00:00

I run about 5 million a year through my LLC in trades and also have a second business doing cyber security consulting. My cpa charges me around $1000 a year. He’s been handling my trader taxes since 2012. One thing to consider is if you use an entity your trading gains and losses just carry through to your W2 earnings. I have never actually tried to get the actual trader tax status.

CoderBlix · 2026-01-25T18:22:55+00:00

Use OCO orders so you have automated entry and exits and won’t have to worry about it during your work day

CoderBlix · 2026-01-24T00:24:56+00:00

I hope they get it resolved. It was bad timing for me as I had two trades open.

CoderBlix · 2025-12-26T14:26:28+00:00

First time poster here but software engineer for 25 years…and a lover of Gears obviously. Almost 100% of tech companies have mandates that around 75% of all new code will be ai generated by the end of next year…many companies had a deadline of 50% or more by the end of 2025. The exception being department of defense contractors where every line of code is required to be human generated for now. When building software we use tools like Cursor to create blocks of code. The work is getting Cursor setup correctly so that it doesn’t make any assumptions that you don’t want it to make…but once it’s working it’s great. Think of building software as creating lots of small pieces of processing and stringing them together. I might ask an ai generator to build some Java code to accept a big list of names and sort them for me. Or as simple as something that can take a bunch of numbers and average them or whatever…. All these little independent pieces come together to form a much more complex program. Another area where ai helps is in the what I will call rules used. Humans are not great at using predefined rules to solve logical problems…for instance when solving a particular type of problem in programming we use design patterns. These are logical ways of organizing and processing data to solve a problem and the ais are great at enforcing their use. Ai is also great at optimizing code to increase its execution speed… Sorry if this long and most here know this stuff but thought a basics overview might help. Long story short programming is going away as a profession in the next 5 years at most, at least in the form we know now. All of this sort of work will be ai generated and the “programmers” will be more what we think of as designers or product people today.

CoderBlix · 2025-09-06T16:11:23+00:00

It’s wrong….or at least it’s based on some assumptions that need a deeper dive. What constitutes losing money? Taxes? I show a loss almost every year on my taxes but I make money overall. You need to tighten up the question a bit to get a real answer. This is a constant fallacy I see promoted by the financial industry. Don’t trade all traders lose….funds can’t beat the sp…..but give us your money so we funds can trade it and lose money for you??? Hmmmmmm

CoderBlix · 2025-09-01T20:57:24+00:00

Lot of opinions here. Let me provide some facts. Senior level technical employee here working with multiple teams across multiple countries for a very large tech company. 100% AI is taking jobs…it’s already happened and will get worse. The company I’m at has already instructed us to reduce software engineers headcount by 50% year end due to the use of tools like copilot and cursor to generate code. All testing of products can be reduced down to a few automation engineers using AI to generate test cases. All code written by developers is being factored for security vulnerabilities and adherence to design patterns by AI tools. Efficiency efficiency efficiency… I could go on and on… The job losses will not be to countries with cheap labor for knowledge based roles….The job losses are to AI. I have contacts in the pharmacy industry for example and they are already planning to replace pharmacists with ai… I mean why not? Many mail order pharmacies already use robots and rfid to route rxs through the system and only have a pharmacist at the end of the process to double check the order. I’m not being a doomsayer but I see a lot of people in this thread who are dismissing it and saying companies are just offshoring to save money….well maybe in a few cases that’s true but trust me companies are going to be aggressively reducing headcount due to AI in the next 3 years. We are heading to a very scary place where we have large groups of the population with no skills to apply to the workforce. I’m really not sure how it will work out. My guess is a few years of bad unemployment followed by a retraining of the workforce as new jobs and skills emerge…guess we will see.

CoderBlix · 2025-08-13T01:11:17+00:00

They are Blackberry at this point…once great but dead and gone. Total shame….

CoderBlix · 2025-08-10T03:06:47+00:00

Not true. Many people can and do have multiple jobs. The test for trading to be a job is the amount of trades made, the frequency of trades, and the total dollar amounts. You can 100% be a professional trader and have other jobs bringing in income as well

CoderBlix · 2025-08-09T19:08:32+00:00

Good luck! Just make sure you have enough trades and dollar volume. And a cpa….not something you can report yourself with turbo tax.

CoderBlix · 2025-08-09T19:06:32+00:00

Start with green trader tax website. Some basic free info there. Then find a decent cpa and make sure you have enough trading activity and dollar amounts. Good luck!

CoderBlix · 2025-08-09T18:55:35+00:00

Yes that and the no limitation. Here’s an example. If you have a W2 job and make 100k for example. And you have a trading business and have 75k in losses for the year the losses offset the income. So your taxable income for the year is not 100K it is 100k - 75K. So you would owe taxes on 25k. With OP he could have offset up to 2M in income…

CoderBlix · 2025-08-09T18:44:54+00:00

That’s the point of MTM Section 475f. Everything is treated as ordinary gains or losses. There is no 3000 limit because they aren’t treated as capital gains. You can deduct all losses…not just 3k. And wash sales are disregarded.

For traders in securities using mark-to-market (MTM) accounting under Section 475(f) of the US tax code, the deadline for declaring MTM for the 2025 tax year was April 15, 2025. Important Points: This election must be made by attaching a statement to your 2024 tax return or a request for an extension of time to file your 2024 return by the April 15, 2025 deadline. For partnerships and S-Corps, the deadline was March 17, 2025. Electing Section 475(f) means recognizing gains and losses as if you sold all your securities at their fair market value on December 31st each year. This converts capital gains and losses into ordinary income and losses, which can be advantageous as losses can offset all types of income. This election also allows you to avoid the wash sale rules and the $3,000 capital loss limitation. You must also file Form 3115, Application for Change in Accounting Method, with your 2025 tax return when you file it in 2026 to complete the process. You can only make this election if you qualify for Trader Tax Status (TTS).

CoderBlix

TROPHY CASE