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Not everyone is like Bruce Kovner. So everybody is not like Bruce Kovner. What works for him may not work for you.
I don't subscribe to borrowing money to trade when the basic Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is not met. eg, Shelter, Food.
If I am single, that's fine that I am the only one affected. If the family is involved, I am not that selfish.
I would place trading in Safety Needs or Psychological Needs as base but extends to the top as peak experience. Trading can be an adrenalin junkie fix for me.
Answering a question from the Al Brooks price action thread, I'm currently using a 12 tick target for my first contract on CL, which I consider a scalp.
I think you guys also need to look at risk when you define your target. It is not very likely you can set a stop of 6 ticks with a target of 6 ticks and win more than 50% of the time, in my opinion (with regards to CL). Your 6 tick target will very likely be hit, but your stop hit first too many times.
I'm experimenting with something that is a bit radical for me, but it feels right. I've moved my stops @ the broker to 'emergency stops', and am instead now only exiting a trade manually when I feel it has indeed gone against me, vs when my stop is hit.
For those following me a long time you know that is a radical departure for me. But I think this is the evolution of trading on my path, and like I said, it feels right to me. Too many times I picked the correct direction but was stopped by trying to maintain a hard limit of 1:1 risk.
So I've pushed the stop back quite a bit, to an emergency stop, and instead am focusing on executing a better than 1:1 (actually the average is closer to 2.0 reward over risk). So now trades where I am right I give them the opportunity to actually win.
Don't get me wrong, if at the end of the day my avg is less than 1:1 there is a major problem, but so far it is working well. I find that most trades do not turn against me, and most trades I feel no need to want to exit. Those that do, I can usually exit at a much improved price over what a hard stop would have allowed.
I think sefstrat was advocating some similar technique recently, so I am curious what he has to say if he is reading this thread. It also goes without saying that you have to really have conquered the psychological aspect of trading, because it can otherwise get away from you way too easily ("oh I think this one is coming back") and it will kill you quick. Luckily that is not my problem any longer so I feel good about it.
BTW, for 2nd contract I have a hard target of 40 ticks, which moves the stop to break even once the 1st target is hit, and I manually adjust the 40 tick target down if I feel like the move is slowing. I also manually adjust it upward if the move has lots of momentum.
This is the approach we endorse in our trading room on all of our markets. We have an emergency stop in case a war breaks out or something and the market runs away, and then we watch for market conditions to tell us when to bail on a trade. Clients who won't "drink the kool-aid" and use a tight stop in the market nearly always perform worse than we do trading the same setups. So, we've had a year or two of real-world side-by-side comparison to go on.
i just start to read ur post today. it was very impressive. trading without indicator is simple but effective from ur post. I am going to learn from u. thx.
Update Nov 24 2010: This thread was based on the Better Volume indicator from eminiwatch. I no longer use this indicator, instead I use my own version of his new indicator Better Pro Am. But that's just a small part of my trading, see this post …
Trading without indicators is the first step IMHO. Then you add some indicators to simplify and speed up your analysis. But adding indicators without first knowing how to trade price is not good. So give it a try and post some charts. CL isn't the easiest to trade. in fact I often consider dropping it. And then I'll have a great day on CL (like Friday, 37 ticks in 2 trades before 9:30 and I was done for the day).
Anyone know how CL behaves on FOMC days? I'm at work so I can't check the charts.
I usually don't trade ES on those days and I usually don't trade CL on the crude inventory days. So I'm considering doing other work today instead of trading.
I have been trading CL successfully for some time now using 3 time frames. My trading chart is 300 ticks, medium time frame 900 ticks and long term time frame 2700 ticks. I used a momentum indicator, a cycle indicator and a volume indicator. I take shorts at cycle highs and go long at cycle lows but there must also be a concomitant tradable wave pattern, or a nice ABC retracement. I enter one tick above my trigger bar for a long and short one tick below.
The problem I have is that crude moves so fast that there are many times that price shoots past my desired entry before I can get it down onto the chart. So I have decided to try a switch and trade range bars or renko, which should work just as effectively with my strategy.
So I have these questions I hope someone out there can help me with.
1. Would Renko Bars be better than range bars?
2. Does anyone have any ideas as to the settings for range and renko bars on a trading chart and a longer term chart.
3. Any other tips for trading CL.
I would be happy to share my exact trading strategy with anyone that is interested. I can post a screen shot, my indicators and their settings.
Many Thanks
PS: I am new to Big Mike's and in the week or so I've been here I’ve been amazed at the incredible amount of great information that this site contains.
