Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
There is a substantial risk of loss in trading commodity futures and options. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The opinions expressed here are those of Gary Fullett, and are not to be taken as a recommendation to buy or sell commodity futures or options. This is for educational purposes only.
Thanks monpere - your cautions are well taken. I do have an issue with "needing to be right" and I agree that trying to understand the market can amplify this "psychological trap" - I monitor myself to minimize this and sometimes I do better than others. I read the market based on technical analysis but this practice means something different to different traders. I use technical analysis (the volume and chart patterns) to give me clues as to what traders are trying to do, what they might be waiting for to act, when a "goal" may be accomplished, etc. Ultimately I place bets - sometimes those bets pay off, sometimes they don't. Mostly I try to understand the context so I know which kinds of trades are more likely to be successful given my understanding of the context. I'm not trying to understand the "why" in the sense of cnbc or fundamentals but in the sense of what forced traders to act, when did they give up, where were they satisfied. I don't think you can necessarily know these things - and I don't think that placing a winning trade means you were "right" - I just think that this type of analysis gives me a basis on which to place bets, one that I feel is effective.
I will note that the pattern which I described as a final flag and the "last gasp of the move" took the market to 3488 and it has fallen back to ~3400 since then. Does this mean I was "right" in my description of what took place? I don't know. I just want to use the type of analysis I describe as the basis for placing bets because it makes sense to me based on my understanding of how markets work.
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. - Frank Herbert
I agree with you TIYF - however, I also think that volume and price patterns can tell you about the things I mentioned in my reply to monpere. If you try to understand the underlying phenomenology (traders actions) based on their signature (volume and price patterns) and you then piece together a model for making decisions which results in higher expectation for your trading bets, you can be successful. Of course, as monpere pointed out, there are many approaches which can be profitable - each with their own pros and cons.
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. - Frank Herbert
Good call. It's a classic double top divergence, and triggering on a cluster of tiny narrow range bars for great risk/reward. Too bad it missed the the numbers you were looking for by a wee bit. Might still get back up there though.
Another nearly trade! I was looking for a spike of the LTRO news but it didn't get high enough for me. If it does get up there I will still be looking to short depending on how it gets there.
I wasn't as optimistic as you, I took longs and shorts after the LTRO announcement. LTRO, TARP, QE3 been there done that! It was a strange day for me, the blue circles are targets I had orders sitting on. Price traded on that price but I didn't get filled. Seemed like either the entry or exit of every trade for awhile. I was holding a long wanting 1.3472 when the speech got underway. Actually it took awhile to fall, I dumped the long trade and sold the pivot targeting the buy number. When I scrolled down on the chart I saw Yesterday's low. I drug the target down to 90 but price pulled back first and didn't trade at 90. I was screaming by now, I just went through this on almost every trade I've made. Price backed off to the buy number (on one minute chart) then dropped and filled me. This was enough for me. I shut down everything and called it a day.
As Monpere previously stated we had a classic double top divergence. Given that the five week weekly range is around 304 points I wonder if we now have that range about set but as they say anything can happen.
Diverging the other way. Time to tighten the stops from the short, if you captured part of the nearly 8:1 MFE so far. If reversed to long, I'd be at break even stop at this point, since we got to 2:1 MFE on the long side.
