Okay Here goes- I have been hanging out Hijacking Evans PATS thread for a while now and it's time I grew a pair and created my own journal I guess.
I first got interested in trading when my wife dragged me to a 4Xmadeasy seminar in 2004. $3000 down and no results later I was still hooked. I followed this with countless ebooks, mentors, even a ponzi runner I named Captain Morgan in the Dominican republic. Ironically I followed Cindy's signals back in the day blindly - starting with a 10k account and I made good money. I bailed on the trade that cost her account but I was hooked and my Plan B firmly in place.
I started trading forex in the middle of the night and using MT4 - That lifestyle couldn't sustain itself so I discovered the ES and Mack PATS in ~2011. Through Mack I also learned NinjaTrader and what a real trading platform is. I worked in IT for over 30 years and was dead sick of it - The last 18 in management. Good money but hated it. Was laid off in August of 2012 and secretly I was really happy. I had my goal in place and funds saved- What I did not have was real time market time in. I thought I was ready- Man was I wrong...
in August 2012 I started trading Macks system in SIM and got my butt handed to me. I made the excuse that trend lines are to subjective and needed something more definitive and in a hurry. I wandered off to another program that promised results in 3 months. ( You can probably see where this is going). I joined the daytradingacademy- All those glowing testimonials - even the personal contact references I communicated with seemed like a sure thing. NOT
That program did not work out as you might guess - Now $3000 lighter and 4 months down the tubes I returned to PATS. This time however something was different and within a few months I was able to draw trend lines correctly and shortly after that my long string of losing gradually turned into profitability.
In May I believe I added the Jigsaw product and that provided me an additional edge- The problem I had with PATS
was the entries and waiting for confirmed price action on the 2000 tick chart. I was always entering late and the max 2 point stop failures could wipe out any profit easily. The Jigsaw product gave me the clarification I needed to verify that Macks areas are indeed reactive. So my goal was to determine how I could enter at these areas early using price action structure but without using price action candle verification. ( Also have all of Steve Nisan's material too btw).
I use the following indicators:
Previous day high / low
2000 tick chart
21 ema
trend lines ala Mack
Jigsaw strength meter and recon tape
short term sr lines ( my special sauce)
15 min range indicator from mkt open
My trading rig:
IBM Thinkpad Wseries with SSD dual Dell 24" monitors
Dell Precision T3500 dual Dell monitors as backup and recording
Regarding my trading I have learned something from every one of my mentors including what not to do.
The biggest strides I have made came from resources here at Big Mikes. Mack obviously - Vance's CL journal- and Peter Davies with Jigsaw come to the top of my list.
I do not consider myself an expert and do not want anyone to think I have improved Macks system. I made changes only because of my personality and weaknesses with entries. Posting to Evans thread has helped my personal trading. My plan is to continue making progress and maintain profitability and hopefully pay something forward in the process.