This is my trading journal which I hope will help me learn a few things about my trading behavior and gain some consistency.
I've been trading for a few years with various platforms and products, and been looking at futures for the last two years.
I tried Mack's PATs system, and while it looks great and I'm sure works for some traders, I struggled when I went live for two reasons.
The first is that I don't have a lot of time during the day - I run a small business in it's sixth year and I have a young family. I'd be busy trading away, and would be randomly interrupted by an urgent call or member of staff and would miss trades, or worse, would rush entries or exits when under pressure. That's no way to trade and needless to say it didn't work for me!
The second reason was psychological - I really struggled to stick to the rules and the system. I would always be second guessing setups and I would 'create' trades that weren't there because I felt like I needed to validate the amount of time I was spending trading and also I felt like I needed to be making money everyday, which added to the pressure.
So this time I'm trying something a bit different which I hope will get around these problems by taking a step back and trading multiple charts on the 4-hour time-frame.
My strategy is to trade simple, with-trend pullbacks and trend line trades using Keltner Channels and manually drawn trend lines. This is an example on 6J.
1. Price shows momentum by pulling strongly out of the channels
2. Price pulls back and then breaks through the pullback trend line - in an uptrend, a trade is placed at the top of the bar which clearly breaks the pull back trend line. A second setup would be to see a second-entry style setup close to breaking the pullback trend line but I need to firm up my rules on this.
3. Price goes above the price of the momentum swing at 1. which is a target.
Another example from this week on 6B. Both trades worked, but the runner on the 1st was stopped at BE, and I bailed both contracts on the second when I should have held one.
And one more example where it just didn't work out.
Recognizing exhaustion will be a handy skill for trades like these.
I hope to post updates frequently and see how my method evolves over time. I'll be SIM trading until I'm confident of success, and also I will be reading through Brett Steenbarger's book The Daily Trading Coach and The Art and Science of Technical Analysis by Adam Grimes
Any help, advice, wisdom and criticism is very welcome