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i've been wanting to get into futures day trading for a while, and i'm starting my regimen today. 30m-60m/day of trading the open(or before lunch really).
i'm using a basic setup: waiting for the 9/21sma to spread with the pSAR confirming, and then buying pullbacks into the 9ema and selling when they hit 4 ticks.
i'm also using 4ticks as a stop too. the ATR was like 10~ticks today, so things moved fast to say the least. average trade was 45sec. after 35trades i was down $113 after commissions, in a paper account.
is that a good idea with scalping or is it better to scale in your buys, and scale out of your wins? i'm curious as to what the different opinions are. i come from the trend following school, but i like the idea of having fixed targets and sitting on my hands to not interfere. Theres also a boatload of noise in the e-micro market, so 4 ticks can pass by in .2 seconds and not be part of a "move" at all.
any thoughts would be appreciated. this is my first post and im looking forward to learning more from this community and sharing what i can.
the chances of making that idea works is not good . out running the slippage , commission , and over trading will not be easy day in day out. when you fail to make it work , then you will try to filter the pull backs . you would stand a better chance using higher time frames . like when when the ES is trading above the 8 day ema on the daily and weekly charts , take all pull backs to the 8 day ema on the daily with a 5 point stop. hold it until you make 15 to 30 points. use micro contracts if your cash account will not stand a 250.00 loss. that takes care of a lot of problems in your concept. commission, slippage , over trading , being glued to a computer all day long ... ect.ect
I use a variety of indicators to help me to choose when to enter a trade. Exiting a trade is much easier as I am only interested in 5-10 ticks. To help with the whipsaw action and general noise in the trendline I use vwap/mvwap and of course support and resistance. I am working on an addon where I can click a button to adjust various time periods with vwap/mvwap in relation to ema and sma. Also I adjust the ATR calculation and I like to check the RMA and the SMA as SMA is not normally used with the ATR calculation.
In terms of when to trigger the stop loss I prefer to use 8 ticks instead of 4 so that I can ride some of the whipsaw activity. Also with the addon I am coding buttons to adjust the stop loss from 4 ticks to 8 ticks so I can quickly adjust when whipsaw activity is only 1-4 ticks. I don't look at this as slippage now that I have started using Bookmap.
Additionally, I have a chart with the ADX DMI strategy simply as a way to see how much of this data is matching up. I have Bookmap sharing the same monitor and I would argue that Bookmap is quickly becoming my most valuable tool for choosing my entries. I am still getting comfortable with Bookmap as it is an explosion of eye candy that my brain is still learning to process.
Part of the reason I am commenting in this thread is simply to help me organize my thoughts. So thanks in advance for forgiving me for this dizzy array of strategies.
If you factor in the commissions, your 1:1 risk to reward ratio doesn't hold in practice .
I'd suggest leaving that idea & move to at least 1.5R to 2R trades, indicators don't work IMHO - try moving to volume profile if you're looking for longevity as a trader.
I don’t use actual stops, but I target 2-4 ticks (sometimes it moves fast and I may end up with 6-8 as I do it all manually) and try to get out 0-4 ticks if it stalls but sometimes if I just think my placement was wrong, I may put another order in and try to win that one and get out of the first at scratch or profit if my correlations are moving in that direction.
I don’t scale out. If I’m trading a 5 lot, and out all 5. I treat each entry as a separate trade.
The rest I can’t speak to as I don’t use charts or indicators...
35 trades though is a lot to be down for the day btw. Even though it’s paper, try and condition yourself to end the day of it’s not going well.
I had 36 trades today 100% winners (a very good hour of trading), but if I was trading bad I’d never have traded that many times... otherwise you are digging a hole with fees.
I trade 30-50 separate trades a day (sometimes over 100). I risk 1-4 ticks (limit exit usually), I take 1-4 ticks profit, I win 80-90%, but like today, I was 36-36 100% winners. To try and pick direction is a losing venture. His ideas (though, I wouldn’t use charts, indicators or market profile to trade because none of it works) are far less risky.
I agree the commissions can add up, but if you win, they are nothing to worry about. If you are losing 40, 50, 60% of trades you have more to worry about than commissions.
I have no slippage. There’s no slippage on limit orders. It’s not possible.
