That should be a clear hint that you are (a) overtrading, (b) scalping, (c) have no clue.

The name of this game is survival. Everything you are doing right now is acting like you are trying to solve a puzzle. The problem is, you are missing about 1 million pieces and don't even know it.

You need to slow everything down. Stop looking at indicators. Learn about the market and why it moves. Hint: it has nothing to do with an indicator.

The only remote chance you have of making this work is if you stop being so stubborn and start listening to people giving you advice. Then you need to re-plan your strategy knowing that you have YEARS of work ahead of you before you even get to the same place that the people replying to you are at, and likely years more before you are profitable.

If you disagree with this or think you are the exception, then you would be far better off just quitting now. Save yourself a lot of time and money. So far, you've demonstrated you are not cut out to be a trader. Don't take it so personally, most people aren't. The smart ones are the ones that realize it early, before they've lost so much time and money.

Mike

I was not completely clear that you were in a Combine before this. This is a good thing, and while having a sudden, shocking loss that blows it out is not, itself, that good a thing (), it certainly happens. Now the best thing is to see what weaknesses it exposed and what you can do about them.

My first reaction on seeing your chart was that there were just a whole lot of smallish trades on it. When things go very wrong for me, my charts often look like that, too.

I would say that you probably are trading more than you should, and probably trying for moves that are too small. In other words, some sort of scalping. This sort of trading is way harder than it seems. You might want to cut back on the frequency of your trades and look to take a somewhat longer view. You will find it hard to respond quickly and accurately to very short-term twitches in the market, when you're under pressure to act, and certainly when you've already got a loss. It can be helpful to cut back on the pressure to be right within a very tight timeframe, by expanding the timeframe.

Another thing may the size you are trading. I can't tell exactly from the chart, but I would say that you are using mutlitple contracts, which, if the number is too high for you, means that your leverage may be too high. High leverage means more bang for the buck, but it also means more loss for the buck when you're wrong. I don't know your Combine size, but it is usually a good idea to not use anything like the max available contract size per trade. See how it goes with one or two. Your leeway to survive unprofitable trades may become much larger then.

Also, they always give you a daily loss limit. You do not want to use theirs, because that is the "blow up" limit; if you hit it, you're done. Take a number about half or two-thirds of theirs and make it your personal loss limit. If you get to it, don't try to trade your way back to a profit -- the fact that you hit it means that something is off that particular day. It may just be that the market is not the kind of market that your method is best at. It may be that something is off with you psychologically. It may mean none of those things, just that you had some losses today. It doesn't matter: if you want to survive to another day, always stop when your personal limit is reached. Take a walk or do something else for a while. Then do your post-mortem on the day, but avoid any temptation to get back in that day....

Again, good luck. Nobody said it was easy. Or if they did, they were wrong....

Bob.

That should be a clear hint that you are (a) overtrading, (b) scalping, (c) have no clue.

The name of this game is survival. Everything you are doing right now is acting like you are trying to solve a puzzle. The problem is, you are missing about 1 million pieces and don't even know it.

You need to slow everything down. Stop looking at indicators. Learn about the market and why it moves. Hint: it has nothing to do with an indicator.

The only remote chance you have of making this work is if you stop being so stubborn and start listening to people giving you advice. Then you need to re-plan your strategy knowing that you have YEARS of work ahead of you before you even get to the same place that the people replying to you are at, and likely years more before you are profitable.

If you disagree with this or think you are the exception, then you would be far better off just quitting now. Save yourself a lot of time and money. So far, you've demonstrated you are not cut out to be a trader. Don't take it so personally, most people aren't. The smart ones are the ones that realize it early, before they've lost so much time and money.

Mike

@marketvoyager - Bobwest post is the best advice you can get. His post must be printed out and read multiple times a day. Here is why I am saying it. I failed Combine so many times I don't even want to mention it here.

I've been making every single mistake Bobwest listed in his post to you.

What made me change my trading is Many hours of watching seminars related to trading psychology. The key turn point was @Chipps1983 trading Journal as well @alejo journal they are my favourite. You should read chipps1980 journal where Bob providing good support. This guy displayed incredible discipline and continues improvement.

Ahha moment will come. It is like a puzzle.

If you disagree with this or think you are the exception, then you would be far better off just quitting now. Save yourself a lot of time and money. So far, you've demonstrated you are not cut out to be a trader. Don't take it so personally, most people aren't. The smart ones are the ones that realize it early, before they've lost so much time and money.

Mike

@marketvoyager,

First, let me just say how hard it is to give anyone else meaningful advice. Everyone finds their own way, or does not, and it really is up to each of us. However, there are some things that can help. The biggest problem is sometimes getting through to the other person, because everyone pretty much lives in their own world of beliefs and their own viewpoints -- which is not in itself bad, but it makes it hard to get their attention.

I will give it one more try. Please see if anything I am offering makes you want to change anything you are doing.

Looking at your charts and at the things you have written, these things stand out for me:

1. You really, really have to stop attempting to scalp, and also get hold of your tendency to overtrading. Scalping is death. Almost no one can do it well, and the very few successful pros at it will just eat you up. This has been said many times, and somehow you haven't gotten it. You have demonstrated that you cannot scalp profitably. If you do not stop the attempt, you will continue as you have been. This is important.

2. You have mentioned a few times that the TST Combine rules require you to scalp. They do not require any such thing. None of the successful Combine traders who have posted here were scalping. Many of those who failed it were. There is a reason for that. Get that idea out of your mind, because it does not work. There are strategies that do not match well with the TST ruleset, and yes, many are longer-term in nature, but the rules do not require nor do they encourage you to scalp, nor to be very short-term -- which is just as well, because there are almost no successful scalpers anywhere, and none of them are just starting out in trading....

3. You are taking too many trades. This is connected with the attempt at scalping, but is another point to understand. Jumping in and out will kill your account quickly. You will get many small losses that will eat up the small profits, and you will be done. You need larger profits to give you a cushion against the losses, and you will not have them with all this over-trading.

4. There is an amazing amount of stuff on your charts, and they keep getting more complicated. You also keep looking everywhere for more techniques, more methods to use, more stuff to look at, one new thing after another. This has not helped you. Look for simplicity. Find something that speaks to you, understand how -- and whether -- it tells you something real about the market, and stick with it until you have really explored its potential. Jumping from method to method, idea to idea, is not working for you. Put a stop to it and get focused.

5. Similarly, the "right" methods, and the "right" indicators, do not exist. There are traders who succeed with methods that seem totally ridiculous to others, but that they can put to use profitably. There are so many different possible approaches to the markets that it sometimes seems that they are each in a totally different reality. Yet, many, many things will work, in the hands of someone who has made them work. But to look for a new thing that will be what you need to break through is a fool's errand. If you don't put a stop to it, you will continue to thrash around with all these new ideas and new questions and new charts, but the same unfortunate results.

I know this is a kind of negative list -- it's all about things you should stop doing. But if you don't stop them, and I mean stop every one of them, you will have no chance of finding anything that will work for you.

Now for the hardest point:

6. I cannot tell you, and no one else can tell you, what you should be doing instead. That is truly a bummer, and I wish I could. There are a lot of books and webinars and forum posts where someone is trying to tell you that, but they do not really work out all that well. There may be a lot of really good ideas in many of them, but it is not that easy to grab them and just put them to use. If you actually do the work of making sense of them, applying them, then maybe they will be helpful. Whether you get ideas from someone else or not, you have to take them into yourself and make them your own, or they are worthless.

7. Which is why your question about a good journal to follow is also barking up the wrong tree. Sure, you can learn from other posters, but mostly you will learn when they are discussing their mistakes, since their mistakes probably will be among your mistakes too -- not from following or copying their methods.

8. As a last point, everything you are experiencing that is not working lies within your own personal psychology, which is why new methods and all that stuff are not working for you. You are still you, when you try the shiny new thing; you still do the same things with it that you did with the last shiny thing. This is also hard to get, and is absolutely something that only you can address. You are the only one who knows what you are doing and what you thinking when you make a good or a bad trade, and you are the only one who can address, or even know, what your issues are. But without the self-awareness to work on them, nothing else is going to work for you.

I'm truly sorry if this has not been pleasant for you to read. Please understand that I mean it well, as do the many others who have tried to tell you similar things. I know that I have not answered your questions, but that's because your questions are wrong. Perhaps I have helped you see that, perhaps not.

If you want to know, I believe that is why @Big Mike said, in his last post to you:



That doesn't mean you have to quit, but it does mean you have to change. Otherwise, quit.

I think I have fulfilled my duty to try to be helpful. I do hope it will be of help. I have also put a lot of energy into this thread, and the questions that have come back are still about what new thing to try. Really, you have got to be kidding.

Good luck, and please start thinking and stop all this spinning around and searching.

Bob.

Can you recommend a journal of a trader that trades the ES, and is heavy on volume profile, volume ladder, and price action, and that is consistent with experience? I think the one you recommended have methods based on sma's and some trade euro and forex.