Hi mate, I have a day job but sometimes get time to trade at work when nothings on.

I was actually in a pull back long right at the start of the Asian session just prior to the news pop. Hit my target for around 20 pips but then went almost another 200 higher...

I've recently been reading Lance Beggs PTA ebook so I'm interested in your trading.

Adamus 

This one was difficult! That was the biggest bar I've ever seen on the 3-min. I think the previous record was 80 points. 112! Couldn't hold my trade - don't know if it will turn out to be good to scratch it. After the fact: noticed I was very bearish after the big push up, but should have been bullish. However there were no real opportunities for B/Os or P/Bs that I could see. The trade I put on was the failure of the B/O continuation at 1.2600 although I was pretty worried about the volatility and incorporated the 1.2593 S/R line into it, so I was looking for it to break below that too, which it did. It also broke a swing low and a line up from the big swing low and it broke the MA, but still it wasn't going to go down. Guess I was lucky not to lose anything.

Hi Adamus!

I remember those moves. Who says no news (and no news only) is good news

The first caught me by surprise but was more or less prepared for the second. It wasn't too long ago probably would have been on the wrong side of them, losing money hand over fist and hoping "it will turn around any time now" until I was margin called :-/ No substitute for (bitter) experience.

One reason I prefer tick bars to minute bars is they give a little structure to the action and therefore let the indicators work (I trade 50MA trend, stochs, MACD & S/R but also raw enthusiasm of price movement).

Cheers
Brian




ETA: times in figures are AST: GMT - 4 hours.

Brian

bnichols 

Hi Adamus! I remember those moves. Who says no news (and no news only) is good news The first caught me by surprise but was more or less prepared for the second. It wasn't too long ago probably would have been on the wrong side of them, losing money hand over fist and hoping "it will turn around any time now" until I was margin called :-/ No substitute for (bitter) experience. One reason I prefer tick bars to minute bars is they give a little structure to the action and therefore let the indicators work (I trade 50MA trend, stochs, MACD & S/R but also raw enthusiasm of price movement). Cheers Brian

Ah, I'm so envious. Do you not sleep or something? Sadly I both have to sleep and go to work and didn't get a crack at either move. It looks like both offered classic break-out pull-back setups for getting into position and some beautiful moves to target

Just looking at your charts, I can't see what you mean - surely your trades on the first move were much better than on the second? On the first, it looks like you got in well and traded two parts both of which hit target, twice - and on the second move, it seems you just had a couple of scratch trades, no? NT7 entry triangles point right, exit triangles point left? Or are you trading more long term and adjusting your position?

Didn't trust the action enough today to stick with the trades. Risk 8 points or bail? I bailed, just felt it was too 50:50. Felt like I needed good luck to get my target. Annoyingly it got hit after bailing, but it was better management on my part than usual.

Looking back at it after the fact, the decision to bail at the mini-reverse off the MA was pretty hard to avoid. Killer. I had two clues to go on to make me bullish - the failure (initially) to hit the Asian low - and then the higher high (just - I'm talking about the bar 2 bars before my entry)

Too many S/R lines to get a good trade in, and hovering around 1.2600 too much for my liking.


From the rough chart on FT.com it looks like I should have held thro support at 1.2600.

Might have a job to do here - going over as much history as I can to see whether I should be holding thro the first target or not, or maybe better said, when to hold and when to fold - it goes in cycles. Once the market has stayed long enough in one range, the S/R levels from previous day highs and lows build up to the point where they are too close together for a rational trading plan. In a new area, there are limited number of S/R levels to play with and break-outs from one S/R level results in a big move to the next.

Reminds me of @Cashish 's message where he was talking about the natural price rotation - he only had 14 points at that stage, and he played off the 00 and 50 levels too.

So my trading: first trade was a bit of a goof-up. Must have been half asleep still because I misjudged the risk:reward and after entry suddenly realised my reward was smaller than my risk. I took the target exit happily and tried to play the B/O - P/B at the Asian high, although it was slightly difficult because of the immediate S/R just above. I treated it as one setup, so I didn't get suckered into a long by the dip and big push up which was actually my B/O bar, being the first to break the higher S/R.

It looked unlikely to turn into a good setup on the 1-min chart but did then clearly fail, offering only a few points down to 1.2600 and the next S/R. And I'm always suspicious that the market is going to consolidate around the 00 levels so again I was happy to take the target and be flat.

So despite taking 9 points which is pretty nice by my standards, I have to look at the big picture, which is that the move I keep seeing is all the way across the Asian session - despite the two S/R levels in-between - 30 points. To do that today, I would have had to put my initial stop at 1.2615 to be sure. 9 points risk ... and then I would have left it for the day.

Stuck in a trade that appears to be going nowhere.

After the fact, it is pretty obvious that it was just holiday trade, everything moving really slowly. The market put in some bearish counter-action against me, and in fact made higher lows and lower highs so if I was really switched on I would have scratched the trade. As it was, it went my way and my luck continues.

The market actually gave me enough rope almost to hang myself with. I toyed with the idea of pulling my stop up when it would have been too early, and I toyed with the idea of putting the target at the Asian high at 1.2608 instead of keeping conservative with it just in front of 1.2600. Fortunately my experienced little voice said no, I had enough of seeing the market retracing further than I thought it should and not extending as far as I thought it should.

In fact I had a reversal entry order in place too and when I was moving the exit stop around, I goofed up and deleted both orders, and of course the target order which was OCO was cancelled too so I had to put them back in, and I goofed that up, entering a Buy stop at the target instead of a sell limit. I didn't notice until my target was hit and my position size doubled. Then with double my position size, the devil on my shoulder told me to hold it until the next target. I didn't, I recovered and bailed, good since it was the top.

Went wrong way. Should have caught myself and didn't


PM: broke my winning streak. i wasn't careful enough. my trading rules say take the first S/R line after the B/O as the target - but that was only 5.5 ticks away so I just took the next one after that, which is not according to my rules. I
should have combined the S/R lines closer than 10 ticks apart into an S/R zone and played the B/O of that as one area.

The problem with that is that the whole area from 1.2495 to 1.2538 is full of S/R levels every 5 to 8 ticks apart. So basically I wouldn't have got a B/O-P/B at all. I could have culled some of the S/R levels by re-analysing the situation, since it has just built up over the last month. Or I could have just played channel B/Os or simple P/Bs. Can't see any setups there. Too keen to trade still I guess.

Nothing this morning, just flat. Couldn't even find a pull-back.

PM: another half an hour and I would have had a move on my hands. It was pretty evil though, would have suckered all but the best into trading it as a break-out downwards past the Asian low, but it failed and reversed, also will malice afore-thought, giving little indication that it was going to go straight up to the Asian high.

scraped thro......


PM: turned into a sideways day.

Thought my stop would be taken out on the 3rd bar of the trade but the bid hit the sell stop without electing it. Probably the benefit of an IB sim trading account. I actually had a reversal order in place 0.5 tick below the stop.

The exit order was definitely in the right place as far as I was concerned so I wasn't going to change it at all under pressure. We'd just had a break-out pull-back at recent S and as far as pull-backs go, it was looking pretty convincing with a couple of bars of stall, a fakey move down which then reversed and hit the MA. Didn't expect the move that followed quickly all the way down past the low.

When the bears were pushed back up a second time though I figured I could leave it and went off for breakfast. Since I'd abandoned the trade, I didn't move the stop up, so I didn't get caught by the next bear spike down and it shot up to my target. Normally under most circumstances the target would have been the first R, but the 1.2300 level I figured was far more attractive and only a couple of points. And it all worked out.

Nothing doing - lots of up and down but no setups.


PM: if you can look at the quiet Asian session as a slow, smaller variation of the normal London session, you can look at the action which started at 04:45am as a break-out pull-back failure at the S/R level there - and it stalled for over an hour before failing but it was pretty much a B/O-P/B failure in slow motion. Maybe I'm talking rubbish - another thing to check out in the history.