GaryD 

Sunday afternoon ...similar to how markets react whether in/out out of range/balance, the high dollar winning days that came earlier in the week had pushed my expectations out of balance. Possibly it was ego that took the place of volume... When markets are out of balance, behavior can be more volatile, risk and/or reward can increase significantly, it is harder to predict how far something might go...

There is a metal sculpture that sits on my desk. It is something I bought while on a ski trip to Colorado, during a time when my wife and I were separated, 2001 maybe. She had "pointed out" that I had forgotten how to live, that all I did was work 24/7. I thought I was doing my part by providing the money I had made, the cars we drove, the vacations we took, our house, our lifestyle... but all of that came at a price. And it was not monetary.

I had become so absorbed in it I did not see it, until, at that time anyway, it was too late.

So anyway, I saw this metal sculpture. It is of a man, very muscular, masculine, giant biceps and deltoids, cartoonish and loosely detailed. He is running, has somewhere to go I guessed. What sold me, is that he was carrying this large flower in one hand. And to me, that represented balance. Masculine and feminine, driven and carefree.

I made some post a year or so ago about how to trade for money but not focus on the money, how to size up without acknowledging it was for greater profits, how to have confidence and fear at the same time. We tend to swing from one extreme to the other, rarely finding that moment when everything has perfectly balanced and the two extremes no longer exist.

The past few weeks I have been feeling calmer than I can ever remember about trading, and I think that is balance. I saw that when I traded poorly on Friday, the best I could classify it over two days of careful meditation, was "out of balance". Tonight I read that again (via permalink for the week) and looked over at that sculpture...

I was going to be a buyer at an ABC, but the expected C leg went further than I wanted to follow, and so I sold all day, despite it being a mostly up motion in the RTH. Then I thought maybe the up move was a minor W4, but that got blown away also into the close (insanity move). Tonight I am considering this view.

Wednesday, 6/12/13


Today is EIA, crude moved higher in the ON session, only 8am so could be anywhere by open. I am running through rcent memories and conversations with myself, feeling what balance feels like. Flexible, non-emotional, unbiased but with a strategy for whatever comes. I am tired again today, TRying to hang with my schedule and Melissa's, but other than that feel great. Back pain is non-existent today, my posture is greatly improved.

Melissa is off work today. She has seen my charts over the years as I explained what I did or what I was going to do or whatever, but she has never, in 6 years, sat with me and watched me trade. While that is most certainly a good thing considering the odds of her catching me on a bad day in years past, the past month I have been encouraging her to come sit with me and watch what it looks like, let me explain it to her as the day unfolds. We have not talked about it for today, but when she gets up I am going to suggest it.

My trading weakness as I started this new journal was psychological. I have gone into a whole new depth of technical knowledge this year as well, but the more important thng was to boost confidence, stop being ashamed to refer to myself as a daytrader. It is amazing the shift that I have felt occur recently as my sense of who I am as a trader has finally solidified.

She may decide she is not ready for that, it could take her awhile before she really accepts it. She accepts it enough that she allows me to do it, she knows the day by day account balance changes since we talked one night sometime recently. She took the $1800 down day without even a change in expression.

This is from an email I sent to a friend recently, "...believing there are guys who trade for a living, not just teach trading for a living, is kind of like believing in any other fantasy being. Unicorns, leprechauns, Santa Claus... Of course, blowing up my first few accounts does not help things, but my wife said to me once as we were discussing me studying trading, "Gary, I know you are workig very hard at this, but at some point you have to realize that it is not real".

As a self-taught trader, it can feel that way sometimes.

I used to give myself mantras like "Believe". Sometimes that felt childish. Would I ever grow up? I used to play blackjack pretty well, carried a rule card in my wallet and would play against a handheld game on the plane to Vegas and run the account up the whole flight there, make my $200-300 a day, then go eat, drink and be merry. Trading seemed kind of like that. Something to do for entertainment. But it was not that as far as my motivation went, this was war. But still, my future seemed to hinge on the shuffling of the cards sometimes.

I don't have that feeling anymore. While the outcome remains unknown in both, there is so much flexibility in the rules in trading that once understood, the advantage is light years away from anything called gambling.

While self-taught traders usually feel like they are alone in the fight, guys who come up on the street have a two huge advantages over the rest of us. 1) they receive professional training, so have no reason to doubt what they are being taught, and 2) they have a network of people who not only believed it was a "real job", it WAS their real job! lol!

My job starts at 9am.

Key reference point for the day, Major players came in here, and seemed to think this was high enough. They could be wrong though, but I am on their side.

Going in lightly before the ES open, may get nailed. Fading a strong opening drive.

On the surface this could look like a "bad" trade. But I am going for adding an element to my trading a major RR opportunities, and on a higher view the market has been bracketing in a wide range, and there is prior TPO excess on daily and weekly profile.

On the RTH I want to see this pass thru the dark area, and then I will add on a pullback. But will be flat going into EIA most likely... Maybe, maybe not.

Closed +25. Any other day, but I still have that reference in my head. Net 51 and flat. Should have hit that with normal 3 contracts, in hindsight, but that was a major fade. I had everything going against it on the small timeframe. I want that as a part of my trading, from the RR standpoint, but I also don't want to start my day with a full stopout for doing something that hard against the flow. If I got hit with 1, I was wrong. If I got hit on 3, I was stupid.

Going to watch them balance out in front of EIA, may scalp that reference. It it blows it means something too. But with the uncertainty in the news recently, I am now leaning short. This is the high side of price that has been between 92 something - 97 something for over a month.

That move into yesterday's RTH close was short covering, they blew everyone out. Then the open above Y value continued the squeeze. But the big sellers stepped in up around the top of this move. The bad news, the biggest players do not have to be out before close... and would not mind to sell more above the current HOD.

The extended effects of potential deleveraging have to be in the minds of some big guys though.


This is where I traded this morning. A lot of small scalps mostly, 25 was the "big" trade lol!





I used to like to scalp the major turns, where I could see there was someone much bigger than me backing me up. That means a lot of freighttraining, and that also means I have been run over so many times over the years. But I have been refining it, and nail some great entries sometimes. And used to then get pissed when my 15 tick winner would have been 150...

"Don't try to pick tops and bottoms" I would read, and tell myself, and then do it anyway... Crazy, but getting better at it. More comfortable with trading and or insanity...

So far they can't get out of this dark zone. Sorting things out ahead of EIA I imagine. Why I closed the runner. If It would have left it, passed thru it rather, I might have held.