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Basically here is the latest development in regards to my strategies:
1. I keep my momentum/stop liquidation strategy with very small stop reserved only for days with above average volume and strong momentum and directional market. I feel that only during days like that I can generate consistently good risk-reward using small stop of 5-6 ticks and targeting 30-50 or so ticks profit. During shallow market like we have for last 2 months bar few days, it generates break even trading because slippage eats up significant part of profits (low liquidity).
2. During other days I look to implement different type of entry within the same order flow framework:
a. During range days - fading stop run area, expecting price action to collapse on liquidity vacuum and return back and overshot the break out level; the hard part here is judging how far breakout can go before collapsing, yesterday I used 7 ticks from the level, one trade went only 4 ticks into red, another 11 ticks, but with 20 ticks stop all was safe, so I plan to use 20-25 ticks as a base stop and profit equal to that but once the spike is over and 1m candle closes I will tighten stop to remain past the extremum and look to adjust profit target within the price action structure
b. During trends on low volume days - I will look for strong levels, allow break out to happen and will look to enter on limit order on a snap back price action to the breakout level, having an entry few ticks prior to the level and using 20 ticks stop, which will be truncated as a little bit of price action develops and reasonable stop zone will be present.
Oh, and I am ending all the scalping experiments like micro-breakouts out of blocks of compressed price action (Volman-style), scalping Keltner channel, etc. It's not very profitable, spends a ton on commissions and is extremely draining emotionally. To celebrate that decision I removed range bar chart from my trading setup and have only 1m and 5m charts on. As I grow my cushion I look to trade more and more swing-based approach, but all intra-day.
I know this is your journal but I just wanted to add that I have found Bob Volman's approach EXTREMELY profitable. It also took out the stress from trading once I got used to it. To my amazement 10-tick scalping was the holy grail for me. I know intraday swinging is the best approach for TST but Volman is where I learnt to manage my trades best.
Please continue what works for you without getting distracted by my comments.
This approach works definitely better on euro than on gold. I just found euro being dead for most of the time lately, and going even for 10 ticks during dead market is often very challenging. Very recently euro became very active so perhaps it works much better, I stopped scalping euro in January 2013 after about 2 years working on it and trading euro on short term basis one way or another. Glad it is working for you. I just want to take a couple of trades per day and be done.
Today gold was very challenging to trade. Low volume day but what was expected to be a typical range day turned out to be a grind and push day with unstoppable move up. I had several good entries on demo. I did only one live trade, late in the day, and was glad to get out with 1 tick profit. In the end it would yield about 30 ticks profit after and hour and a half, but the entry was too off the high and price rotated way too close to my stop, so I wanted to get out ASAP. Tomorrow will be a better day.
My biggest fail on Friday was inconsistency in trade management - I cut some trades short and let others hit stop. I will devote next week completely to improve my consistency and hold to the target or stop whatever it is. Not to say I will foolishly expect predetermined stops and targets to be optimal, I will adjust both to the price action structure: stops to the swing low and high and target to the end of space, swing or trendline.
