Jeff Castille 

Please see link #378 in the "All you Need" thread. This is dated 9/8/2009

Nice find. It's funny to read my old posts and see where I was back in the past. One day I'm sure I'll get a good laugh out of this thread too.

All you need Yeah... it seems to me that price often retests just a little above or below the support/resistance and in this system it might trigger a losing trade. I think there's a time to buy/sell the breakouts and a time to buy/sell the pullbacks. I hope …

Quoting 

Yeah... it seems to me that price often retests just a little above or below the support/resistance and in this system it might trigger a losing trade. I think there's a time to buy/sell the breakouts and a time to buy/sell the pullbacks. I hope cunparis is aware of this.

I think I arrived at your same conclusion there it just took me 4 months.

In order to know the time to buy the breakout or pullback, I use some Market Profile concepts. If the market is balanced I will fade the breakout. If the market is unbalanced I will buy pullbacks but one could also buy the breakokuts in this scenario.

I didn't mean any disrespect to S2, RH, AYN. My inability to be profitable with these is more likely due to me than those methods, and I didn't practice them long enough to become proficient. The reason I didn't is because I had issues with them (from a personal point of view) and so I moved on to something that was a better match for me.

For me, the first challenge of trading is to find a method that one truly believes in, that doesn't have any conflicts with our own beliefs. This includes not just the trade setup but the timeframe, the market, position sizing, risk management, trade management, etc.

The second is to practice it as long as it takes to master it.

To relate these to my trading:

The cycle trading was a good method for me but it was incomplete. I had to learn the discretionary part of it. That's when I went looking at other methods & techniques and ways of interpreting the market data. Market Profile, order flow, and the volume ladder helped to complement the cycle method and helped me to understand the discretionary part of it, making it complete (I hope). Now I'm in the practice phase.

An update on the swing trade. A nice gap down sunday night and some follow-through this morning. I'm watching the dax and I see lots of professional buying (in the ES too) so I took profit on my 2nd target at 1147.50.

I have my 3rd contract open and I'll be watching this closely. I'd like to see a test of 1035 but we may not make it there.

The good, the bad, the ugly..

I had my worst day ever on the dax this morning. I haven't brought myself to analyze my trades yet. I prefer to just forget about it. Very unusual. During my lunch break I usually go for a run in the woods and that really helps to clear my head and come up with my goals for the afternoon. So today I decided that for CL I'd go back to what had been working last week, that is scalping. But I wanted to keep my losses to 3 ticks and scalp around the cycles. It worked very well for me:



Here's the trades:



Last Monday was negative, last Tuesday I didn't trade, and since last Wednesday I've been positive every day.



That's only 4 days but I think it's about when I started focusing on scalping for CL. So my goal here is just to continue doing what I'm doing and see if I can be consistent.

For the Dax.. it's obvious that the dax is a different animal and I need to make some adjustments. I've been trading CL a lot longer than the dax so I need more time to figure out a working strategy.

PS: I just noticed on the 4 day CL P/L that all my profits came on the short side. This stresses the importance of lining up trades, even scalps, with the "big picture" (higher timeframe trend).

Last contract of the swing trade stopped out at breakeven. I was surprised at the strong move up. Earlier today I saw professional buying on the dax and I kind of that that was going to be the end of the move down but I thought we'd hang out a bit in between. When the dax made a double bottom that's when I covered my 2nd ES short. I ended up covering 3 ticks off the low.

So 5.25 + 13.5 = 18.75 = $937.50

Things are starting to look bullish, the trend is still up, so I'll be looking for a spot to get long. Probably the next 45min support cycle. The lack of follow-through to the downside has me wanting to stay away from the short side.

Wow (-3) tick stop in the CL... I have done something similar at (-5 to -7) but if you can do it at (-3) that is awesome. Small stops on the CL can work if you have a good setup no doubt.

The DAX on the other hand will eat that without a second thought, (in my experience anyway)

my stop is just one end of a range bar but most of the time it looks like more than 10t.

>scalp around the cycles

good plan, that way your mind can keep track of both cycle (big picture) and small trends at the same time.

HJay 

Wow (-3) tick stop in the CL... I have done something similar at (-5 to -7) but if you can do it at (-3) that is awesome. Small stops on the CL can work if you have a good setup no doubt. The DAX on the other hand will eat that without a second thought, (in my experience anyway)

I tell you it's very very difficult to bail on a trade at -3. My little brain keeps saying "maybe it'll come back!" but today I didn't listen I just clicked the close button.

For dax, I'm going with the same strategy tomorrow just to compare with CL. I think I had other issues on the dax today.

here's an example of a dax trade gone wrong. I see no reason to take a full stop on this.

I spent an hour last night going over my dax trades. Made me go to bed late but it was worth it. I also went over my CL trades and then I kept asking myself what did I do wrong on the dax? I came up with two things:

- I didn't cut losers quick enough. in a few cases I got a ladder setup in the other direction, which is my signal to get out

- I didn't scalp with the cycle charts. That's not just a question of discipline, often the cycle charts are a bit ambiguous. In fact that's why it takes so long to learn how to trade with cycles. But I saw clues that told me I was on the wrong side. I just didn't see them real time.

So today's goals:

- cut losers quickly. 3 ticks.

- use the cycle charts to filter out trades. Focus on the cycle charts & POT instead of my scalping chart. line up the scalps with the cycles & order flow on the big picture

I encourage everyone to do this kind of analysis on your trades. If you're not doing it (and I often don't because I "don't have time").. if you're not then you can't learn from the mistakes. I think from now on I'll stop trading 30 minutes early and do the analysis then so that I can keep my evenings for family time.

My perfect trading thread discusses this. It's one of the hardest tasks I've found in trading. It's not hard to do but it's hard to do it every day. But I really think it's has the most impact on my trading.

The POT indicator showed massive buying on the breakout above Friday's close. A POT this high is pretty rare in the DAX and professionals were fading the breakout but they couldn't stop it. When this happens I don't try to fade it, instead I look for a pullback opportunity to join the move.