bluemele 

Papa, This may seem harsh, but I see you falling back on some 'tendencies'. The 2 steps backward to me seem to be not sticking to your PT's and Stops. That is it! I got some good advice from Mike and Co. and I wonder if when you hit the entry, you turn your chair around and meditate or stare at the wall until you hear Profit Target Hit or Stop hit or whatever? You moving your stops is the bigger concern to me as that has been your main issue for some time. Just trying to help.

If you think it concerns you, how do you think I feel?

I really thought I had beaten that bug-a-boo, but yesterday showed me I have to be constantly on the alert against it; yesterday proved that I can recover from a normal loss but when I screw up and create a large loss, it takes much longer to recover the dollars, but even longer to fix the emotional loss.

This journey is not easy....

Good point.

Didn't mean to pound it in, just pointing it out with a possible solution. I used to trade like that w/ FOREX. Never 'got ahead' or 'recovered'.

The road is a challenge and I guess we all have our issues. I envy having your issues to deal with and I am sure you do the same with mine.

I think I have gotten away from working on my self discipline issues. I have been trading more than I like (number of trades), taking almost every little hint of a setup. I am again going to limit myself to 4 or less trades per day. That means I need to wait for the best setups and thus exercise a bit more patience. I also want to set and achieve consistency goals. I really want to have 70% profitable days, 90% profitable weeks, and 100% profitable months. In honesty, I have never met those goals. When I look back at the vast number of trades I have taken cash and sim over the last month, I do have a high winning percentage, but that is not the final measure. For the next few weeks, my daily goal is not very large, and thus my weekly goal is not large. A fair number of you make my weekly goal in a single trade, but that does not bother me (in fact, I am very happy for you and use you as a goal to shoot for), but my goal is something for me to work towards, and then repeat, and repeat. After that I will start raising my goal slowly.

I am happy with the method and technique. It is now time to focus on goal achievement.

Only 2 trades today. Both were winners, but the second one was not a very good trade and I am very thankful to have gotten any profit on it at all.

I watched 6E closely this morning using the 4 and 10 Better Renko charts. The 10 Renko chart indicated to only look for longs, but on the 4 Renko price seemed to spend the majority of its time above the 100 line. There were some entries that I could have taken but I was being very conservative and just watched.

I did my trades on CL using the 5 min setup.

Over the weekend, SC released pre-release 706 which incorporates a new API from Rithmic, allowing SC to receive Rithmic data while running under WINE on Linux. Everything looked good and there was no visual lag when compared against NinjaTrader running on a separate computer. One serious error was found; if I submitted an order, either sim or cash, the SC would shut down. I have posted on their Support Forum and will wait to see if it is a SC issue, a Wine issue, or something in my setup. I will continue to do all cash trading on NT until SC is a proven performer on Linux.

A good day, met my daily goal. Did not take a lot of heat doing it. I traded the 6E with cash using the 4/10 better Renko setup. I used NT on my desktop for this. 6E did not give the long runs today that it has in the past, but I met my goals and am satisfied.

On my laptop I was running SC with 2 charts of CL. One was a 5 min chart that I did MWinfrey's 5 min odyssey setup, with the modification I want the candle body to close across the moving average before I enter. I had 3 successful sim trades doing that. The second chart was a 15 min CL in which I looked for inside bars. I had 2 successful sim trades for those.

I limited myself to 3 cash trades and the 5 sim trades. On each I took modest gains, but at the end of the day, the total was good.

Overall a great day. Started off with a 14 tick loss on 6E. I was a little anxious and shorted too soon. Switched over to CL and had 3 quick winners, one for 22 ticks, so ended up positive for the day. My daily average for the week is just above my daily goal, so my renewed focus is helping.

Finally, SC will run on Ubuntu and I was able to trade on it today. Most folks may not care about this, but it means there is a viable alternative to Windows. I am cheapskate I guess; I don't like paying for something if it can be had for free, and Linux is free (dollar wise, but it does require some effort to learn to maintain it, but for me that is a labor of love). Anyway, I am happy about the situation. I have attached a screen shot of my linux setup, having the 5 and 15 min charts...some of the trade signals came from my desktop with the Renko setup....

Gonna be out of town for a few days. My California girl and family have moved to Tennessee and we are going to visit them and probably bring some of the grandkids to stay with us for a while. A little break from trading ever now and then is good.....especially if it involves grandkids

Take care all

Enjoy your mini-vacation



Mike

Came back from our trip to Tennessee last night. I must say eastern and central Tennessee sure are pretty.

We brought back 2 of the grandkids and they will be with us for 2-3 weeks or so. It will have an impact on my trading time, so I will not be able to watch the markets as much. I was able to make a couple of trades this morning, both successful and I ended up making my daily goal. One trade was a Renko on CL and the other was an inside bar breakout that the Renko charts supported. I met my daily goal and then shut down the computer to spend time with grand kids.

Tonight we will be getting 4 more grandchildren for a week, so trading may not even be possible the rest of the week. I will try to fit something in without compromising my focus.

Today was similar to yesterday. I did two quick trades, made daily goal and quit. It took a while longer today for the setup to appear but I was able to do both trades in about a 4 minute period. First, I did a 4 Renko trade and then waited for a 10 Renko that followed right on its heels. Before that I had mixed signals where one of the Renkos would indicate to go long and the other would be short. Thankfully, I stayed on the sidelines until I both were in agreement.

There are a couple of good lessons buried in there that I hope I can repeat in the future.

We have to get up a bit earlier than usual in order to get some of the grandkids to school. My wife took them; that left me a bit of time on my hands and that is scary with the market. I have never had much success pre-market and repeatedly I have told myself to leave the pre-market alone. I broke that rule, entering a trade short at 8:53. It was promptly stopped out. I had the stop above a recent swing and it suffered a bit of slippage, so I found myself in a hole before the market opened.

Rather than beat myself up as I have done in the past, I just focused on getting in synch with the 10 and 4 Renko charts. It took several trades, but I did make my daily goal. I slipped a bit more in my discipline when I took a trade just before the oil inventory. I cut that one quickly, and it was a good thing because it would have been a loser otherwise.

Stay focused on technique, daily/weekly goal....repeat that over and over.....The loss today was a good thing as it tells me I have to stick to the gameplan, every bit of it....