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I hear you there... that's where I was last fall...so wrapped up the rest of life was almost a burden, although I knew better. Shut it down completely, bought a fishing boat and hit the lake for a few months... came back rested and MUCH more on my game. Also seem to have learned the lesson too... not letting it engulf me so much.
Good for you for recognizing it, and for having a life beyond trading...
Craig
Did a better job today just making the right higher-level decisions about what trades to seek and where to move on them. But I was not quick on the draw, allowing unfilled-limits to leave me high and dry at BE.
CL, Took a good short entry. Tried to exit half on the first dip at 67.80, but by the time I got my limit exit in place, price was on its way up to stsop me out. My weak hand got shaken out at BE before moving back to target. I doubt I would have moved stop to BE if I had correctly exited the first half, which is silly but it is what it is.
No entry in ES, but I did try to take a long right on the opening break at 2825.50. I screwed that one up also, trying to limit in for a couple ticks and did not get a fill. I have a lot of crap to get to this morning so ending even earlier than usual.
If I want to keep at this mode of trading, I clearly will need to put in some practice-hours just placing orders, moving them quickly, exiting decisively, when to try for the bid/ask spread and when to just hit the market.
Rounding up another exciting week here at el rancho. What have we learned? Some things! First, the numbers.
Once again, this week had me up over 2K on Tuesday, and ending the week much less than that.
On Sunday I sold 1 6J at .009058
On Monday I bought 1 6E at 1.1740,
Sold 1 CL at 69.22,
Bought 2 ZN at 119'245
Bought 1 GC at 1219
On Friday I bought back the 6J at .0090375 for a gain of $256.25
sold the 6E at 1.1704 for a loss of $450
bought back the CL at 68.86 for a gain of $360
sold the ZN at 119'135 for a loss if $343.75
sold the GC at 1222.60 for a gain of $360
All together a gain of $182.50. But these positions were up over $2000 at one point in the week.
I have been very fascinated with the first-few-days-response to my entries over the past few months. I seem to be getting all the good stuff in the first day or two, and all the randomness after that. This is a small sample within a particular market state, so I avoid drawing conclusions. (I avoid drawing conclusions, in general - I prefer to stay on my toes). Still, it makes sense. Let's suppose that the markets have a rhythm to their waves, and that those oscillations dip in and out of sync with one another, and vary in frequency. I look at the markets on a Saturday and pick various peaks / troughs in those recent cycles as places I would like to act on. It could be the time-frame I am looking at, a general tendency, or simply a recent coincidence, but I am observing that the 12 - 48 hour window after a trigger-point seems to carry the bulk of that immediate swing.
And what follows is random, or worse, skewed toward reversion.
Furthermore, if those oscillations can synch themselves to various paces and patterns, then looking at the markets only on a Saturday, with usually a monday-friday or tuesday-friday holding pattern, is arbitrary and suboptimal. There are obviously going to be peaks and troughs starting and ending at varying points in the week for each market, and potentially waves that last shorter than a week or longer than two weeks.
What I will do with this set of observations is still unclear. What is clear, is that it is time to get out the chisel and carve some new facets in this little method of mine.
A convenient time to hit the blackboard, as this weekend is very tight for me schedule-wise, and I do not know if I have time for my usual market review.
Perhaps I will round out the month with more journaling on general topics, but I may not post a swing-trading-plan for the coming week. I need a little time to gestate this baby.
The race is tight. If you like this journal, feel free to drop a thanks in the FIO July 2018 journal contest here:
Here's my submission to the contest, a little late to the party. In addition to my usual weekly updates, this month I plan to post some intraday activity also.
These are impertant points. Looking at it from a slightly different angle, I think the main thing is that the market has no reason to hold to expectations set on a weekend, or at any other time. We can try to lay out the possibilities we see at that time, but the view we have then is really only valid then. So if that's a trader's window, then he needs to be an accurate predictor for the entire next week, regardless of the market's changes during the week. I think this is a very high bar.
In other words, it's not that the market deteriorates into randomness, but rather that the trader's prediction diminishes in accuracy with time, even a few days. This implies that responsiveness to the market as it changes is essential. Unfortunately, it also argues more in favor of a short-term perspective, which I do not really agree with. I think that experience shows that traders can make money on a long, medium or short-term timespan. But there is something worth looking into in these observations.
Thank you, Bob. I thought about this a little, and wanted to add a few more perspectives.
Exhibit A: CL Weekly chart with weekly ATR, side-by-side with CL Daily chart with daily ATR and a 5-day donchian channel. 2018 YTD.
One important thing to consider about doing weekly analysis on the weekends and generally entering toward the start of the week and closing positions at the end of the week, is that it imposes a rigid start and end to a 5-day holding window. On the weekly chart above I have circled every time the weekly bar closed reasonably close to its directional extreme. In other words, these would be weeks when closing on friday would leave the trader quite pleased with himself. Note that through the first 15 weeks of the year, it was almost 50% of the time. Then over the last 16 weeks of the year it has been less than 20%. Overall, 10 out of 31 weeks.
On the right hand, we have a daily chart with a 5-day donchian where I've circled roughly each time the bar closed near the 5-day extreme. So we remove the rigid start and end, and look across any potential starting point and end point for a 5 day period - if we close at the end of that period, would we be near the extreme for that period. This comes to roughly 50 out of 150 (just eyeballing it), 33%, and much shorter dry-spells of not getting good exits.
So, in cases where the market synchs up nicely to a monday-friday trading window, as it did very often in the first few months of the year, the weekend-trader comes out nicely. But this could be purely coincidental, and when the market starts picking its pivots mid-week, it pays to have a flexible open and close date. Makes sense.
Another observation is that as you decrease the length of your hold, from 5-days, down to 3 days, 2 days, or intraday, you are going to have many, many more cases where the end of that holding period occurs at the extreme of that holding period. If we dropped down to a 2-day donchian, that chart would be completely full of circles.
A true swing trader, holding for several months, will tell you that in terms of effort/reward, commissions, and reducing opportunity for mistakes, longer holds are ideal. They would be right, and generally able to make very respectable returns. But if we ignore all of those human things, then the "ideal trader" (one with a crystal ball, unlimited time, and balls of steel) will reduce his / her hold time to optimize opportunity to open at one extreme and exit at another extreme, and capture as many of those windows as possible (as unrealistic as that may be).
Another point of optimization worth looking at is ATR of relative time windows. A naive guess as to the multiple between a daily ATR and a weekly ATR would be 5x. 5 days, 5 times the range. But of course that is not how it works, and we see here that a weekly ATR in CL is roughly 2x a daily ATR. Looking at the change of ATR as we alter the length of our horizontal ruler is another good way to think of optimizing hold times. If we can capture, for example, a 2-day swing, it should generally be as profitable as capturing a typical full week.
I really like doing these exercises of sliding a horizontal ruler of varying lengths across a chart, and seeing how the vertical dimensions of the box shift. Much like physics, the rules seem to change as we go from the very large to the very small. Woe upon the trader who ignores these measurements!
If you have an interest in more of these rants, let me know with a "thank" in the journal contest. Last day! Trader needs a new pair of shoes!
Here's my submission to the contest, a little late to the party. In addition to my usual weekly updates, this month I plan to post some intraday activity also.
As we near the end of the July journal contest (you can vote for my journal here), I wanted to wax a bit on the topic of journaling on FIO in general.
I've been journaling here at FIO for a while. When I started, I was a non-Elite member, so I started my journal here in the non-Elite section. I told myself that I would try out the forum and, after 6 months or so, I would decide whether to become an Elite member. The criteria I used for this evaluation was simple: Was my trading improving, and was I gaining a sense of community? I very much wanted to end the solitary confinement that had defined my life as a trader up to that point. By the end of that 6 months, I had more than a few people step in and comment in my journal, and I had "broken out of my shell" so to speak, and started commenting on other threads on the forum. Additionally, I had made revisions to my trading that I believed were helping. So I went with the Elite membership and have never regretted that decision.
The first thing that I gained from my FIO membership was a gradual loss of the "Is it possible?" question that I had never quite shook until that point. I had bounced around blogs, read books, and listened to podcasts or watched videos of professionals, and even still, I hadn't quite internally come to terms with the fact that yes, making a living as a retail trader is absolutely possible. There was always this lingering uncertainty, this "well, maybe they're not actually consistent, or maybe they're full of it" question. It wasn't until I started interacting with traders on FIO, did I finally recognize the landscape of traders, novice, intermediate, and expert, and get a real sense for what characteristics tend to accompany professionally successful traders... and begin to truly understand and internalize the knowledge that, YES, it is possible.
This is not so small a thing. Understanding that there is truly a way, somewhere, somehow, whether you yourself are cut out for it or not, is a big deal. As a west-coaster, I don't encounter a lot of (any) professionals in my day to day. I've never met a successful trader face to face. I've listened to them (supposedly) on podcasts, but that wasn't enough. Until I had interacted with them and observed them in real time, there was always a lingering doubt as to what is realistic. I maintain a healthy skepticism, but here on FIO, my first question is always "what motivation might this person have for being disingenuous?" One tends to, over time, sniff out what is real from what isn't.
For those of you out there still on the fence of going Elite, I can only suggest my own path. Start a journal, keep it consistently, break out of your shell, and at the end of a few months, decide whether you are benefiting. There is great content over in the Elite section, but there's no lack of participation in non-Elite for you to get started.
I will probably be asking the mods to move my journal over to the Elite section in the coming weeks, just to be in the same area as the majority of the more senior journals.
Now I'll provide some tips on free tools I've used to make my journaling process as seemless as possible.
1. Libre-Office. You're going to need a spreadsheet. Start with the data your platform dumps to CSV, and import it to a template that you can add additional records and notes. A ton of discussion exists on this topic elsewhere on FIO. Suffice to say it's critical to your growth and continued success.
2. Zim Desktop Wiki. Zim - a desktop wiki This is something I haven't seen mentioned on FIO. I like to keep my journal local. I also like something that manages and stores all my screen grabs locally. This program is free local wiki document that I can easily contain all my journal entries, pictures pasted in and automatically renamed and numbered, and organized into a folder tree that mimics the structure of the wiki pages. It's extremely powerful and I barely use a small fraction of the available functionality. Keeping the journal local allows me the flexibility of ranting privately if I choose, and only publishing what is fit for human consumption on FIO.
3. ShareX screencapture tool. https://getsharex.com/ This is new in my toolset, but the built in snipper in windows is not great for annotations, and NT8s built-in annotations are not the smoothest. ShareX has all the tools of most paid tools I've used, but it's open source and free. Not bad!
There it is. Alright folks, last time I'm going to pimp the journal contest. Drop a thanks here if it pleaseth yee.
Great post. I'm going to try that note-taking thing.
If anyone reading this is non-Elite and is wondering, he's right. Give journaling a shot, you'll like it. (Except when your trading is really terrible, which is when you need it most. ) If you like it, give Elite a shot and find all the rest of the forum.
Wow man, the content of your last two posts has literally blown me away. Great stuff... you deserve to win the journal contest outright with stuff like that, seriously. If I could vote twice, I would
You've always gone out of your way to help me out and I certainly appreciate it. You and @bobwest seem to have an amazing knack for encapsulating my thoughts better than I can myself... still working on the brain to keyboard interface (the queue is usually full.) Catch me in person and it's a totally different scenario LOL. For this, thanks.
And another +1 on going Elite folks, there is so much here...
Dude... not sure if you are doing your weekly thing but wanted to see if you had any thoughts on the situation with Cl. I always enjoy your take and am kinda 50/50 myself on which way to lean. See anything interesting?
Craig
) If you like it, give Elite a shot and find all the rest of the forum. 
