I traded like the DBacks played baseball this last year.....3 and out.....no hits, no runs, no walks....

I got up on time, did my pre market routine, and decided today would be a little messy perhaps and to not count on the big runs to get me my ticks.

Started trading at 6:30AM AZ time as usual, feeling fairly confident, and by 7AM, I had three strikes, -20 ticks and done for the day. That was fast. Almost funny but not really.

What I did right.
1. Pre-market routine
2. Got the messy part right at least for the first half hour
3. Thats about it.

What I did wrong:
1. I was slightly impatient for the first set up. The real one happened before I got to the computer so my entry was a very late entry on an established short term trend. So perhaps the trade selection was poor. Maybe not. Don't know. All I know is that I knew it was risky when I took it and I should have left it alone as I never had any real conviction about it.
2. I broke the rules on my second trade. It was a short for no reason whatsoever.

While today was a losing day, I lost less than my winners from yesterday and I experienced for the second day in a row, the consequences of trading against my trading plan. Only trade when the colors.....there is no magic in the colors other than they are confirming a short term trend, line up. I did it yesterday and I did it today. I try not to make the same mistake twice in a row but I did in this case.

Still positive on the week and two more days to go. Time to do something else for a while....Since I have an extra hour today, I might sim for a while or perhaps read some of the new journals......or maybe I'll help with my kid's breakfast today......that's it, I'll spend time with my kid.....

Well what a day it has been. The market was moving pretty fast today and I think my computer was having trouble keeping up as the price action was real jerky. I had trouble trading it as well.....since I use stop orders to enter, I usually wait for price to form a pattern I like and then place my entry and wait for price to come to me.

Today that strategy was just to slow....at least on T4. Ninja was no problem. I think I could have traded it on Ninja but my skill with T4 is not good enough to trade a really fast market. And I had another problem...wide spreads....I got stopped out on a couple of trades really early due to my stop being inside the spread but on the chart, the price never actually printed with a bar.....so down a couple hundred dollars due to that little bit of nastiness.

So I waited around for a while trying to get in and just never really got in the groove with the market this morning. I could see the entries, but just could not react fast enough to take advantage of them...so I took them where I could and on a 6 range chart, price was pretty unstructured in my opinion.....at least my current skill level.

So I took a small loss today....I traded one contract to keep the risk small after I saw how difficult it would be to trade and for the most part just watched today.

There is no chart as I forgot to mark it in real time as I was concentrating on getting trades in T4 and not on marking my trades. Hopefully I'll have charts again tomorrow.

Hard to surf well, in a choppy sea state.

Just playing around, last night I was SIM on the $100.01 breakout. It filled me at 100.14, came down about 10 ticks, knocked me out, then went on a 300 tick run pretty much. I got back in, just to see if I could hold onto the bull. Up about 100.00 on SIM, but boy was it interesting. Tough day to trade.

aztrader9 

Well what a day it has been. The market was moving pretty fast today and I think Today that strategy was just to slow....at least on T4. Ninja was no problem. I think I could have traded it on Ninja but my skill with T4 is not good enough to trade a really fast market. And I had another problem...wide spreads....I got stopped out on a couple of trades really early due to my stop being inside the spread but on the chart, the price never actually printed with a bar.....so down a couple hundred dollars due to that little bit of nastiness. .

What do you mean by "spreads"? I've only seen that term used in Forex...

tia

tderrick 

What do you mean by "spreads"? I've only seen that term used in Forex... tia

The difference between the bid and ask. Today the spread on CL was wide, usually it is 1 tick but today and last night due to thin order book and fast moving market, spread was 3, 4, 6, sometimes 10 ticks.

Mike

I stopped out today....very poor execution today....Oddly enough, still positive on the week although just barely...I think $200 or less.

What can I say? I feel like crap today....like a total beginner.....When I reviewed the trades, I was dumbfounded that I had such poor trade selection. I was not patient today at all. I kept thinking if I don't get in here, I'll miss the move.....well that is stupid stupid thinking....because guess what, I missed the moves....not because I got them wrong although I did on a couple of occasions....but because I went to early with a to narrow stop.....waiting is a skill....which I have not perfected yet.....

So a really crappy way to the end the week....damn.

aztrader9 

I stopped out today....very poor execution today....Oddly enough, still positive on the week although just barely...I think $200 or less. What can I say? I feel like crap today....like a total beginner.....When I reviewed the trades, I was dumbfounded that I had such poor trade selection. I was not patient today at all. I kept thinking if I don't get in here, I'll miss the move.....well that is stupid stupid thinking....because guess what, I missed the moves....not because I got them wrong although I did on a couple of occasions....but because I went to early with a to narrow stop.....waiting is a skill....which I have not perfected yet..... So a really crappy way to the end the week....damn.

Together, we shall persevere, my friend... Stay strong!

I made my profit target but only after LOTs of hesitation.

I missed tons of ticks because of hesitation...But I was right so many times in my head I just decided to trade what I was seeing.
This resulted in 9 trades altogether, 5 winners and 4 losers. Net of 84 ticks.

I made some eye candy changes to my chart so they look different today but the method has been preserved. The indies are designed to help keep me out of chop and show me good entries.....its just a simple 3 MA system. Trade with the trend.....speaking of trend, I have spent some time reading @MWinfry's 5 Min Odyssey. He is trading with the trend by entering on the 5 min bar on the break of the most recent bar in the pull back....more or less. I have always wanted to be a strict pull back trader and so over the weekend, I spend time looking at how my 6range bar interacts with the 5 min chart.

What I discovered is the 5 min chart is a fantastic filter chart. Trading with the 5 min chart is brilliant for being a short term trader. What I did was set up the 5 min to look just like the 6R in terms of indies. This resulted in being able to see the trend trade start a bit earlier than the 5 min chart did.....

So using this two chart set up, I was able to avoid almost all the chop, and had I been a little more aggressive in taking the trades I saw setting up, it was possible to be done trading real early today. As it was, it took me two hours....still, I am pleased with the results.

The 5 min chart below does not have the entries marked but the 6R does.

What I did wrong today:
1. I was very hesitant to trade every signal I saw. I think it was due to the fact I was using wider stops today to accommodate the crazy spreads I have been seeing lately. So on the ones where I needed more than what I was comfortable using, I sized down and put the stop in the correct place.....this worked really well.
2. I used Ninja Trader sim to trade the ones I wanted to trade but was to scared to take the trades for real. This is counter productive. The results was a mixed bag as I took trades I never would have taken for real as well as good trades that I should have taken. This behavior is unacceptable.

What I did right today:
1. I sized up and down in the correct places.
2. I used proper stops
3. I was VERY (read almost to) patient both in waiting for trades and staying in them til they were done.
4. I entered one trade with a great signal and exited for a small profit when price action said to exit. That trade saved me today.
5. I quit when I made my profit target.

Good day today. I am satisfied. The range chart is a little tight but I need to in order to get all the trades on it.

See you tomorrow.

AZ,

How did you get the indi to create the 'graying out' of the area between? Is it a 3MA indi that does that all ready to go?

bluemele 

AZ, How did you get the indi to create the 'graying out' of the area between? Is it a 3MA indi that does that all ready to go?

Actually its a slingshot indie available here on the forum and just loaded twice.

One is set to 5 and 15 SMA and the other is set to 50 & 15 SMA and just change the area in between to reflect the color you want. So the chart ends up having a 5,15 and 50 SMA on it.....the 15 is duplicated to provide the shaded area between the 15 and 50.....

The 5SMA is blue, the 15 is white on both instances of the slingshot and the 50 is red on the second instance.

Hope that makes sense.

This set up is something I have experimented with over the last couple of years. I like it, but needed a larger time frame to filter against. I've just really started learning how to use a larger time frame as a filter.....so this is probably the start of something long term