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Dissecting this morning's bad /ES trade


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Dissecting this morning's bad /ES trade

  #21 (permalink)
 mbondiett 
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
 
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Hey Snax,

Here's a link to a listing of webinars on Futuresio youtube channel. I searched on Futures Trader 71 AKA FT71 who is a really good guy and covers a lot of important aspects of becoming a trader. (these gives you a lot of help for free)

Also, read Big Mike's comments. His advice as you will elsewhere from experience traders that you need to spend AT LEAST 2 years trading sim before you go live.

This gives you time to find out what style of trader you are based on your personality and tolerances and to figure out how to develop your "edge" without going broke. It all takes more time and patience than you can imagine from where you are sitting right now.

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWzHsd2fbLueDSfRunb1DmA/search?query=ft+71[/yt]

Remember -- You are not alone. Everyone else has had to go through the same drawn out process of ups and downs and a lot of pain sometimes.

“The major work of the world is not done by geniuses. It is done by ordinary people, with balance in their lives, who have learned to work in an extraordinary manner.”
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  #22 (permalink)
 
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 snax 
Chicago, IL
Legendary Price Action Student
 
Experience: Beginner
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mbondiett, thank you so much for the link, I am blown away by this community.

I'm taking it all in a little at a time. I feel like each small step you gain in trading is composed of many, many smaller pieces that each take time to develop.

Cheers!

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  #23 (permalink)
piilgard
Copenhagen + Denmark
 
Posts: 14 since Feb 2019
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achoo58 View Post
Snax

The advice you are getting from everyone is generally good. However, I detect that you may be becoming overwhelmed. You are getting a lot of suggestions that don't necessarily fit into an organized trading plan. there are many ways to trade and the goal is to find your own way. In your initial post you seem to have been trading with your "gut". please stop this. it is the surest way to lose money.

Trade only sim until you have a coherent plan that makes money! I saw one of your posts that seemed to say that u make $50 on one trade and lose $100 on the next. Please stop trading NOW, if this is the case. Trading is a business! you shouldn't be trading for "fun" or excitement or because you hate your day job. You trade to make money, pure and simple.

Last, it takes a long time to become consistently profitable. the traders i know who have done it are fanatics. they eat breath and sleep trading. If you are not ready for this type of commitment, quit now while you haven't (i presume) lost a lot of money.

hope this helps

LISTEN to this! This is gold.

I'm basically in the same position as you at the moment - only I'm not trading. I've used the past 4 months to research everything about day trading and what markets you can trade (I thought day trading was buying and selling stocks only basically). My research has given me a good idea of which market, that suits me. And what kind of trading style that fits me as well. I'm not even at the stage of sim, so I can only speak for a theoretical standpoint.

As soon as anyone tells you, you should use this indicator or that indicator - take a note. But leave it at that. It wont help you, if you dont understand, what it actually means or how it works.

I, for instance, are leaning towards scalping and order flow. Using the order book in the DOM to analyze what happens in the market in real time. There's thousands of ways to interpret that data, but I have an idea of an "edge"/setup I would like to pursue and make that work, before I go on and add anything else.

Many indicators are so-called "lagging" indicators. They are based on events in the market, that have already taken place. For me, personally, that doesn't seem super valuable.

If there's something I've learned in the past 4 months, it's that the money you keep, are more important than the money you earn. So stop trading until you have figured that out.

Find a method/edge/indicator or whatever suits you and make that work. Then you can build on to that. Do a lot of research! I would say "track your performance", but this post seems like a product of that, so..

This is my opinion and experience (if you can argue I have any), but I hope it was useful. I was fortunate enough to have someone teach me a great deal and answer all my questions on the fly, so I know, how much it can mean.

Good luck buddy!

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  #24 (permalink)
 
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 snax 
Chicago, IL
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piilgard View Post
LISTEN to this! This is gold.

I'm basically in the same position as you at the moment - only I'm not trading. I've used the past 4 months to research everything about day trading and what markets you can trade (I thought day trading was buying and selling stocks only basically). My research has given me a good idea of which market, that suits me. And what kind of trading style that fits me as well. I'm not even at the stage of sim, so I can only speak for a theoretical standpoint.

As soon as anyone tells you, you should use this indicator or that indicator - take a note. But leave it at that. It wont help you, if you dont understand, what it actually means or how it works.

I, for instance, are leaning towards scalping and order flow. Using the order book in the DOM to analyze what happens in the market in real time. There's thousands of ways to interpret that data, but I have an idea of an "edge"/setup I would like to pursue and make that work, before I go on and add anything else.

Many indicators are so-called "lagging" indicators. They are based on events in the market, that have already taken place. For me, personally, that doesn't seem super valuable.

If there's something I've learned in the past 4 months, it's that the money you keep, are more important than the money you earn. So stop trading until you have figured that out.

Find a method/edge/indicator or whatever suits you and make that work. Then you can build on to that. Do a lot of research! I would say "track your performance", but this post seems like a product of that, so..

This is my opinion and experience (if you can argue I have any), but I hope it was useful. I was fortunate enough to have someone teach me a great deal and answer all my questions on the fly, so I know, how much it can mean.

Good luck buddy!

Thank you for the kind response, @piilgard!

I agree with most of what you say, it is very good advice!

I don't have many regrets about my first attempt at live-trading before discovering this site. I spent about a month struggling, I didn't lose too much, just enough to create a good challenge to try and reach positive P/L by end-of-year. And if I don't achieve this its not a big deal, I'll get there next year. From tracking my progress I estimate about 20-30 trades under good expectancy would make me turn profitable or at least close. 30 trades just so happens to be the number of trades I like to focus on to test or tweak a strategy. Long enough to get a decent sample but not so many trades that I am not expanding my experience with new ideas.

If I regret anything its that in hind-sight, it was hard to tell how long to spend in live-trading to understand what I needed to work on and go back to sim to work on it. It was hard to tell if I was just shaking off the nervousness of first going live, I didn't know what that sample-size should be so I spent a few too many weeks kind of grinding around that didn't add much value. I would say you should know rather quickly, it is not just nerves, and that those nerves will only complicate matters.

I have seen glimpses of how this can work long-term. Keep losses set to a known value you are comfortable with, track expectancy till your sample-size is big enough that you trust it. Keep focusing on small trades that are well-within your comfort zone and then new trading opportunities begin to "appear" that you didn't notice before. I used to see only zero-to-one opportunity in the morning and it would take everything I had to focus and keep my cool and then I was done once that trade was over. Now I notice maybe 1-3 of those nice friendly setups a day though my screen-time isn't much due to work. I think this pattern-recognition improves and our endurance for handling these multiple trades improves as we gain experience.

I went back to live for my previous 30-trade cycle and had results consistent with sim-trading expectancy over the course of my first five trades. I preemptively cut it off to go back to sim because I could tell I wasn't as fearless as in sim, so i consider that a short but successful excursion into live-trading. I learned what I needed to work on very quickly and earned a slight positive P/L from those 5 trades. Very small steps to keep an eye on the future and what the ultimate goal is. The goal for me is to incrementally match sim- to live- trading and be able to do this confidently and successfully over the long-term. I think I have to manage my impatient side of my personality, the one that thinks its ready all the time. I do this by pushing my learning aggressively and trying harder in sim-trading. When I am ready I will try another small excursion into live-trading. If I am ready I am ready, if not I will go back to sim to improve.

Question for you, piilgard, Why do you think you are not ready for sim-trading? I think you should get started with it!

Cheers!


TraderTS View Post
You were against GapFill players @8:20 am ET
Overnight High 2721.50 reTested of 2722.25 WED's Low, it's Double Top and failed Break-out to new High; therefore, Gap players pushed down to fill it and retested Overnight Low 2700.50 at end of day.

iTS

Hi TraderTS,

I now know what your post means. I understand what these GapFill players were doing, and the market context that I was lacking at the time. I wouldn't go long in this scenario now in fact. I really found your help beneficial because the fibonacci-retracements/extensions unlocked the "bigger picture" of market awareness.


mbondiett View Post
Hey Snax,

Here's a link to a listing of webinars on Futuresio youtube channel. I searched on Futures Trader 71 AKA FT71 who is a really good guy and covers a lot of important aspects of becoming a trader. (these gives you a lot of help for free)

Also, read Big Mike's comments. His advice as you will elsewhere from experience traders that you need to spend AT LEAST 2 years trading sim before you go live.

This gives you time to find out what style of trader you are based on your personality and tolerances and to figure out how to develop your "edge" without going broke. It all takes more time and patience than you can imagine from where you are sitting right now.

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWzHsd2fbLueDSfRunb1DmA/search?query=ft+71[/yt]

Remember -- You are not alone. Everyone else has had to go through the same drawn out process of ups and downs and a lot of pain sometimes.

Hi mbondiett,

this has been an excellent resource. A lot of the progress I've made can be tied back to something in one of these videos, so thank you again!


~snax

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  #25 (permalink)
ArthurKathleen
London England
 
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snax View Post
My questions are:

0) Did this seem like a reasonable trading opportunity?
1) I am getting squeezed a lot these days between tight stop-losses and volatile price-oscillations, one thought I've had is cutting my allowed number of losing trades in half and doubling my stop-loss width on the trades I make...that actually may have helped here, time will tell.
2) What types of set-up strategy could I have used to time this better? Did I just see something in random market noise that wasn't really there? I am not using many technical indicators or stuff like DOM (I don't think my platform even has DOM tools, I've looked). I've tried setting up Bollinger-Bands with Fast Stochastic Oscillator and things like that but it just seemed to add noise without benefit. I don't think they would have helped here but I am a beginner so I am probably wrong on many layers.

Any help is appreciated, apologies for any typos and inability to post links, etc.

I am sure many have given you advice in this thread and sent you off in all sorts of directions. Before you go off and start trying to learn order-flow, fibo analysis or whatever else, first understand how this trade fits in with your level of understanding of the market and how you currently read and understand the market. Before adding new tools to your tool set, you should try to understand where this trade fits into your trading framework and your method for analysing the markets.

The screenshot you posted is not particularly helpful to me, which is not necessarily your fault, but what time frame is the chart you are looking at (looks like a LTF chart, maybe even 1M)?

Let me give you a walk through of how I was taught to read the chart/market.

--

I note that whilst you tried to buy a pullback of a relatively strong move early in the day, we were coming into the next area of support lost on the higher time-frames.

Before I get into that, the first thing to note is that we are popping hard from a weekly level, and thus the weekly chart is in control at this point in time on the higher time frame. The eventual targets for this weekly move are far higher than the current levels at the time of your trade, the relevant target in this case at the time of your trade would be the swing high that took us down to test on the weekly time frame - around 2814-2816, either from here or slightly above we are expecting to get a smack from fresh highs;



So with an idea of what the HTF time frame is doing, we need to go deeper and look in higher detail at what is happening. I do not have time to get into too much detail here, but if you look at the 8H you can see we have hit the level that was gained to provide that significant level I mentioned above in the leg we are retracing - the target of this weekly pop;



This might look really busy to you, but if you look at the white arrows you will see the level we have hit - the level we gained for the most recent significant high before we sold off, as well as the target for that level - the last un-tested swing-low we gained for this pop on the 8H chart, which is the other white arrow. If you study this closely, you will notice all these levels have something in common from where I have drawn them.

So we are now in an up-trend on the weekly and popping from pretty significant support on the 8H - if this move plays out we should see us go up to test the weekly level (or whatever is significant un-tested in-between), with potential smaller smacks from our current up move (i.e. the levels immediately to the left) until we get above the high of 2738 and thus are now testing fresh levels in the leg we are retracing. So if we dive down we can look for the levels we might get some smaller smacks from;



So the red line is your entry on the Monday morning, and you can see it is a couple of points below this 4H I have drawn that we lost as we came down to test this 8H. Here is the 2H, you will note something about the 2H candles and where I drew that 4H level from, technically we could say it is actually a 2H level;



So if this is a 2H, a target should be the last swing low that took us up to test, although we need to be careful - particularly in a strongly up-trending market, we might not make it that low before popping hard again. I will leave you to mark that out and work out mechanically where you would expect the market to target.

So after all that, let's consider where you entered the market - the red line I have drawn on the chart below. If you are based in Chicago, I think you entered the market around 13:15 my time, which is where I have drawn the red line. Below is the 15M;



So here we have clearly distributed into this 2H/4H level on the 15M - one might refer to it as a double top - and fallen back to the last swing low on the 2H/4H. You will also note we even got a 5 point smack from the tested 4H I mentioned earlier, before continuing higher to test levels above 2814-2816.

Here is the 5M for completeness, note how your entry went against what was playing out in the HTF and in particular on the 15M;



What is unfortunate here - at least for your trade - is if you had entered a trade following a similar pattern you had found on the 1M time frame a few hours earlier, you would have probably ended up coming away with a few points in your back pocket. This is the issue with trading patterns without having HTF context, it can really screw with your thinking and reading of the market as one becomes disheartened at being stopped out once again without understanding why it worked last time but not this time etc.

Hopefully that provides a bit of a fuller picture from a chart reading perspective utilising multiple time frames to determine where we are in the trend and how I was taught to read the market - this is not to say you should learn this approach and not some other approach, you should do what makes you feel comfortable. My main goal here is to demonstrate to you how one might analyse the market from HTF to LTF to determine entries, exits and potential targets and my view on why your trade did not work out this time.

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  #26 (permalink)
piilgard
Copenhagen + Denmark
 
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snax View Post
Question for you, piilgard, Why do you think you are not ready for sim-trading? I think you should get started with it!

That's just a matter of funding. I havn't saved enough yet, to get a hold of the Jigsaw software I need. Soon enough tho, I should be up and running on the sim

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  #27 (permalink)
 centaurer 
south africa
 
Posts: 169 since Dec 2018


piilgard View Post
That's just a matter of funding. I havn't saved enough yet, to get a hold of the Jigsaw software I need. Soon enough tho, I should be up and running on the sim

This sounds like me when I was young and foolish. Spending $250 a month on esignal and market delta when I had a $7000 account.

Needless to say my returns were pretty bad when eating 40% annually on software and data.

"It is just the cost of doing business" my young foolish self would have said. When in reality it was just that I had lost perspective that the goal is to make money and compound my account over time. Not waste it on cool looking data visualizations.

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  #28 (permalink)
piilgard
Copenhagen + Denmark
 
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centaurer View Post
This sounds like me when I was young and foolish.

Not sure, if you're calling me and my plan young and foolish, but I don't think your failure in your early trading career, can or should be projected onto me.

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  #29 (permalink)
 Cloudy 
desert CA
 
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snax View Post


A quick 2c reaction. It seems you were looking for a 2nd leg entry long from what could seem to be a new uptrend.

1) overall market structure/"bigger picture" - often on a higher time frame, or based on previous day or days' week. It may not be necessary if someone is just scalping small targets, but if you're basing on pa over a 5min or higher chart, it's helpful to know what the previous day open high/low points are, or even the daily structure. as TraderTS said, taken from the open and the previous day high, it could be like a gap long open (opening bell time) from previous close, and with a big move up, there could be pressure from those wanting to "fill the gap"; although it may not absolutely happen, it's good to be aware that it could and see how the unfolding market proves itself in light of that. There are of course various schools of thoughts into market structure , s/r levels, fib retrace levels, etc. so maybe learning some chosen ideas and then seeing how it unfolds in backviewing or screen time moving forward. One indicator available on this site I like, that could be helpful for daily ranges is FatTails' session pivots indicator ( ) that shows ADR(average daily range) bands for the current day based on past several days. (I usually turn off the session pivots and other features just to show the ADR, ADN, & previous day OHLC) More info about the indicator at: ( )

2) current price action - as a trend is usually defined by higher highs and higher lows usually in alternate sequence for a long trend and viceversa for short. Where you tried to go long could likely be too early , as there were no successive lower lows and lower highs at that point. (nor had price reached the previous swing low red bar with tail in order to start a possible overall range behavior. ) So you may have wanted to wait for a new pa pattern that could indicate interest to return long. Such as a double bottom or at least one set of higher highs and higher lows which alternately could look like a reverse "heads and shoulders". Other ideas warning against a long taken at your point, could be the previous long move already had "two legs" and the top bar was an "exhaustion" type forming a resistance point for now. And big moves and reactions often can occur with "two legs" or two parts. The retracement also could be considered a reaction to a failed breakout long of a long tilted range, so then it became a reaction breakout short and a failure to return to within the range, thus continuing another leg down as a successful breakout short. There are several "schools" of ta thought but generally the same ideas as to what defines trends and patterns so I can only suggest having some of these patterns and pa ideas in mind learned from whichever source, and more screen time seeing it unfold.

A lot of these ideas have some free intro webinars by guests and vendors here on future.io Fairly cheap material could be books on amazon such as Brooks, Dalton's "Mind over Markets", or Mack's PA. Also some sites have free info sometimes summarized and indexed. a couple examples: https://thepatternsite.com/ , https://brookstradingcourse.com/price-action/10-best-price-action-trading-patterns/ Ok, good luck, hope it helps.

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  #30 (permalink)
 mbondiett 
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
 
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piilgard View Post
Not sure, if you're calling me and my plan young and foolish, but I don't think your failure in your early trading career, can or should be projected onto me.

piilgard. Don't take it personally. Everyone here is trying to help each other and he is just trying to transfer a bit of wisdom to you in hopes of saving you some grief. (we all would have welcomed some grief relief when we were starting out)

Everyone has had to find their OWN way in this business, and there are NO shortcuts; you are going to have to put a lot of days trading sim as things start to sink in.

Boy, I can sure identify your approach. Educate yourself to the hilt to enhance the probability of success. Yeah, that was my (MO) mindset my whole life and it works great in almost every field of endeavor. And that will be a big plus for you in the future for sure. But..... the point others are making and I concur, is that you need to set up a trading platform as soon as possible and start trading on a sim account. The first hurdle you are going to have to overcome is familiarity with the platform operation and setup. It will take quite a while just to be able to execute trades without execution errors to begin with, especially under pressure like in a fast moving market, or unexpected spikes etc. If you have to learn this trading real money you are going to regret it.

As was mentioned above, Learn Price Action First. Without this understanding all the indicators and oscillators will be worth next to nothing. From my experience all the credible trainers who are selling systems will almost always make the statement that they still defer to price action as confirmation of entry/exit decisions.

I don't have a lot of familiarity with all of the available platforms, their cost, or the lowest cost data feeds, but you should consider spending time making that decision immediately.

I tried a few demos and ended up settling on Ninja Trader after it was suggested to me by a professional trader that I have known for years. It is free although the free version will not allow you to set profit target or a stop loss. But it is a really good platform with excellent analytics etc. You can even record or download daily tick data to trade after hours or on weekends to practice if you have a day job. They will also provide free data but it is end of day, not live data.

For live data feeds for futures through the Ninja Trader Brokerage is only $7 per month. However, if you do not make at least trade 1 trade during the month they will charge you a $25 inactive account fee. So, the total cost to you is $32 per month to trade the demo account for as long as you like. Another however, is that they require $1,000 to open an account. You do not have to maintain that balance and they will just deduct the $32 per month for your data feed.

Anyway, I didn't mean to blabber on like this but I did not know about this FIO community when I started and it could have saved me at least 6 months of doing exactly what you are now doing before I started getting some real traction.

Best of luck to you and DO NOT GET DISCOURAGED! You are undertaking the most difficult challenge that I know of. You are working towards competing with some of the smartest people on this planet, not to mention the struggle against the institutional program traders, the algo systems written by mathematic PHDs etc.

“The major work of the world is not done by geniuses. It is done by ordinary people, with balance in their lives, who have learned to work in an extraordinary manner.”
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