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Tuesday, April 20 - Moderate to weak gap guides, didn't take a gap trade. In the chat room they did give a little preview of some additional setups they are working on WRT the gap guides, in particular, how an open range breakout strategy can work or fail depending on which gap zone it is in, and relative to the range's open and close. There's still a lot of work to do but it looks interesting. I've attached a preview of what they are for now calling "Mock zones" (Tim Mock is working on it).
Took a high-volume swing low penetration that was with-trend and it eventually failed. kept increasing my target as I slowly increased my stop above the big signal candle but never really got close to my target and stopped me out. It was interesting to watch how quickly it ran through my stop once it started heading up there. There must have been a lot of similar stops like mine up there.
Took another with-trend short on 6E for a nice eventual winner. Again, also increased my target as my original target was close to a swing low and if it would get there it would get some follow through even lower and this time I was right.
CL: 1 fail: -34 ticks
6E: 1 win: +24 ticks
Also, Mirus Futures called me yesterday warning to roll over into the June CL contract since I traded May on Monday. It was a nice gesture and I thank them as I may have forgotten, though when I pulled up my CL chart this morning and saw the really choppy price action and volume I remembered to not trade May anymore. I should just keep 2 months on contracts in my Market Analyzer for now on and watch the volume between the two in order to remind myself.
To be honest i dont knw much abt the gap plays so i wont touch that regarding ur today's trade on Cl y dont u use trend to help you out .. For example if u are using your 5min chart as ur trading chart then y not confirm the trend with a higher timeframe 30 min chart ? and if u are using 5min as ur main analysis chart then y not use a lower timeframe chart to get better entries ??? if you look in the screen shot On 30 mins Trend was up u and even if we closed below we still dint test the 30 min break of the trendline .. and if u were taking a short from 5min then better entry would be around 80-75 region ..... Just one Cent buddy forgive me if i wrote something out of content .. .. Love your trades .. and your journal .. keep up the great work .. happy trading
Well, scrolling my charts back to when I entered, on my MTF charts (attached) I had the 15 min down, the 60 min flat-to-up and the 240 min down but rising. So it's not clear to me that the trend was up, but you could say it wasn't absolutely down. Since the trends were mixed in different time frames maybe I shouldn't have traded at all.
I'm still trying to get used to trading MTF and figuring out which intervals work best and which indicators to use to consistently gauge the trend across time frames. Any ideas? Also, what do you do if a trend if down in one level and down but rising in another? In other words, price is positioned correctly in both time frames, but momentum in one is diverging from the momentum in another, what do you do?
Let say 30min is down and 5min is rising then the best thing to do is sit on ur hands if you dont trade counter trend thats what i would do... but if you must trade counter trend .. then the method which i would use or suggest is to add a smaller timeframe to ur trading chart like a min or a tick or volume chart and when 5min is in uptrend 30min in down trend take trade of ur smallest chart one min analysing trades on 5min ... But the problem with this method will be That u will be lookin for trend trades on 30mins and 5mins . while looking for counter trends on 5 and 1 .. Such methods dont work for me and makes a lotta stuff confusing as u may knw i like it as simple as possible .. But this method is very useful for such cases and gets lotta big runners when u practice it right ... hope it helps .. Happy trading
Wednesday, 4/21 - mediocre odds in the gap guides and a gap < 1pt kept me from a gap trade.
Watched CL and 6E. Saw some good setups on 6E but for some reason had trouble pulling the trigger. Not sure why. I guess the setups weren't overly convincing, or I wasn't focused, not sure why. Anybody suffer from the same thing sometimes? Any good explanations? I mean, I'm not in a draw down, maybe I was just tired.
NO TRADES
Instead of multiple charts I just took a screen shot of most of my desktop and annotated on it.
Made a new friend last night at our Meetup, he showed me a system he uses on stocks and teaches it to others. I couldn't remember all of the details but I put together something from what I can remember, looks like it could be worth something, I tried it out on CL(5 min)
Thursday, 4/22 - The gap setup was weak, considered a go-with gap trade but decided just to stay away. The market did open below yesterday's lows, ran another 5 points lower, which would have been a nice go-with gap trade.
For some reason I passed up on some nice high volume, swing low, with-trend break-downs. I'm not sure why, I must not be subconsciously comfortable or confident in this setup yet, perhaps damaged from some previous losses. I think the best way to (re)gain my confidence is to back-test this so I can feel I have a statistical edge with my entries. Still, I was disappointed that I let those go. Later took some trades that were pullbacks in the direction of higher time frame trends that revisited the lower time frame EMA. Unfortunately, the trend reversed on me in both cases and I got two losing trades.
CL: 1 fail: -20 ticks
ES: 1 fail: -18 ticks
Friday, 4/23 - Was sick on Thursday and didn't feel like waking up early on Friday morning to trade. I needed sleep to get better. The MTG gap guides had a nice, easy and profitable setup of course, which I missed out on.
Monday, 4/26 - Tired of missing good gap trade setups because of sleep, and desiring to trade gaps more mechanically, I finally got around to coding a gap trading strat for myself. I was up until 2:30am on Sunday working on it and slept in, missing another successful gap trade, though it was just a 5 tick gap but I decided to skip this morning's trade for the better, long-term option of automating my gap trades. Did some more testing on it this morning and have it in a pretty good condition now. Going to test more and SIM trade for a week or so before putting real money on it.
In the sample screen shot, I ran a test on SIM. I had the previous session closing price at 1210.00, and told it to fade the gap at 9:00am if price opens between 1212.00 and 1216.00. This is not a typical, ES session or test, I was just testing entering at a specific time and if the session opens within a pre-defined zone. This is not completely 100% auto-trading, I have to manually intervene daily. After I analyze the gap guides the night before and decide on which price zones look favorable for gap trading I can set this up before I go to bed and not rush up early to fade a potential gap setup if it sets up in the zones I wanted it to.
It also looks for a minimum gap size, and closes out end of day if the gap has not filled and I have not yet been stopped out. It supports going for the extended target as well and supports MTG's "one point rule" for trade management, which he uses with discretion but many other subscribers don't (I usually don't).
More examples to come...
I finally got into the NT7 beta program, I'm liking what I see so far. The session templates are handy.
It looks like you're trading with trend on these last two posts and doing a good job of identifying the swing high/low for directional trades with trend (HH+HL, LH+LL).
I suggest trying out this Decision Matrix, it may help you when the psychological aspect. The example Bacon listed could be useful to you, of having two separate areas for when you decided to skip a trade (talk yourself out of it), vs when you did take it.
Tuesday, 4/27 - The gap setup was interesting, the odds were OK but the patterns number looked like an outlier and was skewing the score I thought. Plus the gap was pretty large, but the market favored bullish sentiment pre FOMC day. The gap came within 1 tick of filling, then turned around, so I did avoid a loser but many people in the trading room went for smaller targets and made money. No regrets. I had my gap fading strategy set to take the trade though but it didn't fire. I got it set up at 6:29 (got up late) instead of the night before, so maybe I didn't get it set up early enough ahead of the open. We'll see how it goes tomorrow.
Got breakdowns on all my markets around 8:30, probably something to do with the Goldman hearings. I entered in late on 6E and got a bad entry, which got me stopped out then a few ticks later it turned around for a big winner. On CL I tried to get short but it moved so fast I just put in a limit order hoping it'd pop back up for a second but once it hit what would have been my target I canceled the order. The move down was large and fruitful for those that took it.
I'm having trouble timing my entries. I use Ninja's BarTimer to give me a heads up as to when the bar is going to print so I get my order ready because I saw the bars breaking down on high volume. But the bar seems to print with 10-20secs left on the BarTimer, so I get caught unprepared and fumble my entries like today. Maybe I just need to enter with 15sec left on the timer, but more than anything it motivated me to automate this so I can reduce my execution risk.
6E: 1 fail: -15 ticks
Revived development and testing of a strat I worked on last year but got distracted from, and coded 2 new indicators WRT MTF trend following and mean reversion. I'll try to contribute this stuff to the Elite Group Trading Methods.
.. keep up the great work 
