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Monday, October 18th - I goofed up and used Friday's gap data to trade Monday's gap. Luckily, no trades were triggered, but I did miss out on two small winning gap trades.
I took a first hour range trade, but it triggered late in the day. It was finally closed out right before the Globex close for a small loss. It was not the strongest of setups but I thought I'd try it out anyways.
What a difference a day makes. I was looking to sell the 290 puts and buy an ITM 290/300 call spread on these weekly options ahead of earnings, but didn't get around to pulling the trigger. Look how implied vol going from 85% to 45% affects the price even though the stock moved down 3%. That cocktail of options went from $5.70 to $8.82.
Wednesday, October 20th - We had small gaps up that were just about too small to trade, but tradeable. However, I set up my strat to trade the wrong date (I muff up details like that when I set them up too late at night) and so no gap trade was taken. I only set up to trade the ES so my bumbling prevented me taking a loss as the market rallied 7-8pts after the open. I then looked at the market and thought since the gap guides were so strong and now I can get a better short entry I put in a limit order at 1170.50, just a tick or two above where it was trading, and targeted 5pts. However, I never got filled and the ES did fall 6+ pts, almost filling the gap. I call this a "fade the fail", meaning, if the gap guides are strong, but the market moves past what would have been a stop loss target, hence, a failed gap trade taken at the open, widening the gap, I can then look to fade the gap later with a better entry, hence fading the failed at-the-open gap trade.
I then looked at the first hour guides and saw a nice high breakout setup that had moderate supporting data on the other index markets so I took it, which ended up being a winner. I thought I targeted 25 ticks as I set my target and loss in the DOM and saved the ATM strategy, but I guess the chart trader still had the old ATM settings from my last trade cached so it only got 21. I just noticed the "..." button in chart trader where I can change ATM strategy settings from within chart trader too. That mistake cost me $40...I guess it could have been worse.
CL traders, don't forget to roll into the December contract.
Thursday, October 21st - Fading gaps looked very favorable today as all markets opened up but below yesterday's close after an up day yesterday (U-HC zone). I set up 3 instruments to fade and they all filled their gaps. Unfortunately 2 of them stopped out before turning around and filling the gap. The NQ was the only one that behaved.
Friday, October 22nd - We had small gaps up in D-OC zones, 3 of which had good setups. Two were small winners but the other was a loss. The YM had a nice pullback before filling the gap, which could have given a better entry, but the ES filled quickly without much of a pullback.
I thought I'd check my account performance since I moved my trading over to a server at my co-lo. This has allowed me to set up for trades and take more setups. Here's how it's done so far over the last 4 weeks. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. My biggest pet peeve is my avg win / avg loss being 0.7. This is due to many gap trades being small gaps and targeting levels much small than my stop levels.
Don't want to speak for Scott, but I think his individual posts are based on 1 contract... ? So the pnl screen would show how many contracts he is trading, which to some is private info. It's like asking "how much money do you make"
I don't know, I guess it's nobody's business. If you really wanted to know you could look at my posts, see how many cars I trade, how many ticks I gain/lose, and do the math yourself. It's certainly calculable for those seriously interested, but I don't feel any requirement to post that. I feel I'm already one of the most transparent members on futures.io (formerly BMT) as it is, as far as what they trade, how they trade, position size, money management, posting all wins, losses, reasons for entering, and how I deal with my personal challenges, etc. I mainly journal here because it's where my journal is. Next year I'll probably just journal to a local Word DOC or something because I don't seem to be getting much benefit out of the added work of publishing it to the public, but this is where I decided to journal my trades for this year so that's my plan for the rest of the year.
If you must I'll admit I trade 1 car because my account is small (between $5K and $10K) but for me the total dollar amount is not important at this phase, I am more concerned with my performance metrics so when I am ready to trade larger I'll have some confidence I'm putting money into a worthy cause. I'm considering doing this with my IRAs but I'm torn between that or some options income strategies I've been working on with a partner who has the ability to raise very large sums of money for a trading enterprise.
