FOMC trading when all goes well...

I am going to be posting less often right now. It has its ups and downs. The downside is when it's going against me I sometimes find myself in trades staying longer than I should, thinking "what am I going to write in my journal if this turns into a big loss!" (And of course that makes it worse). It's probably indicative of what I am doing wrong, to begin with. Nevertheless, it's there, just one of those little voices I don't need. As of right now, I am thinking I'll update it once in a while.

Today I did well. I wasn't planning to journal, so the journaling anticipation bug I mentioned yesterday didn't come into play. I probably still won't post as much, or maybe I will, lol. Gotta keep the monkey guessing!

Zero losses today. Five trades. $2,053.92 net profit. But I had one that was not great last night. I scaled in and ended up with 8 lots going against me. At one point I told myself that if it went 1.5 points over where huge absorption, endless, huge absorption was going on (to the tune of 2000+ contracts every time the price pushed up to 4000) and my profit target at 3085.50, a couple of points under my average entry, then went to bed. I think Mark Douglas' spirit smiled upon me for finally setting my max loss on the trade and after coming within 1 tick of my stop, it went back down to 3777.25.

I have pop-up notes on my computers (Notezilla) and today I wrote this one to pop up in RTH and Globex. It is so critical, so obvious, but so often overlooked:

"What was my edge probability going in? What is it now? If it has gone to nothing. JUST, ... GET.. OUT
Reset, start with another good edge percent. Don't hold zeroes."

OK, done for the week.

I revived the Tradervue silver plan today because I've been splitting my daily goal into 3 trades during Globex and 3 in RTH and while the NT8 trade performance module is fine for the most part, it does a really bad job of dealing with Globex / RTH combined for the last 24hrs. There is also the eternal problem of it not grouping contracts into trades, which Tradervue does well. So I added the $29/mo expense back in.

This is this week's and today's performance. Gotta keep this up!

My daily chart major levels & boundaries road map for next week. I trade for 9 ticks at a time, this is just to give me broad context. I do the same (but different) for myself on the 4hr and 30 min charts.

Guess that says something about RTH vs Globex...

My week wasn't great. Guess that tells you everything

But today was really good! P&L stats are okay, done better (and much worse). R is a bit wanting, which makes sense as I was trying out a 3-lot setup with a scale-out and pulling up to my entry +1 tick fast after the first two profit targets hit, which made for a lot of scratches. Also, since a lot of the PA was in tight ranges, I was using a set with small profit targets but still need my 12 ticks of stop loss, so if I get stopped out on all 3 it hurts my R. But those are very exceptional, so it works out.

Overall, what really worked was the fact that I just stuck to my strategy and implemented it all day. I had one a close call, but really just stuck to it. Idea being not to win at all costs, but to implement it diligently and see where it might need tweaking, but just sticking to the systematic implementation of the level-to-level system I have been working on for a couple of weeks. Nothing else. No in-between trades. No taking trades at zones of liquidity support or resistance I see appearing on my chart. No discretionary scalps. No 30 lot 4 tick brackets where I am "sure" I'll get it. Just my strategy, trade, after trade, after trade. Boring sometimes. A bit depressing at the top of the session because I took a few stops and it was tempting to do something random to make up the losses (but I didn't). One other thing I changed was to go to a 1000 tick chart vs 100. The 100 tick is great for scalping small ranges, but the 1000 tick chart feels much saner in RTH.

All in all it was really good. Just got caught offsides a bit too big once and lost my cool and scratched it right before it got slammed down past my profit targets. But it was the right thing to do given that it had already defied my plan. I feel good about the levels I am working with (totally my own). Better than anything I have ever worked with (!). That's a lot of things, trust me . I really trust what I am doing and so it seemed all the more pointless when I failed because I was once again (and again, and again, again again, again ) doing something else that was uncalled for. Today was different.

My Rithmic P&L is better, guess that one is right. Don't know why NT8 is wrong, but it gives more info.

Have a great weekend.

This weekend's major levels daily chart compares nicely with last week's. The box filled out to the upside and now we enter a chop zone where price has gone sideways 2 weeks at at time each time over the last year before reversing. Will it be different this time?

Took the daily loss limit today and did not trade subsequently. Sound like a feat? It is!

Evening notes for myself on stuff that makes sense from outside sources.





Someone I know found corroboration for this in the ES Options for tomorrow (not mine)

I trade sim for ES data and copy to my account to trade MES. It sure looks nice in sim! The only problem is the ($500) drawdown on the day in sim vs ($64) in MES. It's the difference between nine eights of 1% and 6.6%, which is fine when everything is going well. Just the days when it doesn't and I blow the account. Right now I'm trading MES 2 lots, up to 12. Don't have to be precise, can swarm trades totally relaxed. This is the way to go for me.

11 trades total. Tradervue groups them correctly. The "34" showing on NT8 report are the same ones. Not grouping lots of course messes up the stats. The $5K set are the same ones in sim.