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Catching Big Waves - a trader's journal of surfing the the markets


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Catching Big Waves - a trader's journal of surfing the the markets

  #2741 (permalink)
 
GaryD's Avatar
 GaryD 
Orlando, Florida
 
Experience: None
Platform: shoes
Trading: happy
Posts: 6,462 since May 2011


researcher247 View Post
@GaryD

Be done you little pimp; eh?

Better CL trading (methinks) on Tuesday.

Perhaps a tiny taste in last 45 minutes of pit session.

Don't you have a lunch date or a workout or a cleanse or a nice $200+ per hour consultation to 'bill out' during lunch while you are probably making us all look bad eating your organic stuff and also making Charlie Sheen (yea; he is back 'bangin' 7 gram ROCKS--oh well) look like a LOSER compared to your indefatigible energy????

How 'bout that run on sentence; and I am Sudbury Canada trading on my vacation day!

Camping in Algonquin Provincial Park for some canoeing and fishing a bit later today; no friggin' internet there--WINNING!!! (Sheen reference).

I'll take a 2.5 hour lunch now.

peace & blessings!

hedvig



Yes, I try to be healthy, but not as much as I would like to. My worst habits, healthwise, are beer & wine, and lack of sleep. Today for lunch; carrot sticks with hummus for dip, and aloe vera juice with wheatgrass.





But that is not an everyday thing. My travel schedule often means it is Mcdonald's french fries (vegetarian) dumped into the bag they came in and eaten in the car.

I wanted to stay and trade today, and my long bias would have paid off in the afternoon session, but I got into that place where I was trying too hard to find something, during the lunch period, and I had to be somewhere before it got too late. Did not have sa set schedule today, but it was a good time to get out.

The best move of the day was before I started watching, and I had to pick through what remained of the move before noon. I had no choice but to miss it today, which is why I was kind of hoping to trade it through the night, but it would not turn, and I was thinking "up".

I get stuck in directions sometimes, part of the chart analysis portion of my trading, where I wait and wait for the right direction for me, and today I believed in "up". Had CL broken whatever point that was, it could have changed my direction possibly, but 75% of me thought "up" since last night.

I never feel right when "up is down", meaning the best trades are to buy weakness and sell strength. I bought mostly black bars, below the dominant DC today, but refused to seel the white ones, even though that was part of the game. I would not have been shocked to see CL hit 85.34 today, and it might have if ES would have played ball. "Too scared", wusses, just like me.

The CL 5WM target was 81.05, not 81.08 as I typed last night. The tv resolutiuon is not that good. Had that hit when I was awake, I would have done a 2nd "lottery ticket" trade, being the lower end of the zone, and truthfully the strongest portion of that one. But, I decided to seel for a few hours, and then to work for a few hours, and CL would not hold my place for me. It's always about it, and never about me...like it does not care about our relationship...


Hope your vacation rocks, but not like Charlie Sheen.

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  #2742 (permalink)
 
GaryD's Avatar
 GaryD 
Orlando, Florida
 
Experience: None
Platform: shoes
Trading: happy
Posts: 6,462 since May 2011

The long bias came from completion of the 5WM which coincided with some higher timeframe support. That had me long biased and still does. That does not means straight up from here, or that buying 84.12 is the right move, or that we won't see a retest of 81 something... But the possibility for a major directional shift is in front of us. Am I saying it will shift? Who could say that? But in that question, in that possibility, lies the energy that will decide the near term direction.

Will I take a short trade? Of course I will. Today I would not, because it was too fresh and the potential for a major short squeeze as I mentioned last night was very high.

The odds of having my stops run over were too great today on the short side, and the odds of price being supported until, at a minimum, the profit taking and/or pain had diminished, was high. And that is typically not a single move, as in the session before the 9:30am open. Or, at least in my mind, based on watching for so long, and being wrong so many times before.

Years ago, I might have thought, "sellers just have to be waiting to sell this move up", or, "the trend is obviously down", or, "it's gone too far, it has to turn back down"... well, looking at price action into the 2:30pm close, that could have been a disastorous way of thinking. Especially with repeated atempts and/or doubling down. I know, I have done it.





Trading is about making mistakes. Rule number one should be, "Go make some mistakes". Go make as many as you can. (That is why there is sim trading). Screw up in every possible way you can come up with. And when you think you are done, you have made them all, you are just not trying hard enough. You can trade worse than that, I know you have it in you!

Rule #2, learn from those mistakes.


Started this thread
  #2743 (permalink)
 
GaryD's Avatar
 GaryD 
Orlando, Florida
 
Experience: None
Platform: shoes
Trading: happy
Posts: 6,462 since May 2011


Per Econoday;

"The factory sector stumbled noticeably during April and March with April orders down 0.6 percent on top of March's downward revised 2.1 percent decline. This is the third back-to-back decline of the recovery and the steepest. The weakness is appearing in capital goods components which indicates weakness in business investment.

Orders for commercial aircraft gave April a substantial boost. If this volatile component had swung the other way, the April decline would have been severe."



Per Marketwatch:

June 4, 2012, 6:54 p.m. EDT

LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) -- In what may have been a bizarre coincidence, Monday's opening level and daily loss for China's benchmark Shanghai Composite Index (SHA:CN:000001) spelled out the date of the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square -- on the 23rd anniversary of the incident. The index fell by 64.89 points, matching the 6/4/89 date of the event, which is known in Chinese as the "6-4 Incident." The Shanghai Composite's opening level, meanwhile, was 2,346.98, the last four digits of which contain the fateful date backwards. The strange congruence of the numbers didn't go unnoticed, creating chatter on the Internet and prompting Chinese sensors to block all microblogs referencing the Shanghai stock market, according to a Reuters report Tuesday.

Started this thread
  #2744 (permalink)
 
GaryD's Avatar
 GaryD 
Orlando, Florida
 
Experience: None
Platform: shoes
Trading: happy
Posts: 6,462 since May 2011


GaryD View Post
Euro 125 is going to be tough to break.. that may have caused the stall.

Looks like shorting above 125 would have been a winning strategy all day long. That number is most likely psychological, but that was the major support zone prior to the breakdown.


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  #2745 (permalink)
 
GaryD's Avatar
 GaryD 
Orlando, Florida
 
Experience: None
Platform: shoes
Trading: happy
Posts: 6,462 since May 2011




As usual, when the market goes down I look for where it might go up, and when it goes up...

I have just started playing with this chart, so really have no "zones", or even know that there will be any, but just posting the 5WM after the possible completion before I delete some things. This one was tougher to see than most, I can't recall which timeframe it stood out best on right now.

Started this thread
  #2746 (permalink)
 
GaryD's Avatar
 GaryD 
Orlando, Florida
 
Experience: None
Platform: shoes
Trading: happy
Posts: 6,462 since May 2011




I alwys have a harder time making a decision on SR levels after long linear moves. Finding something to use as structure feels harder to do. The chart above shows basically garbage for Resistance, but over the next few hours my plan is to whittle it down into something that might be useful.

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  #2747 (permalink)
 
GaryD's Avatar
 GaryD 
Orlando, Florida
 
Experience: None
Platform: shoes
Trading: happy
Posts: 6,462 since May 2011





And, for me, I have to also construct the same garbage SR for ES, and recently also 6E. So, the $900 I made today is for 5 years of study, most of which lost money, and 12 hours of work per day for those 5 years, to follow a market that I'll never really know where it is going. And I choose this.

But the colors are pretty.

Started this thread
  #2748 (permalink)
 
GaryD's Avatar
 GaryD 
Orlando, Florida
 
Experience: None
Platform: shoes
Trading: happy
Posts: 6,462 since May 2011

6E actually seems to make the most sense to me tonight, same with last night.


Started this thread
  #2749 (permalink)
 
GaryD's Avatar
 GaryD 
Orlando, Florida
 
Experience: None
Platform: shoes
Trading: happy
Posts: 6,462 since May 2011

Sometimes as I sit here and watch, I think, "don't they get that it is going _______? " So easy to question as a bystander. But put me in a position, and I rarely feel that strongly. That is a weak area for me; to have a plan for what should happen, and not follow it as best I should.

Never really knowing anything about the future of price movement is a tough thing to accept, and a strange thing to base a career on. All chart analysis is really a "best guess". I do know for certain that is why I prefer shorter moves while keeping the bigger picture in mind, but knowing that does not do much to ease the frustration of not going for the longer moves.

In some ways I think I should just get that goal out of my head. I do far better on smaller moves. But that may be a lie. I really do not know that to be fact, as I have never really gone to striclty larger moves. Most of the time, when I do, it either won't move and I take the profit early, or I wait and wait and then get stopped out, and think "I could have made half the profit of the anticipated move by scalping that 5 times".


My scalping larger size and for a monetary goal is getting more comfortable for me, and it shows in my trading. Often I feel what hurts me the most is that I constantly try to be a better trader. When maybe, there is nothing wrong with the trader that I am. What works for me may not make sense to me sometimes, or may not be what I think would be the best thing.

And maybe that is the illusion.

2-4 contracts is starting to feel normal now. Getting hit on more than two is tougher than being in more than two. My previous max down is now a possible single scalp loss, and it shakes me so that I hesitate to keep trading. But a 1 contract loss typically means nothing, and I step right back up to the plate again, not the slight bit fazed. Today I took a 10-12 tick hit on 3 contracts, not that big of a deal, but seeing it come at you so fast is just strange, does not feel as familiar, and the confidence takes a small step back. I find that I go back in with only 2, or 1, and that is not correct. Trading 1 contract, I can only go back with 1 contract, and that works best for me. I never really knoew which trade will be a winner, obviously I expect al of them to be or I would stay flat. So I need to get over the habit of trading 3, losing, then trading 2.

I believe that if I traded 3, and then was trading poorly, I should step back down. But a single losing trade means nothing, but has me backing off. Today I would have beat goal, had I stayed with 3 on every trade. But I just poked at it, made the final trade with only 2 contracts, and decided I was done again. There is still an uncomfortable stress that exists with 3 or higher that causes me to get physically tired. Fucking exhausted. Literally. Similar anyway. It must have something to do with the visceral nature of trading, taps into some core area. I would bet my heart rate increases. I would bet my blood flow changes, different hormones are released, my brain fires differently.

Big Mike's comment about the leg shaking from adrenaline while doing something by choice, was the first I had thought in that exact way of the physical responses that are subconsciously triggered by trading. Like it or not, the body reacts however it is going to. My natural response to a trading loss on multiple contracts is, "ouch". And it causes me not to want to do that a 2nd time, at least so soon.

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  #2750 (permalink)
 researcher247 
Chicago, IL
 
Experience: Advanced
Posts: 437 since Oct 2009
Thanks Given: 289
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@GaryD

From my journal; something to think about (one doesn't have to do it--just a thought).

Maybe it is all baloney anyways--I have brainwashed myself properly over time; fully compliant with that voice in my head now. It says the same thing to me everyday for 20+ years now; and I never tire of him letting me know my edge is played out 1 trade at a time.
-------------------
"I read a very good article that actually referenced a trading tool I have been using for 9+ months now.

As of Sunday night that performance is 'dead to me.' I usually work alot harder on Sunday reviewing and going over my charts after a very good week than a week in which I underperformed.

Here is the article; it is...good stuff!

https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/7...e-espn-magazine

I personally use deep breathing and visualization as I get ready to enter a trade (typically when it is getting near one of my setups)."

This is the company and the machine some pro athletes are using.

From the article...

"Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek, Calif. In an office shaded by mountain redwoods, White hooks me up to an emWave..."
------------------
peace

hedvig

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Last Updated on May 23, 2014


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