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Oh sure it's been in a definite uptrend, started the year at about 1270, but the moves have been small and choppy. Compare the price action since January 1 with the preceding five months. Granted late summer and fall had uncommonly high volatility, and perhaps that's why the daily price swings aren't as great right now. Everything goes in cycles.
"Sucked ass" was probably too strong a description. "A little quiet" might be more accurate. For me at least. It all depends on your trading time frame and system. Me, what I'm really looking for are multi-day moves of 40- 50 points or more while I keep a trailing stop 10-15 points behind the market. Haven't had any yet this year.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Undaunted, I continue to plug away in this choppy ES market. My short trade from 1340 got stopped out last night for the third loss this week, but discipline and consistency are the key here so when I got a signal to buy at 1350 I took it:
March soybeans, meanwhile, keep moving up. We got a weather market.
I'm going back to what I originally said: this market does suck, at least right now. Four straight losses in the ES. This is a doozy. I'm almost laughing at this point.
I know I'm going to make this money back. It may take a while, but I will make it back. Currently short from 1340, exactly where I was at this time yesterday.
You seem to not understand how channels work, or are completely ignoring the channel exists. Buy the low of the channel, sell the high of the channel. You seem to be doing the exact opposite, thinking it will be a breakout every time. That is why I posted my chart, to demonstrate to you the market has been excellent because it has been a highly defined trading channel.
This is where you find out if you've got what it takes. Since I started this journal things have been pretty easy. A loss here and there, and a couple nice wins that more than make up for it. Now you're seeing, in real time, my first journal drawdown. (And it really hasn't been that bad since I trade only two markets. Soybeans are actually doing good.) It would be easy to say I'm going to sit out this market, or I'm switching to natural gas, or I need to tweak my system.
Can't. I'm fully committed at this point. I have to stick with it. When the conditions are right, and they will be again, my system can make a lot of money. I've seen it.
To me this business can be boiled down to two simple principles: manage your risk so you don't lose all your money when the market's going against you, and be there when the big move happens. You have to be there. Losing four in a row is bad enough, but missing the one that would have made up for those four just makes it twice as bad. So you have to take them all.
It sounds like you have the right discipline for trading the way you trade - one thing I know is that you will NEVER know when the next big trade is going to come. It is like a thief in the night.
Have you ever backtested your approach? Backtesting, for me, is what gives me the confidence to ride through the inevitable rough patches.
Thanks fury. Truth be told I got this system from a book called The New Commodity Trading Guide by George Kleinman. Kleinman's got 30 years experience and runs his own brokerage. He knows whereof he speaks.
He says in the book that he backtested the method extensively, and then he trades corn for five months in 2008 and lists each trade with charts and analysis, just like what I'm doing in this journal. It was all done in real time, and he notes at the beginning that he has no idea how it will go. Turns out that after five months he makes over $17,000 on one corn contract, and he mentions that the numbers for soybeans and crude oil were much higher (of course 2008 was a watershed year for trend followers). This was from March to August, before the crash.
I have not personally backtested this method but I've traded it every day with real money since last May, and practiced it for many months before that. The slump I'm in now is not common but still within the realm of possibility. It's not the first time.
The ES will break out of this narrow range before too long, and folks who are buying at 1335 and selling at 1355 will get their hands slapped. Not wishing them ill will or saying they're wrong, but the pendulum will turn as it inevitably must. A solid trend will emerge and hopefully I will be there to catch it.
At times like this you definitely wonder if the grass is greener. But you have to resist the temptation to start changing things or abandoning ship. When a golfer is in a slump I'm sure it must be mental and emotional agony. I'll never hit the ball straight again! But you have to just stick with your plan, stick with what got you here.
March soybeans below. Previous trade resulted in a 10-cent profit, then the market essentially bounced off the moving average and set up for a new buy. Long from 1260:
At what point do you acknowledge this method is a failure? A pre-determined "stop" period to prevent you from just continuing until the account is blown, should the method not be fruitful? Comparing live results to your backtested results, comparing MAE, MFE, avg profit, avg win, expectancy, drawdown, runup, etc --- at what point would you say the results have diverged in such a bad way that the method is not sound?
