This day was hard to play with Cyprus in the neck...
Most of the day we were sitting in the range from 410 to 450.
You took the short trades in the middle or lower range.

IMO we had no big chance for a good short, as we had yesterday a Cyprus fear day, and today they had to deliver or at least not to disappoint. That's why I took the DB in the afternoon, thinking they would buy the market, as you can expect a Cyprus deal before the market will open on Monday. But I was out with 10 ticks as it was loosing steam, and so I missed the final move.

I think your idea to post charts with entry/stop/target and to use a journal is a good thing.

Clearly I am shorting against a pretty strong trend.
Lets see what happens

Ok, lets try this again
Short 14423...kind of think I should have gone pending order but oh well.

Feel free to make comments etc...

pilotui, thanks for starting this journal. The good news is that you kept your losses relatively small. Since you welcomed comments, I have two, with the first being the primary one:

1) Your mindset: Put very simply, you acknowledged it was 'clearly ... a pretty strong trend' and seemed to express concern about going against that strength, yet you did so anyway. Why?

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with shorting today's market (as I'll mention below), but there is something fundamentally wrong (IMO) with taking a trade while you indicate you think it's not really a good trade, and then saying "let's see what happens."

I used to love to fade trend days, and I think this was because I did not really trust myself, and so I would somehow doubt that it could be as easy as simply buying dips on a trend day up. Instead, I would take a low probability short, with a low potential reward even if that low probability played out. Sometimes we do things which we know are obviously poor ideas while we're doing them, yet we still do them.


2) Market state and trade location: I just erased a bunch of stuff I wrote that got too long to say this: if you're going to short a day like today, short the highs, and preferably, have a prepared plan before the open to find prices you think will be advantageous to trade so that your risk is reduced. Today was not a trend day, but clearly the bias was long. Look at this past Friday, Monday, and Tuesday and note the highs, all within 8 ticks of each other; what does that tell you about possible advantageous short trade location?

The scary trade is often the best trade, and it's much more likely to work, simply based on the nature of the game. Shorting after a 25 point pullback off the high in a market that is up, and has not yet pulled back 25 points yet today, is taking the easy trade that has tons of so-called confirmation, and yet is ironically less likely to work. Shorting a new high is scary, but when coupled with good trade location and in the right market context, it is much more likely to work, it just never feels that way, which is why we much prefer to sell low and buy high (when we are "more sure" and have "more confirmation" that a trade will work), which is the opposite of what we should be doing.