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OK - so my TST username is gulbenkian and I'm going to journal my combine starting on sept. 3rd. TST has a combine discount offer that you can only take advantage of through a complete online journal with pics of all the trades. I use NT for charting and T4 for entry so my trade charts will be unadorned with any annotation, just the trades. My start date is sept 3rd and I'm going to do the 20-day 50k combine.
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. - Frank Herbert
This morning I came in cautiously bullish. We had been crawling up the 1st deviation of the weekly vwap in the europe session and my view is that we're still in the breakout from 98 on July 2nd, making higher highs and higher lows on the daily chart.
We opened within yesterday's (friday) range and value. I waited for the IB to form and was looking at 107 as the first level of support based on the swing lows late last week. I wanted to be able to get filled on a long closer to the weekly vwap at around 6.90 and when the market tested 107 I was still waiting. I wasn't aggressive enough to buy above 107 but that was clearly the place to initiate a long position from.
After we broke out up I began a series of very tentative trades from 7.75 (eth vwap 1st deviation) and then from 7.60. I entered these trades very well but was too skittish to hold them. I guess that nervousness about starting out on the right foot in this combine made me over-cautious. In any event, I closed all my trades today with very small profits at the first sign of trouble. Tomorrow I hope to loosen up and just take the trades I see and let them play out more completely.
Today I began the day with a bullish bias. We opened up within the range of value from yesterday and when that is the case I often wait for the IB to form before I develop a bias and take a position. The market had just tested the o/n high before the open and sold off straight from the bell. I had opened a long just before the open with the premise that the market would run stops above the o/n high and was stopped out as soon as the market opened. I wasn't prepared to initiate a short so I waited. Once the market made its initial lows I tried selling pullbacks to the developing eth value low (I use the 1st deviation of vwap to determine the value area). I was not giving these trades much room to work and kept getting stopped out on trades that were working.
After the market hit 107 and the big passive buyer came in (500 contracts traded at the bid), I thought that these positions would get attacked right away so I shorted as soon as the bounce paused. I stopped out of both of these and realized that 107 may hold for a while.
I think bought the 1st pullback after the bounce from 107 (bought 7.16) and planned on riding that up to 7.60. I had a sell at .59 but the market only hit .57. I had wanted to go short at 7.60 and it took me two entries to get a position that I was comfortable with. I expected a test of 106.80 and tried to hold my short as long as possible. I stopped out and re-shorted but the market wanted to go up. I decided to take a break here.
After the morning I took a few more trades but my heart wasn't in it. I realized that I had read the market correctly but failed to keep my conviction that 106.8 would be tested. Even at the end of the day after 6.80 was tested and I bought the retest I was not confident enough to hold the trade for a credible swing up.
I will continue to try to develop my market understanding and trade with conviction rather than letting the noise shake me out of a trade. Here were my entries for the day:
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. - Frank Herbert
I should add that after the open drive short I changed my bullish bias to bearish. I wrote this in a chat window which explains my reasoning and why I developed a bear bias after the open (I wrote this at 8:22 cst):
The only thing I can see here is that last friday and yesterday, we tried to get above the bracket high of 8.75 (or so) and failed both days. last week we looked above that bracket high and failed. So it is possible that the two failures on friday and yesterday have intermediate term traders gunning for the bottom of the bracket at 102.50 or so. Thus we're seeing selling today in response to the two failures.
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. - Frank Herbert
I guess I'm not sure because when I open a chart in t4 it plots my PnL at the bottom - I really only use the DOM in t4 and haven't done much with the charting. T4 cust support is very responsive to emails though - might ask them.
good luck in your combine.
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. - Frank Herbert
Today I came in bearish, thinking that we were going to test the lows of our current bracket (6.80 to 8.80) before we tested the highs. I still thought that failed breakout above 109 was going to make the market more bearish.
I got off on the wrong foot right from the beginning thinking we were headed down - 3 losers in a row. After the market went up to the highs I wanted to be short near the overnight high but I was way too impatient and not picky enough with my trade location. I kept shorting and scratching, shorting and scratching. I was trading price not value as Dalton says. What I needed to do was identify the level of interest, the bias, and just take one trade with a stop in a location that would prove me wrong if it was hit.
After quite a long series of losers and scratches I finally got a short that went down but I was too Tilted to hold the winner and closed as soon as the move paused. After that I was still short biased and so shorted the move back up from the lows until I hit my daily loss limit of $500 and shut T4 down.
Pretty shitty day for me - I fell back into some bad habits and bad mental states that I obviously haven't sorted out yet. Tomorrow is a new day and I will be trying to stick to my plan and risk control and hold winners.
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. - Frank Herbert
