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Papa's Trading Journal

  #141 (permalink)
 
PandaWarrior's Avatar
 PandaWarrior 
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papa15 View Post
N
These are great questions.
1. Yes strictly following the guidelines I posted there would have been 4 losers, but before today I was only using 7 tick profit targets. Applying that, and recognizing there was news yesterday at 9 am and 10 am, there really would have been only 1 IB losing trade I would have taken (the candle that closed at 11am) and I am not sure I would have taken it. The candle closed right on the Keltner Channel upper boundary (I think I left that off the guidelines but I have discussed it in the thread). With the price action yesterday I probably would have passed on the trade.

2. I have taken 67 IB trades with 60 winners. That works out to 90% winners.

3. I am sorry to say I only took 10 of the IB trades on Wednesdays and have 6 winners for a 60% win rate on Wednesdays. If you remove the 2 pre-news trades I should not have taken, then it would be 6 winners in 8 trades (but that is purely hypothetical as I did take the trades).

I do use the Keltner Channel as an aide in my trading decisions. Also, once in the trade, I closely watch the price action. If I don't like how price is moving, I will cut the trade. In general, an IB trade to the first target will be between 1-3 minutes in length....if it goes close to the 15 minutes for the subsequent candle, the success rate goes down....

Papa15

Dude, with numbers like these, you should be dancing in the streets. 90% and you can pinpoint your losses to a time period before a major news event. The answer is super clear. NO trading before inventory report. Then look for them as usual. Forget about a max winner week.....take all you can get and have patience for. BUT keep your stops intact and take the stop when they happen. Its part of the game. If you can hold at 90% and keep your stops small, you will be a player.....

When you have the guts to add contracts, the sky is the limit.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci


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  #142 (permalink)
 
papa15's Avatar
 papa15 
Wake Forest, NC
 
Experience: Intermediate
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aztrader9 View Post
Dude, with numbers like these, you should be dancing in the streets. 90% and you can pinpoint your losses to a time period before a major news event. The answer is super clear. NO trading before inventory report. Then look for them as usual. Forget about a max winner week.....take all you can get and have patience for. BUT keep your stops intact and take the stop when they happen. Its part of the game. If you can hold at 90% and keep your stops small, you will be a player.....

When you have the guts to add contracts, the sky is the limit.

Az
I agree with you completely. I posted a money management spreadsheet last week that shows the amount I need to gain before adding contracts. It just took the last 2 days of being knocked around a bit to make me realize how I was messing things up (looking at real data and not faulty recollections), especially trying to trade around the opening of the market. Most of my losses (in dollar terms) come then. I have all the pieces of the puzzle that I need; now just to put it together.
Papa15

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  #143 (permalink)
 
Jeff Castille's Avatar
 Jeff Castille 
Northern California
 
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Hey Papa,

If you were able to create inside bars on a 15 minute chart what would you do? Well........you would have to be able to create a large bar just preceeding the inside bar.......now......what always creates large bars........news. An exaimination of inside bars that are preceeded by news releases........now that would be an interesting study. I think that you will find that the over-reaction to news releases creates a great environment for the creation of inside bars........

Let the news come out........and a half hour later you have a trade. Today was a great example. Many traders have a saying....."don't trade the news, fade the news".......obviously this doesn't always work BUT......it does more often than not.

Check it out.

Best, Jeff

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  #144 (permalink)
 itrade2win 
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papa15 View Post
Az
I agree with you completely. I posted a money management spreadsheet last week that shows the amount I need to gain before adding contracts. It just took the last 2 days of being knocked around a bit to make me realize how I was messing things up (looking at real data and not faulty recollections), especially trying to trade around the opening of the market. Most of my losses (in dollar terms) come then. I have all the pieces of the puzzle that I need; now just to put it together.
Papa15

I don't think you need to look any further than here and what AZ had mentioned is 100% correct. You got derailed with your thinking and became very impatient. I have gained more patient and will wait all day if I have to for what makes me comfortable in taking and the outcome has been a complete turn around for me. So get back on track and do what works for you and stick with it.

Ryan

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  #145 (permalink)
 
papa15's Avatar
 papa15 
Wake Forest, NC
 
Experience: Intermediate
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Thanks to all who posted over the last couple of days. It really is good to have others look over your shoulder every now and then. I looked over my previous posts last night and realized I have not been as complete as I should have been in many of them. I will try to improve that.

Overnight I removed the extended session from my charts so that they only show the pit trading hours. I am going to give up the possibility of trying an inside bar that forms between 08:45 and 9am, but I think that is a good trade off. In ToS you can choose to see the full 24 hour day or just the day session, and I think for my purposes just the day session is sufficient.

I have noticed over the last month or so that the Natural Gas inventory report has not been a big mover of the oil prices, so I put a 15 minute window of no trading in front and behind the report. This morning we had an inside candle complete at 9:30. The candle was 25 ticks in length, with the low at 82.38. I set a sell stop at 82.37. My target was 82.27 (I used 1/2 the IB candle length, and took off 1 tick for the entrance below the candle and 1 tick above the calculated target point). My entry was filled at 9:33 and about 11 ticks of heat were taken before prices rolled over and dropped to the target. Trade was about 4 minutes in length.

No other IBs by 11:45 so I quit for the day.

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  #146 (permalink)
 
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 bluemele 
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Papa15,

Would you say the 8:45 bar was an IB? Just curious.

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  #147 (permalink)
 
bluemele's Avatar
 bluemele 
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papa15 View Post
Jeff
I looked back over my data that is recorded in the spreadsheets. Wednesdays are a day that I have done other type of entries (opening range, gap fill moves, etc). I really have done very few IB trades. Unfortunately, one of the great limitations of ToS is the lack of adequate back data. I do know from having watched the market over the past several months there were good IB trades to be had on Wed after the news releases (I kicked myself several times for not sleeping in at the open and turning on the computer around 10:30).

I have total confidence in the IB method. Even if I don't trade on Wed for a while, I will practice it.

The biggest issue I have is I just want to get in the market, make the goal, and get out. Using the IB method requires exercising something called patience, and sometimes that is in short supply around here. I have looked for other methods to speed up the trading process (increased opportunities) but they have all bit me pretty hard. The proof is in the spreadsheet; stick to the 15 min chart IB, use the proper stop and target, and take the opportunities the market presents.

Thanks for sharing your ideas on the Three Setups and the All You Need threads...they all make sense to me. I just want to master this one and once that is achieved, add one other, and slowly build up my skill set.

Papa15

Papa,

I have played around with IB's from a method I learned on ForexFactory about a year ago. IB's are fun, but challenged due to news and the currency pair you are trading at the time. I haven't spent much time on the CL doing these, so I have a question.

Have you done research on the length of the moves upon breakout? I suggest getting your hands on Tradestation, NinjaTrader or some other platform with decent historical data. This is easy to analyze and backtest using and creating rules.

The system I trade mainly is a 5 tick stop (NEVER MOVED, EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER) but I move it up if my indi's say the move is not what I thought. Of course this costs me more times than not.....

My point though is that I am gunning for 2.5 to 5 points and usually get 1.5 when the market is trending on my first scale out easily (if trading more than 1 contract). Lately I am sim, because I was IMPATIENT and AGGRESSIVE and I went through 2500.00 like it was butter on a muffin.

So my RR is quite good. On an IB where you are taking an entry at a breakout and your stop will then be usually 2 to 2.5 times larger then your PT, then this is a red flag and one in which intimidates me.

I will do some review and see what I come up with on CL, but my point is instead of trading live (cash) for a while and hoping, the best thing to truly learn a strategy may be to visually backtest and evaluate what rules would be better for RR and others.

I am enjoying reading your thread.

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  #148 (permalink)
 
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 papa15 
Wake Forest, NC
 
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bluemele View Post
Papa,

I have played around with IB's from a method I learned on ForexFactory about a year ago. IB's are fun, but challenged due to news and the currency pair you are trading at the time. I haven't spent much time on the CL doing these, so I have a question.

Have you done research on the length of the moves upon breakout? I suggest getting your hands on Tradestation, NinjaTrader or some other platform with decent historical data. This is easy to analyze and backtest using and creating rules.

The system I trade mainly is a 5 tick stop (NEVER MOVED, EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER) but I move it up if my indi's say the move is not what I thought. Of course this costs me more times than not.....

My point though is that I am gunning for 2.5 to 5 points and usually get 1.5 when the market is trending on my first scale out easily (if trading more than 1 contract). Lately I am sim, because I was IMPATIENT and AGGRESSIVE and I went through 2500.00 like it was butter on a muffin.

So my RR is quite good. On an IB where you are taking an entry at a breakout and your stop will then be usually 2 to 2.5 times larger then your PT, then this is a red flag and one in which intimidates me.

I will do some review and see what I come up with on CL, but my point is instead of trading live (cash) for a while and hoping, the best thing to truly learn a strategy may be to visually backtest and evaluate what rules would be better for RR and others.

I am enjoying reading your thread.

Bluemele
I have been following the IB method since mid June or so. Originally Jeff used 7 or 8 tick targets for his first contract, and then 12-16 for the second. Other folks tried to optimize the size for the second contract and some suggested 20-24 ticks if my memory serves me well.

I, on the other hand, currently trade only 1 contract. For a long time, I set my first target at 7-8 and used a stop from 14-20 ticks. The success rate has been high enough to allow such a bad R:R, but I kept noticing the moves would usually go further. So I played with using 1/2 the range of the IB as the first target (taking off 2 ticks for entry and exit). That has had good success. I notice that if the move is early in the day and headed towards yesterday's close, there is a good chance of going for a larger target. I am using a 512 tick chart and watching that now. If I build up a good data base to support it, I will modify my first target in specific cases, but I need screen time. I do have NinjaTrader, but my skills at backtesting are practically nil.

My intention is once I have built the equity up sufficiently, I will go to 2 contracts and use expanded targets. If successful, then go to 3, and so on.

The IB has been very successful on CL to date using the 15 min chart. I briefly looked at 6B using the method, but was not as impressed. Others looked at ES and I think came to the same conclusion. I decided just to stick to one instrument for now.

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  #149 (permalink)
 
papa15's Avatar
 papa15 
Wake Forest, NC
 
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bluemele View Post
Papa15,

Would you say the 8:45 bar was an IB? Just curious.

bluemele
I don't call the 8:45 bar an inside bar. It went higher than the previous bar. The 9am bar did engulf that bar but no, it was not an inside bar. The first one I see is the one I traded at 9:30.

Thanks for reading the thread.
Papa15

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  #150 (permalink)
 
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 bluemele 
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papa15 View Post
bluemele
I don't call the 8:45 bar an inside bar. It went higher than the previous bar. The 9am bar did engulf that bar but no, it was not an inside bar. The first one I see is the one I traded at 9:30.

Thanks for reading the thread.
Papa15

Sorry, not familiar with your chart software. I am a bit confused on time etc... I have a hard time explaining which bar.

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