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FM's Trade Log

  #141 (permalink)
 
FlyingMonkey's Avatar
 FlyingMonkey 
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No trades yesterday. Not a good showing for me today. I traded tired. Didn't really realize it until later in the morning, but my head was groggy. Still congested from illness weeks ago. I don't think either of these entries was that horrible, but they could have been better. But I was really fidgety managing these, and I attribute that to the low energy level.

Could have passed on the first one, a bottom-fishing try near support at 52.75. I wasn't going to give it a lot of rope - It looked weak and I bailed for a small loss -5.

Second trade was a problem because I entered it just as my family was waking up. I got distracted while managing the trade, and should have just closed it out and focused on getting the kids ready. Instead I tried to multi-task, which is pretty agitating while a trade is going the wrong way. Need to re-enforce an old rule: Don't enter when you can't keep full attention on the trade. If you are already in a trade that's in the green, and you now have distractions coming into the mix, OK to leave it on, assuming managing the trade can be somewhat hands-off. However, if the trade is working against you, just close it. Easier to manage a winning trade than a losing one.

I tried to bail early on it, but I fat-fingered it and my strategy aborted (again, same damn thing as last time). Ended up accidentally reversed long and closed out for -3 on top of -10. I wanted to get back in short several times later in the morning, but I knew better than to enter another trade as I was getting breakfast ready, getting teeth brushed, all that.

Welp. Honestly, having trouble with the mental state today. Must. Maintain. Confidence. Positive. Outlook. For the remainder of the week, if I don't get the right amount of sleep I'm not trading. Still committted to giving my current mode of operation a chance to succeed, but I have to wash the stink of losing off my hands...

I've been letting my physical health lapse the last few weeks. Going to try to shake out of this funk with working some solid exercise into the routine. When in doubt, get pumped!


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  #142 (permalink)
 
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 FlyingMonkey 
Los Angeles CA
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Just gave a random old guy a ride to the post office on my way to work. Wasnt goin his way but saw the disappointment when i told him no so I pulled up again and said hop in. Dude named norman with a larry david accent. Used to be a lifeguard in longisland. Super happy to not have to walk 2 miles to the post office.

I told him "good luck" when he got out of the car. He said "I've had my luck today. Now its time for you to have yours!"

Amen, brotha.

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  #143 (permalink)
 
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 Blash 
Chicago, IL
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FlyingMonkey View Post
Friday 03 Feb 2017
==================

Decided to sleep through NFP and wait for the open. Here's a new chart since the 120-min has looked much the same for a while.



It'd be nice to see this break below 53.50 as we have some room to work with down there. If we stay in this 53.75 area I think I'll stand clear. This Friday could quickly turn into a chop fest.



In below image I've circled the area where I thought about exiting early. At that point, you tried shorting into .50, it's been twiddling around without going your way, and the long side is starting to look pretty enticing as VWAP and .50 hold the retest. Get out now. If it comes back down, you can find a place to get back in.



I saw it through to the end, which cost me an extra 12 ticks or so. But in a perverse way (it's weird to talk about achievements when you have a negative PNL but hey, call me mr. positive I guess) I did what I set out to do this week. I went into this week basically telling myself: There's only two outcomes - you either win or lose. And either one, you should do it gloriously. Either win big or lose big, and do it gloriously. No death by a thousand cuts.

Learning the right trade management style is hard. This weekend my plan for homework is to replay all 7 trades I've taken over the past 2 weeks, with the exact same entries, but applying a different management approach and see what I learn. Use stops based on market structure, not a desire to mitigate loss. Regularly re-analyse the trade in-motion and move stop / bail early only with clear rational.

Every man needs a creedo. Every trader needs one too. That's what I'm trying to formulate here.



Mine....



Ron


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...My calamity is My providence, outwardly it is fire and vengeance, but inwardly it is light and mercy...
The steed of this Valley is pain; and if there be no pain this journey will never end.
Buy Low And Sell High (read left to right or right to left....lol)
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  #144 (permalink)
 
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 FlyingMonkey 
Los Angeles CA
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Blash View Post
Mine....

Ron

Good stuff, Ron, thank you.

Jacob

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  #145 (permalink)
 
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 FlyingMonkey 
Los Angeles CA
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Friday 24 Mar 2017
==================

My dog Pocket, a 45-pound black lab / maybe shepherd mix, had to be put down on Wednesday. I had her since I was in my mid-20s. Rescued her when she was about 2. She was about 12 at the end. She was a street dog, had been abused in her early years, and was emaciated and very sick when I got her. She recovered. She had been labeled "agressive" at the pound. But she just needed to be taught that humans, and other dogs, weren't all pieces of shit. I gave her love, and over the years that was all she needed to shed her sketchiness. She gave me more than that. She gave me trust and loyalty. She taught me more about being a good human than I taught her about being a good dog. She knew how to bounce back from anything. Even in her last 6 months, with a torn acl, she always got up to hobble out for a walk. Big hole in my chest with her gone, but I know she went when she was ready, and she was a damn lucky dog.

If you've never rescued a dog, and you think you might want to, go for it. If you have a child in their mid-20s who can handle it, advise him or her to rescue a dog. I don't think I'd be half the person I am today without getting that dose of real responsibility at that age.




I've generally had a lot going on lately. On tuesday I flew out for a one-day trip to give a talk to a few hundred people at an industry conference in my field. It went well - stepping a bit out of my comfort zone but challenges are good for the soul once they're done.

I've also been active on the sim / trying-new-things front. Looking to come back into the real world in the next week or two.

I think I'll start updating this journal regularly again now, but it may be more "musings" than actual trades for a little while.

Buyers rushed in at 47.50. Oil looks like it wants to break up over 48.50 and take a stab at 49.50. But it needs to do it soon or bears will take over again. And even if sellers are taking a break, the 47.50 - 50.00 range could hold us for a while.


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  #146 (permalink)
 
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 Blash 
Chicago, IL
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FlyingMonkey View Post
Friday 24 Mar 2017
==================

My dog Pocket, a 45-pound black lab / maybe shepherd mix, had to be put down on Wednesday. I had her since I was in my mid-20s. Rescued her when she was about 2. She was about 12 at the end. She was a street dog, had been abused in her early years, and was emaciated and very sick when I got her. She recovered. She had been labeled "agressive" at the pound. But she just needed to be taught that humans, and other dogs, weren't all pieces of shit. I gave her love, and over the years that was all she needed to shed her sketchiness. She gave me more than that. She gave me trust and loyalty. She taught me more about being a good human than I taught her about being a good dog. She knew how to bounce back from anything. Even in her last 6 months, with a torn acl, she always got up to hobble out for a walk. Big hole in my chest with her gone, but I know she went when she was ready, and she was a damn lucky dog.

If you've never rescued a dog, and you think you might want to, go for it. If you have a child in their mid-20s who can handle it, advise him or her to rescue a dog. I don't think I'd be half the person I am today without getting that dose of real responsibility at that age.




I've generally had a lot going on lately. On tuesday I flew out for a one-day trip to give a talk to a few hundred people at an industry conference in my field. It went well - stepping a bit out of my comfort zone but challenges are good for the soul once they're done.

I've also been active on the sim / trying-new-things front. Looking to come back into the real world in the next week or two.

I think I'll start updating this journal regularly again now, but it may be more "musings" than actual trades for a little while.

Buyers rushed in at 47.50. Oil looks like it wants to break up over 48.50 and take a stab at 49.50. But it needs to do it soon or bears will take over again. And even if sellers are taking a break, the 47.50 - 50.00 range could hold us for a while.




Super sad right now after reading this bro. But great to here about your relationship with Pocket.

I can barely even say how much I love Zepta (white 13) and Astra (4).

Unfortunately my wife has allergies to dogs with "fur" as opposed to "hair" and you can rarely find any like this to recuse.

Thank you so much for this post my brother.

Ron


Sent from my iPhone using nexusfi.com

...My calamity is My providence, outwardly it is fire and vengeance, but inwardly it is light and mercy...
The steed of this Valley is pain; and if there be no pain this journey will never end.
Buy Low And Sell High (read left to right or right to left....lol)
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  #147 (permalink)
 
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 FlyingMonkey 
Los Angeles CA
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Blash View Post
Super sad right now after reading this bro. But great to here about your relationship with Pocket.
...
I can barely even say how much I love Zepta (white 13) and Astra (4).
...

Beautiful dogs, man. Give them lots of love. Pocket's buddy Dandy is still doing his thing. This little guy is not a rescue.


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  #148 (permalink)
 
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 FlyingMonkey 
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Tuesday 28 Mar 2017
===================

The most important thing I'm working on right now ... is sleep. Crazy to say it. But if I can't get my sleep schedule to a place that gives me a couple hours in the morning to get some work done comfortably, then I'm not getting anywhere. It's not just about trading - there's currently very little bandwidth for pursuits outside of my day to day. Even exercising. Have to get up earlier, which means I have to get to sleep earlier..

I will get back on track — I tend to always run through this around the time change. Also I was in an extended loop of mild/moderate sickness since Christmas, which I finally got out of this month with help from some antibiotics. 2 small children in the house takes a toll.

Pics from my fitbit sleep tracking show a steadily increasing volume of sleep (not a bad thing on its own) over the last year. A snapshot from this weeks time-to-sleep and time-to-wake shows my recent difficulty getting up before the market open.

One of my objectives this year is to get back into swing trading. I have a chunk of change squirreled away that isn't doing much right now, and I will start tracking a few ETFs with inverse-ETF pairs, so I can play the short side as well without margin. Unfortunately most inverse ETFs that get any volume are double or triple. But I'd still rather do this than use futures which are too leveraged for my comfort, and also I can use my IRA with ETFs but not futures.

So stay tuned for that — Still planning to get the early morning trading back on the burner, but at least swing trading I can come up with a plan of action over the weekend, set some alarms and limit entries in the evenings, without actively tracking. I will post as much of this process in this journal as I can muster, so stay tuned for some new things on that front if all goes as planned.




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  #149 (permalink)
 
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 FlyingMonkey 
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Thursday 30 Mar 2017
====================

Been noticing this more often lately, where the overnight session will track one channel out, and then the RTH session will flip the script and start a new channel. Often I need to draw the new channel 4 or 5 times as it develops and changes pitch, but eventually it becomes clear that the overnight session's move is getting retraced in the RTH.




Just dropping off vwap so I may need to redraw this as a steeper downward thrust.

I switched back to my live account this morning (enough messin around). Only got one trade off today for a scratch. Long when we came down into .82 after equities open. Wasn't holding and I wisely bailed.




Getting choppy and I need to make some breakfast. I got up at 4:30 yesterday, which was great. Today, late to the party, barely up before 6, which definitely played into missing a trade or two earlier.

I've picked some long/short etfs for my new swing-trading exper-o-ment and will update here with more framework and first set of analysis in the next few days.

Edit:"wisely bailed" a matter for debate

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  #150 (permalink)
 
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 FlyingMonkey 
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For my ETF swing trading experiment, to start I'm going to focus on US Equities, Oil, Gold, and US 20yr Bonds. I've selected these because they all have Long/Short ETFs with reasonable volume at a reasonable leverage of 2x.

QLD / QID (Nasdaq)
DDM / DXD (DOW)
SSO / SDS (SP500)
UCO / SCO (Oil)
UGL / GLL (Gold)
UBT / TBT (Bonds)

But I won't be using those ETFs for my analysis because the leverage throws them all out of wack. I'll be using some combination of futures and 1x ETFs for analysis:

QQQ
DIA
SPY
DBO or USO (oil)
GLD (gold)
TLT (bonds)

Equities also have some 1x inverses which may come in handy from time to time. PSQ / DOG / SH.

My approach is 99% technical analysis based. I'm not particularly interested in incorporating macro rationale into my decisions, but I'm not opposed to learning more about it and using it down the line. I am interested in statistics and quant-type things, but don't count on that showing up here any time soon either.

My technical analysis is really, really loose. I draw lines. I like channels. But I don't necessarily have a lot of rules about how I draw those lines. I use a combination of a bunch of things I've picked up that make sense to me. It's really basic stuff. You'll see some talk of higher highs, higher lows, support / resistance, impulsive / corrective moves, and trend lines / channels. I'm interested in taking trades at potential reversals or places within a trend that I can make a good risk / reward bet on continuation..

Just to get it out of the way, be prepared for some head-scratcher channels that are kind of hypothetical without a lot of line-touches. Lately I have this burning need to frame all price action inside some kind of channel. For me, it's not about a line on a chart that I expect price to interact with. It's just about putting a box around price so I understand where the basic trajectory is heading, and where the extremes of the action are (where mean reversion is more likely to pop in).

I feel like I need to say a lot more, but rushing through this as I've got to call it a night. Here's a quick look at Gold (I apologize for not using GC for my analysis here so I don't get the commodity price, but this GLD chart is better for my purposes) .




Since putting in a bottom in December, gold has been channeling up. But we've got what some bears are looking at as an extended up move that just made a double-top. The multi-month trend going back several years is downward, and I'm sure there are very good arguments to think at the very least GLD is dropping down to 116.65 here. HOWEVER... we are sitting, right here, at an inflection point worth keeping an eye on for a long. Here's why.




There's nothing any market loves to do more than catch a bunch of participants flat footed. If GLD can hold this 118ish level and start to squeeze the shorts that entered positions off the double top... there's a lot of air up above..

From an inter-market perspective, I find it interesting the strength gold is showing with this sort of laa-dee-daa corrective move this week, while the equities have made a much more signifcant move up (loose inverse correlation), nasdaq even completing a weekly bullish reversal. One maybe giving a clue on the other ... but which?

I have no crystal ball. All I can do is keep an eye on the action here and make a call at some point whether it's worth taking a bet that a low will stick. Or just pass and wait for the next one. I am neither bullish nor bearish on gold. I'm simply saying there's a developing risk / reward long opportunity here that is worth keeping an eye on.

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