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I needed to do something. Many of the other elite traders here have journals. If nothing else, they seem to help them focus. I need that.
I sit in the dark most of the day. Well, I get up at 5 am ish PST to trade the Bond Market til it closes, then work on my web app another 8ish hours. Somehow I've become addicted to trading. It's like a competition thing similar to when I played QB in high school. I always want to win and I can't let it go until I do. Since I'm fairly accustomed to winning, I'm always optimistic and that positive expectancy leads me to make bad trades at times. I think a feeling is more right and ignore the objective data in front of me.
Which has given me some success trading, but also caused me to lose a ton. Overall I'm ahead after five years. I started in Penny Stocks, then moved up to Dollar Stocks and then took the jump into futures. I've stuck to pretty much bonds the entire time, except for the occasional throwing up of the hands and trying the ES or CL, which I've never been good at.
Which is why I've finally started a Journal.... To keep myself accountable. Being single and working from home, I go days and days never seeing or talking to another person, simply writing code or trading, back testing or downloading way too many damn indicators here. My trading is clogged, indicator intensive, nerve wracking and unproductive, but I still like it for some reason... possibly it's the challenge.
About a month ago I dove into Market Profile, Volume Profile, their theories and it's given me an entirely different view of markets and how to profit from them. I kind of feel like an idiot after understanding MP a bit, it seems so clear. I was a scalper, and extremely inconsistent at it. I've stopped scalping, removed most of my indicators, been trading in SIM while pivoting and have gotten better results. It's so much easier than scalping, once I started to understand it.
OK, I need to keep track of trades better than just seeing a green or red number in the DOM.
CQG is close now but I believe overall I was up $535 for the day. About $500 after commish.
Two trades today, third at the end of the day as a flub when clicking in chart trader. Seriously, I've gotta stop making those types of mistakes.
So really two trades, both winners on ZB today.
1st Trade was two contracts. ATM strategies, but I didn't wait for them to work. Saw the pullback and thought maybe I was wrong and exited with a total 2 tick win and a BE, $60 dollars. Entered around low of the day.
2nd trade was a beauty, and almost a nightmare as I chased my original entry up and was down 7 ticks and caught the high of the day when it reversed. I know some people call it scaling in, but I'm not sure I want to do that as if I'm already down 7 ticks on the ZB, why pile on more if it's going the wrong way. Might be better to take the loss and reset right after..... It was my trade location that was a bit early, and right now I don't know why, except that waiting for confirmation would have made this a much riskier trade. I need to understand MP and VP better, but somehow I need to be able to understand how volume slow downs to catch it.
Drill for Skill - Today's lessons:
1. No more two entries with tight ATM trails. One at a time for now.
2. I gotta let it RUN baby. Stop thinking like a scalper.
3. Seriously, figure out the bracket orders deal and drill for skill.
4. Adjust ATM's.
5. Know the expectancy before I enter the trade. I knew what I thought it would do, just be more detailed about it.
6. Create a rules set and review it before making the trade and write it down so I can catch if I've made errors. I should be able to enter the trade long before it gets there.
7. Ugh, reread the CBOT MP Manual, buy the book Markets in Profile book and S
teidlmayer.
8. Setup NT8 on the New PC figure out if Rancho Dinero MP is the one.
I like it. Already I've given myself actionable advice.