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Another gap down this morning on the SPY. This is not boding well. I'm pretty sure the Fed policy meetings are this week and then Powell will be making an announcement on interest rates. But we will likely see the market vote before that happens. Going to be very careful the next few days, I don't want to get swept in a downmove.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
In other news, I spent literally all day yesterday going through every single one of my trades for the last month in an exercise to rout losing trades and maximize winning ones. Always a good experience, but tiring, and I'm still not done. Taking an objective look at every single trade and validating or invalidating the trade in hindsight is a bit superfluous, but I feel like I continue to learn to avoid making the same mistakes over and over, which is both humiliating and illuminating.
Had an okay morning so far, my reflections over the last couple of days have helped. I've been changing up my style the last few weeks, and getting killed in the process, but a change is necessary since I've been having a hard time handling the swings in my equity that typically come with my trading style. Ergo, I'm changing the style kinda sorta.
I've always been a bit of a gunslinger, scaling into my positions, when they go my way scale in more, then look for momentum to dump into. I've multiplied my account 10 fold over a period of weeks a few times but I give waaaay too much back when I'm cold and losing. Weeks ago I got caught short on the russell with 10 contracts and just wouldn't let the trade go... causing me to reevaluate. So I'm trying to redesign things in a bid to have a bit more stability. I'm still a big proponent of pressing my winning trades but for now I'm sticking to one contract and man, I never realized how hard it is to just trade one contract and succeed. The level of precision that I have to have on both my entries and the discipline on my stops is just incredible, no more scaling to buffer my lazy entries. In the past, I've always traded a 'move' of more than a few points which requires some finesse but I'm finding with one contract, it's more efficient to pick away at the market for a couple points here and there. My average time in a trade seems to be about 5mins now which is much much less than before.
As for the market today, volume today is actually somewhat low, surprisingly. I'm waiting to see if someone steps in with some contrary orders which I suspect might happen under 270.
Yes, orderflow. Yes, that is one type of trade, if I'm looking for a move, i will scale into a trade as it 'moves against me' and then scale up as it goes my way and eventually dump into liquidity if I'm lucky. Those are usually trades I plan in advance.
Throughout the day, I am mostly just trading orderflow, locating a buyer/seller, and then trying to time my trade to catch quick bursts of a couple points as quickly as possible with hopefully minimal risk, no scaling.
I finished my trading day just after 1pm today. I've just been cataloging and reviewing my trades since, watching the market out of the corner of my eye, and reading a statistics textbook.. but I've closed my software so I can't trade. Going to be a wild week so I'll save my stamina for tomorrow.
Slow afternoon so far, low volume, last two trades have been a loss and a scratch so I will wait until I see some strength and volume come into the market before trading more.
Got distracted and forgot to recap. All in all, the afternoon did pick up a little and although I was up and down, I ended up positive for the day, mostly thanks to the last downswing right before the close. When I was recapping my trades for the last month, I manually calculated some metrics, and one of them was the time of the day that I do best, and the time that I do worst. Not surprisingly, between 11-2, I tend to do poorly (57% of my losses occur here and only 25% of my wins). Like today, up and down. it's almost worth just not trading during this time frame.
Anyway, with the Fed set to raise interest rates tomorrow and Powell to give a press conference afterwards, I will be watching for massive directional volume which I hope to trade along with.
Good morning to everyone. Looking forward to perhaps a mediocre morning and a busy afternoon. It's options expiration day on the SPY today and the Fed meeting is wrapping up with a press conference at 2pm, so I will definitely NOT have any open orders at that time - a few times in the past, I've been run over by that train because there is usually no liquidity for a minute or so after 2pm.
Yesterday in the afternoon, I was bored and was taking screenshots of the tape which I was going to post here at that time but I got distracted managing a trade I was in. I got long on the SPY at maybe 1:30pm or so at around 270.30 because I could see a buyer stepping in swinging... and as I'm watching, every time the price would touch 270.60, a seller was knocking it back down. There's a screenshot here of how it looks but you'll have to imagine that up until this moment, the tape was spinning green (aggressive buying), full-steam ahead, buyer in control, and as soon as the price touched 270.65 you can 'see' the seller below (red orders are sell). In this particular example, the seller cleared the book down to .63 but in more extreme examples (like around close yesterday) a seller will clear the book for 20-50cents per order in ONE second and THAT is serious business. Just after 3 o'clock yesterday, there was a seller doing just that at 271.50, I was still long, and decided to reverse when price couldn't get through his orders (which ended up being the right move). Anyway, there you have it.
