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At 8:24AM I open and cancel a buy order at 2825.00 because price drops sharply away.
Price comes back so I open the same position.
@8:30AM I am filled for a long position at 2825.00. Price struggles for a few moments and then starts to rise. I close out at 8:32AM for a 12-tick gain. I would have benefitted from setting a target for 16-ticks here in addition to adjusting my stop up. Again I think things are happening a little quick at the moment, things will slow down and I will optimize these exits better.
@8:56AM I missed some price-action mischief. That's ok I think I will let the IB do its thing and check back in later if I have time.
Huge tail develops after this.
Missed some very good opportunities due to focusing on work.
Final results:
Note: I sketch these market-profiles myself for my own practice, they are not official and may have errors, etc.
Completed Market Profile for March 27, 2019. Yesterday ended with a Very wide closing range, wider than IB. Today IB was again kind of narrow at ~13 points, but was quickly subsumed by range-extension widening quickly in C and D, and E periods as sellers auctioned price downward quickly. I saw a couple very good opportunities in hindsight, but most of the chart looks choppy and dangerous like "shark-teeth" in comparison to the long, lean-looking profile.
What i liked:
- Good instinct on my morning trade.
- Good positive reinforcement on "mental trades" when glancing at the chart while busy with other things.
- Started to see value area come into play within the context of interesting price-levels.
- Patient, sparse trading is helping me learn but it is so painful to want to trade more.
What I did poorly:
- I am feeling kind of down because I'm not able to trade professionally yet. I believe I have the risk-management in place to be safe, but I don't yet have enough trading-experience to generate enough wealth consistently. This makes sense for this stage in my career. I need more experience and I need to figute out the next step in generating wealth. The picture is there, there is positive-reinforcement in what I am doing, statistics saying I am on the right path, just not any opportunities yet to do this full time. Will keep grinding forever though.
Goals for Tomorrow:
- continue reading
- meditate
- probability theory
progress towards challenge goal
$3000.00 profit goal.
$250.00 achieved.
$0.00 current drawdown
2 trades of 30 entered.
current expectancy for cycle is 10.0000 ticks
I have a question: Do you, or are you able to, factor slippage into your trading results? When testing on YM, I factor $10 slippage and $1.20 per side. I found it mirrors reality. I was just wondering how that works with ticks and small movements you're trying to capture.
Hi @vmodus! In live-trading I haven't encoundered much slippage because I'm trading 1 contract in a highly-liquid product.
In fact Tom Sosnoff says something to the effect that 1-, 3-, or 5-lot orders in products like the /ES usually get filled at the desired price (almost) automatically by the HFT market-makers...but of course I can only verify this in my limited sample-size of 1-lot orders over a few dozen live trades (before discovering futures.io, then 2 live trades since), so I can't say that's true for sure, only that in my experience I tend to get filled better in live-trading than the sim platform from cme/cqg, which does simulate competition and queueing.
Hope that clears it up. I'm curious about the sosnoff quote, I'll try to dig it up, auto-filled 5-lot orders sounds too good to be true and i'd like to understand the details better, always more to learn. I believe he said something to the effect of "they just get thrown onto the pile of inventory". In a highly-volatile market I'm sure YMMV.
the fees are $5.50 round trip per contract. I started calculating this in my first journal entries and then stopped as its a cost-of-business that just adds a bit of noise to the journal and is small enough that if i'm worried about fees then I shouldn't be trading live because i'm performing poorly.
One last bit, I really am not targeting these small movements as a long-term strategy, its really just more of a starting-point, its what I'm most comfortable with now, but during the cme trading competition back in last november I got to swing-trade /CL a little, while OPEC took its sweet-a** time coming up with a decision and I really enjoyed it, it was very powerful to pull in a big return as opposed to trying to accumulate these slivers. I just haven't worked out a risk/reward-strategy that I'm comfortable with live, there is so much that can happen over-night I'm just not ready. :-)
Thanks for the detailed response. Like you, we only trade highly liquid markets, though YM doesn't have the liquidity that ES. I don't quite know how to program limit orders into my strategies to mitigate some slippage, if possible. It doesn't affect us too much, as we are swing traders and look for the bigger moves. But every $ counts.
Good point about not worrying about comissions too much. If your strategy is riding on such a thin margin that commish kills it, then that strategy is really not making enough per trade to justify using it.
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We trade using Al Brooks Price Action and record our entries/exits in public for accountability.
At 8:43AM CST - Horrid timing, I shouldn't be trading in this chaos, plus I'm tired today so of course I dive right in short thinking no way this market is going up. I've even learned a lot about how the IB is a process of finding a range, and still I get greedy and jump in and get stopped-out almost immediately. Not my best effort.
What i liked:
- I can't think of much.
- I guess you can divide trading into good days and bad days. I haven't done any real damage, and if my bad days are limited to 8-16 ticks or so, I should be ok if I keep my expectancy up.
What I did poorly:
- Unfocused, impulsive trading while tired.
- Didn't hit my goals for today last night, only did a little reading.
Goals for Tomorrow:
- Patience and Focus
- continue reading
- meditate
- probability theory
- start tracking tired, unfocused trades
progress towards challenge goal
$3000.00 profit goal.
$150.00 achieved.
-$100.00 current drawdown
3 trades of 30 entered.
current expectancy for cycle is 4.0006 ticks
So I get to spend my lunch forcing myself not to jump back in and try to make up my losses.
Hardest part is that there are so many opportunities and any single chosen moment, very hard to confess that you still made the wrong choice and you need to stay the hell out of the market today.
This is consistent with sim-trading expectancy so I need to just stay out and re-focus for tomorrow, even though it is so hard.
I will spend some time sketching the market-profile and add it in to my journal later.
@7:31-7:32AM CST I missed a nice opportunity because I wasn't quite prepared to enter a trade.
@9:00AM IB starting to form and the 'A'-bracket was only 9.5 points wide, essentially we just auctioned down to the OH and tested that, then came back up to a midpoint. 'B'-bracket is very narrow so far as well, so market-behavior is shaping up similarly again today to the last few days. I think there will be some instability and definitely some range-extension with such a narrow initial-balance forming unless something changes soon. That could make for nice opportunities.
@9:23AM we test OH once again, and both times there has been support. I almost enter a stop-buy order at 2832.00, but decided it would have been better in this tight range to have gotten in at 2830.00. it would have been an ok trade but nothing huge. I missed a small opportunity. Its a pattern I keep seeing that I would have jumped on in sim but I hesitated after yesterday's impulsiveness. Not going to sweat it.
We have a very unstable base and very little directional conviction. Therefore I think my bias should be to look for volatility-skew, in that markets tend to crash faster than they tend to rally, so I will look for range-extension from the other timeframe seller to the downside, and I know my signal.
@9:44AM I didn't have to wait long, I go short at 2828.50, as I set my stop-loss it is dropping so i just set it initially for a 4-tick gain, and adjust quickly to 8-ticks. That was smart, it turned out to be just a quick probe, auctioning lower to see where the buyers are. pinbar @9:45AM which *i think* signifies strong buyer conviction. I'm out with a small 8-tick gain. I was early though, the move I wanted came back a minute or so later. I should learn to trade these as a combination since I see this "too-early" pattern so often.
This is better than yesterday, I'm clear-headed and prepared.
@9:58AM I missed a good opportunity on the single-print buying tail but I wasn't sure where the bottom was. Ended up being 4 ticks below YH. I have my eye on another signal, if it develops.
Going to need to focus on work soon. So many opportunities! I hope I can get out of this day with more than 8 ticks.
At this moment I can kind of see the successful path forward. Keep building confidence on the signals that are working for me and that have statistical expectancy of being successful, and slowly gain confidence in better trade-management of those trades, and as confidence grows and things slow down, more and more of these little opportunities should make themselves known. Right now it is a slow painful process, but I have learned that forcing the process to speed up by making something happen when you are un-prepared is a sure way to trade poorly. From now on I will make sure I am alert and prepared.
Final results:
What i liked:
- got my trading back on track. All the signals in my mind were firing and I traded well. I just need to keep grinding until the number of actionable opportunities that I can identify and act upon increase. There is a psychology componenent to this as well. It feels nice right now to take a little money out of the market. As experience and confidence increase, the bigger opportunities will show themselves.
- Reading "Mind over Markets" is helping. I am getting more context from the information the market itself is giving me, and I can combine it with my other signals.
- I have previously identified "stepping out in front of bullet-train"-type trades as a problem and have eliminated them from my strategy. Now I have identified "unfocused, unprepared, force-something-to-happen"-trades (like yesterday's) as my main error to eliminate. Now I can take steps to force myself to only trade when prepared.
- I can kind of see the big picture now.
What I did poorly:
- I have some slow reaction-time to new signals after I've exited a good trade. That's ok right now, it can be fixed over time.
- I could have hit my bonus this week if I had managed a couple winning trades better and had avoided making sloppy, unfocused trade yesterday.
Goals for Monday:
- continue reading "Mind over Markets", finish "Advanced Beginner" section
- meditate
- probability theory work
- create punch-list for steps to know I'm prepared, focused, and ready to start trading
- Find next steps and how to drill/practice these next steps for the big picture and ultimate goal.
- write some code and track more stats.
- I just want to focus on futures trading full-time, so apply to another "other timeframe buyer/seller"...though i have my doubts this path will open up for me. I'm not sure why exactly.
- watch more of FT71's trader bites
progress towards challenge goal
$3000.00 profit goal.
$250.00 achieved.
$0.00 current drawdown
4 trades of 30 entered.
I need (2750.00/26) = $105.77 per trade to hit my target.
current expectancy for cycle is 4.9999 ticks
I need to keep getting these small opportunities, keep improving trade-management, and take advantage of sizing up when I hit my bonus.
