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Tuglife's trading journal. Focused on profitability.
The work continues. I continue to have an enormous amount of free time at work. I now have Sierra Chart set up well enough that I can sim trade if I want to.
Unfortunately I now need three monitors. I am a little bit of a vagrant, so I will have to pack them around in my Corolla or on planes. Either way I realized something very important: In the past when I have been trading I've been screwing around a lot with my setup, and not watching the market. Trading as a scalper on a small timeframe chart it is pretty easy to miss setups like that. Even recently I planned on having several tabs I could scroll through...multiple timeframes and the like. I just can't operate like that. I need to have it all in front of me where I can just glance at it.
In the words of the great Apollo 12 Commander Pete Conrad (while landing on the moon). I need to be able to "Smoke over the gauges."
Sat down to do a chart replay tonight. 0/2 on the first two trades. I committed the cardinal sin of fading market strength.
I can be stoic at times. I'm thankful to have this problem thrown at me again. Especially in paper trading. I spent the last few hours rebuilding my Sierra Charts, changing the background color and adding slope colors to my many EMA's. I had thought of color-sloped EMA's many times but never got around to it.
Hopefully I can train my money brain that fading certain EMA's will equal failure. *Sighs stoically.*
My employment finds me sitting inside a 25,000,000 BTU water heater trailer all night. I basically heat a pond all winter and early spring. The unit is fully automatic and I have very little to do unless it shuts down unexpectedly (it never does). There is wifi and a TV that I use for my second trading monitor.
As I told my friend, my nights go a lot like this: I spend 8-10 hours poring over charts, talking to myself. I occasionally take breaks to window shop for the Lexus or McLaren I feel I might be able to buy soon. Then I paper trade and get smoked.
I think I may have overtuned my indicators to give me too many trade entries. I also also have developed trade rules that get me into trades pretty late. Things still need a lot of work before I can live trade.
Shout out to the Intel Corporation cofounder Gordon Moore who passed away recently at age 93. We owe people like him a lot.
I started setting up alerts tonight. I now have the ability to color chart background when certain conditions exist. I firmly believe this will be a game changer, as I now have around 8 different charts that I am scanning. I think alerts will also give me the opportunity to do some backtesting.
I have found an amazing product. I don't think admins will mind as I am definitely not affiliated with it (other than enjoying the hell out of it).
I have had carpal tunnel for 20 years. I had the surgery long ago and the symptoms have been under control until this winter. I have been clocking 14 hour days on the PC. In the interest of giving my hands all the help they can get I ordered some "mouse skates" from Amazon. These are replacement gliders for the bottom of your mouse. The ones I got are "Lexip Mo42 ceramic gaming feet" there little ceramic buttons. My mouse now glides like it's on ice. Utterly amazing. I also got a gaming mouse pad. Much, much, much easier on the hands and wrists.
There will be trading. I have a funded account and will have live data on SC this week.
I should be paper trading more and playing with indicators less.. When I paper trade it does not go well. The markets also really confuse me sometimes, the ES in particular.
There is a possibility of failure and that makes me anxious. I believe more time paper trading could alleviate that eventually, if it goes well. My winter season in the oilfield will be over soon and that doesn't really bode well for my trading...part of the reason I've been so productive the last few months is because my work affords me so much free time. When I am at home I don't work as hard at things.
One source of my frustration is that I continually think I have a system that can be automated, or at least let me disengage and watch for a green light or red light. Then I try it out and the market either moves too fast or too slow and the indicators flash one color and repaint another color.
1) tbh, I'm too lazy to back test correctly. (I have heard and I don't suspect him as a fruad) In theory, you should back test each of your indicators in various market condition and various parameters (not just rely on default settings). Overall you should have a few indicators that track different things and when all four line up, you execute. You should checkout him out, nonosense something, I forgot. He is prop forex trader that relies on indicators. He also suggested to not use indicators that repaint.
2) just use RSI with TA. A lot of ppl just do this, its works... just need to not fall for the obvious trap, it works until it doesn't. risk management will carry you.
3) Either way its hard, so rely on risk management and psychology. It will carry you to profitability. I would suggest to just keep trading sim, don't back test, forward test with your indicators. Don't worry about P/L, find a system that fits you and gives you a chance of winning. I also get confused by the market, but in the end, it comes down to a win or a loss. The market determines it, so spend more time on what you can control. Your emotions, your psychology, and your trade!
I papertraded yesterday and realized that while I have spent a lot of time on my new setup, it still needs work as I can't really see what I need to without messing with the scale and whatnot. Also...I continue to fade market strength.
I will develop trading rules. I don't think I'm bein too hard on myself when I say it's idiotic (for me) to try and be a countertrend trader. I think I can devise a ruleset that precludes engaging in this kind of behavior.
I'm taking a few days off of working on this. I am starting to lose focus and feel like it's time to regroup.
I papertraded the last two nights. About 3 hours per session. Time well spent. I now have 20 period TEMA (triple exponential moving averages) on my charts. They turn the background blood red when they have negative slope and green when positive. My new trading rule precludes me from going against the TEMA.
Trading went OK both nights. I need more trading rules. I also need a morning checklist and a good way to log trades.
One thing that went well the last two nights is letting winners run. I still got into a couple of bad trades at the start of the session (lack of trading rules, ken). But while they were bad trades, they were a country mile better than the idiocy that reigned last week.
Everything is ready to go. I feel like I am ready in every area except I am petrified. I'm hoping this will go away with more experience. Or some modest success. I still haven't live traded and have done very little paper trading since I got the entire setup finished (multi monitor).
So yeah I'm scared. It isn't the trading itself that scares me, it's that I have so much invested emotionally. If I'm not profitable pretty quick it will be a huge letdown.
The worst part is that I feel like if I don't succeed with this next attempt the only reason would be because I am trading like an idiot. I am *light years* more knowledgeable than 3 years ago when I first tried this.
Paper trading today with the "full monty" 5 monitor setup for the first time. I traded OK. Identified a nontrend day early. Woke up on time for market open which is the biggest win all year
I might be getting better at not losing money. I might live trade tomorrow.
