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Exercise:
Man does not live by ticks alone, possums maybe, but human traders need food and exercise. Food is up to you, I eat mostly rice and potatoes, but whatever comes out of the food replicator is fine. Hopefully there is protein in there as well. Some exercise is better than others though. When I was a child they had kung fu theater every Saturday at 3 PM (this was in the 1970s) so I would watch the various kung fu movies and learn about a guy who was a builder so he would tie people up while he fought, the same way you lash bamboo poles together. Another guy was trying to defeat an invincible opponent, so he kept learning different styles but nothing worked. In the end he learned acupuncture and discovered that his opponent kept all his chi in his right ankle, the only vulnerable part of his body, stick a needle in there and poof, defeated. So many cool lessons in there.
When i got old enough I learned karate, the hard styles and gradually moved to the soft styles, tai chi and baqua. Most Western understanding of body mechanics relies upon mechanistic views. It sees the body as a system of levers and pulleys where the knee and elbow move in a two dimensional plane. It is a common misconception, to try and stuff what Dr. Mandelbrot called "rough" systems into a linear geometric space. Traders do it too. We draw horizontal lines for price levels (to include stuff like donchian channels, power levels etc.) and diagonal for trendlines, unfortunately or fortunately the market moves rough and erratically, like a river or cloud bank. That's the way your body should move.
In tai chi, there is a pattern of 4 moves called grasping sparrows tail. I have practiced it for about 30 years. It is the most useful thing I have ever learned. It does so many things. My main practice is Baqua, it is hard to find a teacher, but I was in a big city for a while so I did. The movements are based on the five animal exercises from India (this is what bodhidharma taught monks at Shaolin when he arrived there) and those animal exercises evolved into kung fu, tsing-I, baqua, tai chi...so many forms. Baqua is an extremely circular form, a master in the form can move so quickly and circuitously that you would be hard pressed to lay a single finger on him in a small crowded room. It is also excellent footwork for swordplay as shown here. This is Master Sun, when he was younger Watch the feet, those steps take a lot of practice to achieve.
Anyway, dont sit in your chair all day. The best thing for the lower back is kicks (IMO). Don't kick too high and always consult a professional person if you are unsure. There are yoga and tai chi instructors everywhere. Talk to one.
This is potentially a very good set up on the Russell. Since most of you trade some version of this market ES,NQ... This is a good topic of conversation. The timeframe is 30m as usual, and the Grey vertical bar is yesterdays close. I don't use data from a previous session. Yesterday is gone and the future not yet arrived. So I would take a long at the green bar. In my mind a trade like that has the potential to go for the rest of the week so exciting stuff. You can also see that long doji there so passing that shows a lot of bear strength. Either way there is potential for trending so fingers crossed.
Back to the main story, it is 2014, I have just quit my job, because my boss was a maniac. The stress of operating a failing business for so long had driven him quite mad. They took him out on a stretcher one day, no joke. He was just lying there waving and smiling at us as he got carried out. The field manager was never around because he was out in the field, but me and the project manager, well we had some times. So I started trading mini contracts, like I had been doing. I won and I lost about break even, until one Friday I decided that the market had gone up too far and would go down eventually. I dont remember the details of how I came to that, probably bollinger bands. So I entered a short and watched the market go up and up and up. You've seen the Friday afternoons when a trend catches, it just goes to the moon sometimes. So at the end of it I was out 3k, on one trade. I had $30k at the time and I needed some of that to live on (because of the whole job quitting thing) I freaked, I just walked around in the woods in a daze. Then I put together a plan.
Step one; get a job. There was a job watering plants in offices. Sounded pretty good, and it was. I drove around the city and watered plants, no supervision, no stress. A friend turned me on to micro futures and I chose currencies. (I don't think micro-ES existed yet) micro gold was also around I think. I just wanted to trade a lot and start to be able to identify trends and how to stay in them. Am still working on that. I would trade mostly one contract which I think was a dollar a tick. You can't make any money but also can't lose much. I did that for a long time and got a lot of fresh air and exercise watering plants but it was a part time job and rent in Washington DC is a full time proposition. So I kept looking. While in the car I listened to Michael Covell's trend trading podcast and got to hear from the likes of Ed Seykota, Tom Basso, Van Tharp...very cool stuff. I read "Remembrances of a Stock Operator", "Market Wizards" lots of stuff. Eventually I saw an ad on Craigslist said, "Are you former military? We are hiring" So I called.
Coming, they can't be denied. Going, they can't be detained.
Good morning boys and girls! Are you excited for today? I am. Thursdays (until the end of the school year) I knock off early to go help the middle schoolers do a garden. We have 4 weeks left, fingers crossed we can complete the project.
Russell looking GREAT this morning. Very excited about that and took a short in gold an hour ago that is holding for now. Oil was a small mistake on my part. See the green line?
oil mistake
Ideally I would have shorted at that point but without the benefit of hindsight that is shorting into the overnight when the price hadn't come back to my stop. I think the best move in that sitch is to get out. I did reduce my position so yay me (I guess). Price is coming back up now so I may emerge largely unscathed. Anyway keep your fingers crossed for a big RTY rally today unless you're bearish. In that case uninstall your platform.
LOL JK
cats pants
Coming, they can't be denied. Going, they can't be detained.
question for those reading, and feel free to chime in, don't be a sleepy dragon, how do you feel about stops? Do you have a general philosophy?
Look at this;
happy
Russell zooms up, as hoped for, in the past I might have said "move your stop to the entry. Lock in the profits" but I think that's the fear talking. I imagine that's how scalping works. Scalp, read consolidation, scalp read consolidation, but on a really short time frame? I don't understand scalping or bitcoin. I hear about it and all my organs go la-la-la. I'm not saying they are at all bad, both provide a lot of people with security for their family, but it is, I think, for fast paced competitive people, not for me. I was always destined for trend trading.
Erratic movements can zoom around any which way and you want to keep yourself out of it. Much like you avoid an angry bumblebee. They were just talking about this on the last psychology webinar (really excellent conversation BTW)
I guess my philosophy is luck brings the spikes you like and the ones you don't like. Nothing personal really.
Coming, they can't be denied. Going, they can't be detained.
Fridays are very good, maybe my favorite, although, as Yunmen says,
Every day is a good day.
Do you know why? He asked the monastic community one day, "I don't ask about before the 15th, but what about after the fifteenth?" The 15th day of the month is a monk's day off, only day off per month, so mostly it is spent shaving the head, sewing the robes, sleeping, whatever. So Yunmen used this to question the community.
Are you monks aware of the present moment or looking ahead or behind you? he is asking. No one said anything so he replied for them "Every day is a good day" But what is good about it? As soon as you get into the fine details you lose the day right? Is it any different than trading and getting lost in indicators and elliott waves, retracement or abandoned baby bottoms? (gold star if you know what that is) In the end you are either long, short or out.
So Fridays I trade a maximum of 2 markets and I'm out by close, no weekend positions. Today it is Russell and Gold, both looking quite bullish ATM. If today works out well I will be slightly ahead for the week, if not slightly behind. The profits come all at once or not at all in this kind of trend trading, maybe most kinds of trend trading. A lot depends on how many contracts I add as the trade progresses. I could be a lot better about that. It can be particularly depressing when you add a shit-ton of contracts just to have the movement collapse, I think most of us have been there, but playing safe all the time just makes at best a break even trader.
Alas, Break even trading does not pay the rent.
Yunmen Wenyan
Coming, they can't be denied. Going, they can't be detained.
So one day my friend says to me.
"I don't want to sit here and do the trading stuff I just want a robot"
"Why not build a robot" I asked. He has a fairly extensive AI background.
"Well they trade fine for a while then they hit a snag and trade you off a cliff. So you have to watch them."
I asked "what would you do with the free time?" He said he would go to the beach. Which is really an excellent answer.
So robots can only do robot stuff, which is it's own very niche very limited job, this computer, this camera, these servers, exactly what they were told to do. The second you introduce random human/animal nature their circuitry fries. They dont have the thing that all autopoetic systems possess, which is chaos, the random in a pattern. This.
Gushan3
My friend believed that machines would take over trading very soon. There would be no more traders. I was pretty skeptical but couldn't argue why. Now, six years later. I don't know much. Really. I do know that there are linear machine systems and rough, messy organic systems and neither are going away. Each has a place.
Also you can know this,
Ashes on the head
and eyes below the river
warbler trill, peterbuilt downshift
The bells chime loudest when the wind stops.
Coming, they can't be denied. Going, they can't be detained.
Stops are important, its basically what that has kept me from blowing my account more than I've already done so.
What you use your stop is almost as important as your primary trading strategy, and I consider it as a part of the strategy itself. For me I use ATR system which also trails the price. So if price moves so and so amount against me, I assume its sign of market changing its mood and I should get out of it till confirmation of the mood change where I could enter in the trade again in that changed direction.
