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Update for Tuesday 1/24: I was away from the screens for the last few days, so no new trades.
I've been re-evaluating my progress though, and even before I started this journal it was clear that my winning percentage needs to improve. To get better results I have to take fewer bad trades, the question has been how?
What I've decided to do is focus on trend entries - I'll eliminate any range stuff. Really there are two flavors of trend entries I'll consider:
1. Second entries inside a clear channel, off the EMA with trend.
2. After a first break of a channel, a second entry off the EMA in the original trend direction.
Now all my lizard brain needs to do is identify clear trends on my timeframe and look for setups & entries in that direction.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
For your reference- This is 1,500 MES which is about the same as 2,000 ES. So a standard PATS chart. Note I do have his 2nd entry indicator running. Big difference is I pay Convergent Trading (Futures Trader 71 daily U Tube pre market is free and worth the time) for their two indicators that are free with membership. They (someone on staff) looks at volume profile and comes up with areas of high probability and (over on the left side) historical items that could make a difference. Note how the market reacts to the stalk zones. I also have overnight high and low as well as one hour opening range high and low. A lot more junk than yours. But it also shows me where I need to be wide awake! Yes they have this for your software if you want to try it.
2nd point- Mack's channel tool is nice after the fact. And I do draw channels once there are some points, but as you know they are after the fact.
3rd point- I now have half a dozen automatic profit stop/break even profiles. I match up to the ATR. So if ATR is running around 12 I have a profile that has larger everything than the one for an ATR of 8. I figured that out listening to PATS videos.
4th point. Running the volume profile in the right margin is new for me. Haven't decided if it is helpful enough for the screen space.
Good luck training your pattern recognition response. I wish it was easier!
Thanks for the response, I just prefer (require?) a much cleaner chart. Too many levels/indicators and I can't make a decision. I look at one symbol on one timeframe, with one moving average and it's still not easy. If anything I need less, not more information.
I went thru a volume profile / market profile phase myself. I watched FT71's premarket videos for a while, along with getting Shadow Trader's premarket profile. They tended to come up with the same levels, but I found they caused me to have a bias that did more harm than good. I find that trading PATs is about trading what you see, and having a bias gets in the way of that.
Personally I think using PATs second entry indicator is a terrible idea. The key is knowing when you're NOT looking for a second entry, but the indicator counts them all the time regardless of context. Nevermind the awful clutter on the chart the indicator creates.
I stick to the signal bar size for my profit target now, I tried the ATR thing and having multiple bracket profiles too. Again, too many decisions to make. My main goal anymore is to make my chart and my decisions as simple as possible.
I don't know how much value there is in the MES volume profile, it's a derivative of the ES. Wouldn't there be more value in plotting the ES volume profile?
Yes, I also stopped looking at FT 71 levels, they messed with my judgement and were overall not helpful. I enjoy his recap. I do like his stalk zones service. They are mostly effective and you can change the color to make them subtle, not distracting.
The second entry indicator well I agree it fires off a ton of signals, most of which are to be ignored.
I did try running the MES and ES on the same chart. It works pretty well. But they are not identical (you know some computer trader is arbitraging differences) so I have ended up running duplicate versions. About every week or two I run them both on the same page to make sure the MES tick count is close to a 2,000 ES.
The real issue is it just gets down to screen time and pattern recognition to make this system work.
No trades today to finish out a mediocre January. Admittedly trading wasn't my primary focus for large parts of the month, hopefully I'll actually trade more than 8 days in February.
Today was a test of patience, I saw a couple tempting range setups but I stuck to my plan of only taking obvious trend pullbacks off the EMA. At this stage it's much better for me if I take too few trades rather than too many. My goal is to achieve a winning percentage of 80 or better, which requires that I eliminate losers - so these days with no trades will happen.
Ok first trade of February believe it or not. I've been patiently sitting at my screens every day this month but didn't see anything I liked until this morning. Granted I only trade a few hours a day, but nothing? Anyway the good news is I didn't take any trades when there were no trades to take. I definitely wouldn't have been able to do that until pretty recently, my patience has come a long way.
10:01am trade: +17 ticks The context was an uptrend that played out with a break and new extreme (BNE), so I was expecting either a reversal or at least a decent move lower. I saw this as a second entry short inside a downchannel off the underside of the EMA. It was right after a news event so there was a bit of chop but I really liked how the signal bar broke higher and reversed hard back down to close on its low. I let the trade trigger and back up a bit before entering short one tick below the signal bar.
