Woke up this morning and decided I wanted to play for an upside breakout. Should've of just stayed in bed. I'm a horrible breakout/swing trader and today confirms that. So back to what I do best, which is 1:1 risk/reward scalps with high hit rates. I might let a trade run every once in a while with tight trailing stops, but for the most part I need to stick with my bread and butter. Today felt like a pivotal day in that the NQ needed to rally to at least 4460 to resume this larger uptrend from Feb 11, but instead price rolled over hard late day. If buyers can hold this 4340 area then we have a chance to rally back to new highs. If not 4200 is in play. Buckle up, this can get wild. Might need to take tomorrow off to "reset" things mentally. Hope ya'll killed it today.
For the last 2 years of my trading I neglected to define the trend and look at the daily bars. They give you major clues to which way you should be trading. NQ has been in a downtrend for the last 7 days... It isn't even close to being up (the major up TLs from 11 Feb - smaller one from 29 Mar - have been broken; not to mention the daily downTL from Apr 19 high). Making money long is going to be extremely tough. Your trades bring back my nightmares of the days I was trading last Dec, the Russell was in an obvious downtrend, and I tried buying all the way down. The only trade I wanted yesterday was short 4440~ we are in a daily downtrend, it was a pullback to the edge of a range (overnight), and there was a head and shoulders/triple top/trend line break and test of the high on the 5 min.
One of THE most difficult devils that derails traders: Defining the trend.. Another is refusing to accept the trend once defined. Then IF we do accept the trend we want to predict where it stops so we start trading against the trend early.. Basically greed makes us want ALL of the move, not accepting we cannot pick bottoms or tops. See my fantastic hindsight trend chart<gg>.. Based on this I will look to short 4440 to 4480 area next week.. wait.. I just predicted!,.. maybe short at the declining line?.. Yes humans are not naturally wired for trading.
Well said. So what do we KNOW...? 1. Lower lows AND Lower highs.. assuming the Hourly is our trend Time Frame.. The only thing we should concern ourselves with locating the FIRST resistance area to risk a short.. If we see 4372 to 4400 I will take a short on a good setup.
Or if we open lower on Monday we can wait for a pullback and short a lower high or if we get a drop and then a higher low I will look for a long until the most recent high on the 5 minute
Thanks Rashid and masterm1ne for posting your charts. It's nice to see your approaches to trading. I traded sloppy for the better part of last week. Friday (-51), and for the week (-327)... plenty of room for improvement here. I wanna say that it's tough to work a regular job and trade, but at the same time I feel very fortunate to be able to do this. One thing I want to mention is that trading (at least for me) is part of a bigger plan to grow a modest investment account into a million dollars. I have been aggressively adding to my Fidelity technology fund (ticker FOCPX) these past couple months, and added some more last Friday. I have a very long term horizon of at least 10 years if not longer, and I believe the top holdings in this fund will do very well in the years to come. Today's trading was going ok until I got dinged on one trade.. The story of my life Lol!
Your NQ trading doesn't have to be limited to the short time you have before work you know.. Swing trade? I actually watched NQ yesterday and it reminded me of what bothers me about it.. Mostly due to me being mentally inflexible.. That grinding 3 hour PA.. where does that come from?? Then again it went to resistance and I should have just set alarm and moved on to other things. Did get short after hours.. Now THE hard part.. Since we are in May the idea is to hold for a while.