True but it's not so sexy when you are constantly making losses when you tp too late or cut losses too soon. LOL Thanks for your advice though. Going back to my previous question, do you know any other market information material that I should get myself familiar with besides the pre-market charts for trading Crude oil CL? Thanks again.
Okay you lost 20, first thing is to work out, if this is a big deal or a random chance coincidental blip, before panicking. Questions :- 1. how long have you been trading this method ( days is fine with me ) 2. What's your average profit / loss rate ? If you've been trading it for 10 days say and your average profit is >10 say 11, then you've lost 2 days of average profit, I'd put it down to a blip and ignore and continue. ( tweak your numbers to suite ) If not, continue to listen to the negative A holes!!
I have no idea at all, that's completely foreign to me. I have never traded crude oil/commodities...Forex...etc misc stuff. I have no idea how they act and respond like to various conditions and factors. I only know Options on stock ETF's.
friday is frustrating...for range traders. though still money to be made on long side despite.. any long buying 9:45, 11:45, &1:15, made money provided they got out
IMO you need to remember higher timeframe context and stop trading in garbage areas. Before the session even starts have an idea of where KEY levels will be. If its no-mans land go back months prior and find the key levels THEN. Otherwise use fib extensions to have a rough idea of where other traders might react and/or if you really don't have anything substantial do not trade until you do. You need to understand that support and resistance, ie levels most definitely do matter. Trendlines in the middle of a ho-hum zone at a small timeframe is just going to chop you up. Stop doing it. Zoom out, consider the bigger picture. You're definitely overtrading. Think about how irrational the above is. You already pointed out that the times you took profit the trade will keep going in your favor and the times you didn't it turns back and hit your stop. By definition if the above were true then taking profit in all cases would have avoided your stops being doubled back on and letting profits run in all cases would have resulted in atleast some percentage continuing strongly in your favor. You're reinforcing irrational thought professes based on negative experiences. The market doesn't know where your position even is. It may have an idea based on larger traders knowing typical entry and stop locations but it doesn't know "Eddie is gonna let profits run this time - lets screw him."
While I definitely understand why going long and/or expecting a reversal seemed alluring to people on Thursday and Friday, the market was in a generally strong downtrend. Taking counter trend trades would have made you less money than taking high probability trades like shorting at a key level after rejection. Why overcomplicate this?
I took some longs on Friday and made money. To the OP, your chart sucks but I don't want to post my chart so I made a minor correction on your chart. Using this minor correction, allows you to see that on this Friday price was trading in a channel. It does not always trade in a channel, but it was. So now you can see 1 channel trade that you could have taken short.
Ok i am just looking at a 10 minute frequency chart on finviz and i see two short trades in hindsight. 10:30 AM and at 2:30 PM were breakouts of horizontal support areas. Chop the rest of the time. Maybe only for a few points...i dont know. I would say that breakouts of established horizontal support areas are more bearish on a downtrend day than breakouts of sloping support areas . This is a trend day that is recognizable by day traders, so I read. Wait for chop to end and take the resumption of trend on the rare breakout from big support areas. I remember reading a 2008/9 thread where traders were pulling over to the side of the road and ONE guy was killing it and, another trader confirmed that he was good and swung a big dick in high vol. Similarly, where are all the guys who were bitching of low vol. ( .20 daily swings) in CL. 18 months ago. If they were killimg it in this CL vol. they would be dancing on ET. Crickets..