Those of you who are interested in trading ranges should make a point of reading 40D's posts on his NQ trade today in his journal and Schaefer's posts on same in the TL thread. We may very likely wind up in the same sort of range tomorrow.
There are many threads about you. Even so, you remain a hamster in the same wheel you were in a year ago when you couldn't distinguish between a range and a trend. I said at the time that unless and until you learned how to make that distinction, you would not progress. And you haven't. Just recently I suggested that you find 100 ranges and analyze them so that you could break out of this cage you've built for yourself. But did you do it? No. So you remain in the same place. Only considerably poorer. You may find somebody to take you by the hand and show you tick by tick how to trade during one or two or ten mornings. But it will have no lasting effect, or perhaps no effect at all, because you cannot trade independently, and you won't trade independently until you do the work, which in this case begins with being able to locate and define a range. That thread? That was 13 years ago. I don't trade that way now because it doesn't work now. I've adapted to the changes that have taken place since 2002. But you won't adapt. You can't. Because you seek to follow and copy rather than do your own work. I'm hardly the only one to point this out. At least a dozen reputable traders including NoDoji, 40D, and Gringo have all said the same thing. But it's water off a duck's back. Why? I have no idea. But your continued difficulties are not my doing, nor are they my fault. Do the work.
It's hard to give advice, and know for sure what will work for someone else. I can only refer to my own history. And that was that I felt a lot of fear when I had uncertainty of what to do in my system (in fact initially I didn't have a system fully worked out). Then later when I did, I still had some fear, because I hadn't proved that the system worked in demo for long enough. I went in circles. So many circles it is dizzying thinking about it now, so much time wasted fooling myself that I was working on it, when really I was avoiding the hard work. Eventually I got down to writing the system, testing it, improving, test, practice and that was a far more productive circle to be in. I was an idiot and lazy for a long time. (Anon) Your experience is typical except that you came out the other side. Most don't. They find no excitement in putting together a trading plan, no glamour, no opportunities for heroics. They consider observation, hypothesizing, backtesting, forwardtesting, and even simtrading to be drudgery. Real-time trading with real money is where the action is, so they'll spend twenty years or more trying to achieve without a trading plan what they could achieve in months if only they'd learn to crawl before spending hundreds of dollars on running shoes and trying to compete with professionals. It's a mystery. No one believes that he can play championship tennis or golf without ever taking a lesson, that he can become a concert pianist without ever doing scales, that he can become a professional chef without knowing the first thing about food chemistry. But one can become a professional trader simply by buying or shorting what seems like a good idea and hoping for the best. It should come as no surprise that so few are able to make a go of this.
Excuse me for interfering in a discussion where I desire no quarrel, but I believe DbPhoenix has plenty of threads discussing his techniques out in the open, at no charge or hidden charge that I'm aware, yet your Price Driver concept seems to be guarded by the Illuminati, therefore, I find your post above quite hypocritical.
I like that. Have you summarized what those general differences have been? If not, would you care to?
Oh Jeez, I wouldn't know where to start. Three bubbles and a burst tend to modify market behavior. Fortunately, along the way I had some epiphanies with regard to auction markets and auction market theory, in which Wyckoff had a hand (don't worry, he washed it afterwards). Now I'm far less rigid about entry triggers and stops, which can change several times during a session, which is why I can't satisfy those who need to know exactly what to do where and when. Right now, for example, we're testing the upper limit of the early morning range before we broke thru to 54. Whereas before I might have exited here and looked for a reversal, I'm now able to focus on traders' behavior to see whether I should reverse or hold on for a test of the morning's high.
Coming back to this, I suppose that one of the more important things I've learned since then, which has nothing to do with the changes in the market since '02 per se, is to "judge the market by its own action", specifically the dynamics of ranges and trends and the characteristics of each and what each can do for me, but also the messages that the market sends repeatedly throughout the session with each lower high or higher low or double top or bottom as well as those moves which kick me out. If for example I sit and mope over being kicked out rather than focus on why I got kicked out and what if anything I ought to be doing about it, I miss out on a lot of profitable trades. Which is probably more than you wanted to know, but there it is.