I have glanced at this in the past, however further and thorough examination certainly wouldn't hurt. I will review. Thank you.
Certainly. Your best bet would be to fully understand that yesterday's range has little to nothing do with today's range. Many Wyckoff disciples think they can just draw a few horizontal lines and they will be able to trade that range the next day, The trouble is, that it's today range that is important-- not yesterdays.There is no attention paid to how to enter a trade and then manage the trade. Furthermore, there is no thought of how to limit losses or to let a trade run. This is actually the most important aspect of trading and is totally ignored by SLA "students" and "educators". Recently, I saw a post that described how you might be able to use a 3 pt stop and get a 5 pt gain. Huh Wah? Sorry, that don't feed the bulldog. You must have at least 9 points on a 3 point stop and much more if possible. This is where the SLA completely falls apart. No exploitation of winning trades and no consideration given to the percentage of capital that can be lost on each trade. Just stroking someone's ego by "being right". ====The "educators" and "students" post no trades---just pretty charts with lines. ===. What you need to define are the areas where todays support and resistance is based upon todays momentum, not yesterdays. That can only be done as the market noise unfolds, not before. Learn to identify market direction by current activity,lose a little when wrong, and win a lot when right. Numerous other more nimble approaches have since been developed since the time of Wyckoff. These methods look at the current activity and the current momentum, whether the activity is at or near yesterdays range or not. In addition, diagonal trend lines are much more important than horizontal lines which are static through time. --And most importantly never lose more than 2% of Total Liquid Net Worth on any one trade/idea. Good fortune in your endeavors.
And so it goes. The ET journal section is being held hostage by two incapable traders - Buy1Sell2 and Marketsurfer, and spawning the nextgen of trolls like kp. I was reading a long ago thread this afternoon OP'd by no_pm_please. It is a very good journal, not only because of the quality of the OP, but because of the interest level of the other participants and the aggressive moderation. If the journal section today was moderated as efficiently as it was then, ET could be an oasis on the trading forum stage. The @Magna who was moderating that thread would have told this Buy1Sell2 guy to take a hike, as his posts are consistently and constantly at odds and contrary to the journalists's stated intention and path of focus. I would remind @Magna that we today are as interested in keeping our journals as focused and clutter free as you were about keeping no_pm_please's journal focused and free of irrelevant and contradictory clutter. Buy1Sell2 should start a journal of his own pressing his views rather than being allowed continually to press them in other's work.
I have to jump in here and stand up for myself. My criticisms of 40D have all centered around his lack of complete transparency, which I believe I have proven sufficiently based on everything he has posted. He never posts charts with all entries and exits marked (drawing little shapes on a chart doesn't qualify when a screen capture of his own trading chart would be easier). He will post a trade blotter to show one entry and one exit for 40 points profit, but when he described his trading plan, he says he always takes half his position off at 5 points. The blotter of course doesn't reflect this. Then he states that when he scratches a trade for only 8 ticks or so, this doesn't even register to him, meaning it doesn't even count. Furthermore, he says that it is very easy to get at least 5 points from every single trade. Here is a the thing. To a new trader, a scratched trade actually means something, and getting even 5 points isn't easy. He shows one thing, but says he trades in a different manner. This might all work for him, but trying to learn from him is difficult because its a bit all over the place, and if he is trying to teach, then he should be a little more forthcoming with what he is actually doing. For the record, where he says his focus is, the extremes, really is where the juicy trades are, but his inability to show actual entries, all entries, all scratches, all little losses along the way is I think legitimate to concern/question. If he wants to call me a troll for pointing this out, so be it, but the onus is on him to back up his extraordinary claims that getting 5 points is easy and that almost every single trade he puts on is a winner. All I have done is shown links to what he has said at previous times and how it didn't match what he is saying in some other place. By my definition, this is not troll behavior but good fact checking and cross referencing of important information before arriving at an opinion, call it a "well informed" opinion. I am always up for re-evaluating my opinion, but this would require his willingness to share more facts, dare I say actual proof, so the ball is in his court.
There is nothing "basic" about doing that. There are _few_ who can read who is in control and many more who think they can. If you knew, you wouldn't be on a trading forum asking for advice. So we can deduce you have no strategy. Okay. So what next? Devise a profitable strategy or exit the business. How to use trading forums? So you are looking for ideas to use in developing your strategy. First step is to learn the difference between reliable and unreliable sources of information. Otherwise you pollute your mind and ruin your chances. Compare: nokomisjeff, Rearden Metal, garachen, rallymode with dbphoenix, NoDoji, marketsurfer If you can't see the difference and act accordingly this is not the business for you. Good luck!
How many here at ET do you think would find this to be a reasonable demand? Let's see how effective your little defense of yourself has been: Go back to your own journal and start posting, and let's wait to see if some other idiot comes along and offer to help you, (and by idiot, I mean someone like me, who, given your history here, should have known better, and not any of the fine people who tried to help you early on before you showed your true stripes) and then you go ahead and tell that person that the price of offering to help you is that said good Samaritan must be willing (as it is not a question of my ability to show or not show, but my willingness to do so) to show all of his/her entries, all scratches, all losses, all profits along the way. See if @NoDoji will post her daily blotter or charts showing all broker fills to your journal for the duration of her tutelage. How about @Redneck, I may be mistaken, but I seem to have a vague recollection that he has said his blotter is there for the asking - have you asked him? How about @KDASFTG? Will he open his financial life to you? @dbphoenix? @BhProp? @Handle123? Holy smokes, you have had a veritable "Who's who" of ET offer to help you free of charge to you. I'm the only one paying for it. I wish I would have had @monoid's good sense. Here's your old friend Ghost_of_Blotto - ask him for his trading plan and to send you his daily trades - Do you think he'd be willing to do that? In the end, the reason you want the info you want is because you want a "gimme" rather than lift a finger. If you were paying for the information it would have been a different matter, but we are freely sharing ideas here at ET. Anyone demanding the information you seem to feel entitled to is being extremely rude and should be ashamed. I have nothing to prove. You have mistaken your relationship to me in particular, and to ET in general. There is a reason that the only person (excepting this current post of mine) who has responded to your recent posts in another troll (remember your friend Ditch?) Eventually like finds like and what you are reaping now is the following you've sown. The irony of this situation you've created for yourself is that had you done just the smallest portion of the work suggested to you and posted any evidence at all that you were willing to do so, I would have followed you and then you could have asked anything you wanted to ask of me in private as others have. You'd know when I Take 5, take 10, and when I go gonzo. You'd understand that +2/-2 really is nothing to me because at the end of the week or the month they just net one another out - they are the equivalent to folding in poker: On those hands I either lose my ante or maybe just get my ante, or a portion of it, back; but if I don't ante to begin with, I will definitely miss the hands where I win the pot. I have trades I enter too early, exit too soon, and overstay my welcome. Those are all just mistakes - I don't mind them, but I see no reason to parade them around either. WTF would be the point? To make you feel better? What are you - a kindergartener who still believes that "we learn from our mistakes?" I never said I don't have losing trades I've always acknowledged such. What good would showing you all that do to help you learn to trade? I should just shut up now as nothing I or anyone could say to you will result in you comprehending the nature of this game and the nature of this forum. As it is, I've wasted far too many words and minutes on you. If you are hell bent on ruining ET for me, there is apparently little I can do to stop you. But I do hope others who might fall prey to you have the good sense to view your post history first and then think twice before reaching out to help you.
So first of all, I'd like to thank-you for replying. Next, I don't think you have invalidated my defense at all. I have asked some of these members personally what they roughly make, and since it was shared via PM, it would not be proper to state it here. Also, I have asked some of the other top members if I am legitimate with my concerns, and those who I've asked have stated that what is shown is incomplete. Based on their understanding of how that person trades (either you or Db), there should have been other entries on the chart, and why they were skipped is a mystery. As a generalization though, most seem to be making in the order of 5 to 10 points on a trade here and there, hardly pulling in 50 point trades. Furthermore, what many of these members do is quite different than what Db and you do. Heck, for a long time in the fall, I spent struggling with trying to follow "behavior", since I wasn't get much response in regards to what this looks like, and started going down the pattern route, very much like NoDoji who has everything worked out to the tick. So to be honest, with so many members doing it so many different ways, this has almost been a distraction. If anything, what I have been told is to not follow what you and Db do but some of the experts I have talked with. But my whole questioning has nothing to do with how much money you're making, it has to do with your entries and exits. NoDoji states flatly that he has lots of losing trades, and knowing that sometimes her stops are in the order of 5 points, I assume that along with some scratches and BE trades, there are also a good number of 5 point losers in there as well. This once again differs very much with what you state are your results. So I think you really are in a league of your own 40D and why its not fair to put yourself the same group of people as the others you mention. What they do is much different than what you do, and hence, whatever their advice is, is often in no way applicable if a person is to try and trade like you. Here is the point I keep trying to get across. Imagine you're trying to learn to teach someone to drive. You can get from point A to point B and think all you've done is turn the wheel and hit the accelerator. But the new driver has to learn to do 5 things at once. He has to watch his speed, he has to watch the lights, he has to watch for road signs, he has to watch for obstacles that might be on the road, but also stuff off to the side that might actually end up in his drive path like kids playing with a ball. If all you ever did to teach a new driver was to look forward and step on the gas, we all know how this would end up. What you call a simple scratch and hence don't even show is quite informative to a new trader. If you say its easy to get 5 points, does this mean that out of 10 entries, 9 always go to a 5 point target? Or out of 10 entries, are 3 scratches, which leaves 7, and then 6 go to at least 5 points? You see, all the things you do, but don't mention, matter quite a bit. So when you show a blotter with one entry and one exit for 40 points, without showing anything else that might have happened leading up to that trade, or any other exits for partial profits along the way, this greatly disguises what you are actually doing. I would have followed you and then you could have asked anything you wanted to ask of me in private as others have. I remember when I first asked you a question last February, over a year ago. I tried to PM you but since you had it turned off, I wasn't able to and had to ask in Db's Straight Line thread. So I'm not even sure how all of these guys are able to PM you to be honest. I would have loved to be able to ask you things directly before posting them here so that it didn't appear as if I was calling you out on it, but I had no ability to do so. I have trades I enter too early, exit too soon, and overstay my welcome. Those are all just mistakes - I don't mind them, but I see no reason to parade them around either. WTF would be the point? To make you feel better? What are you - a kindergartener who still believes that "we learn from our mistakes?" I never said I don't have losing trades I've always acknowledged such. What good would showing you all that do to help you learn to trade? See, I think this actually makes a world of difference as per my example above. When I go back to your charts you shared in 2013, with the exception of the first one where you kept shorting on the way up, every single one after that showed basically a perfectly entered trade with a nice profit. So it appeared as if out of 20 trades, 19 of them were winners! If to get these 19 winners, there were actually twice as many initial trades entered, but many scratched, this makes a huge huge difference, and to a newbie trader, seeing that a 2 point scratch does not affect your ability to re-enter moments later, even if in the same direction, I think actually goes a long way to helping that trader's mindset. Otherwise, what we have is a series of what appear to be perfect trades as if you really know exactly what will happen next, which of course is impossible. Seeing those mistakes as you call them, what you did that didn't work out, is just as important. It shows that you are following a trading plan and taking each trade as you should, and exiting if you have to. Its not even mistake, its simply a trade that didn't work. Why you are reluctant to show this I don't know. Your are very mistaken if you think that nobody would learn from trades that you put on which don't work. I should just shut up now as nothing I or anyone could say to you will result in you comprehending the nature of this game and the nature of this forum. As it is, I've wasted far too many words and minutes on you. If you are hell bent on ruining ET for me, there is apparently little I can do to stop you. But I do hope others who might fall prey to you have the good sense to view your post history first and then think twice before reaching out to help you. Honestly, I think that if anyone goes through my posting history, they will see that the questions I ask are legitimate. I am not hell bent on ruining ET for anyone, if anything, I am trying to make it better. I sincerely want to make this work, I really want to make this my primary source of income, and although you may call what I'm doing "trolling", I'm simply asking questions that are legitimate because after so much intense study, some things still don't add up. Thank-you for sharing that you do have many scratches, and you're right, at the end of the month it might not add up to much for you, but I think it still certainly makes a difference for a new trader to see what is actually necessary to make a profit from the markets day after day.[/QUOTE]
On the other hand, if you had done the testing over the past year instead of complaining about how no one would tell you what to do, you'd know where the entries and exits are. If gears can do it and lajax can do it and whoever else can do it, why can't you? Because you're special. This isn't just about Db and 40D; it's about every other competent, experienced trader who tried to help you and gave up because you are incapable of helping yourself. You do not "sincerely want to make this work"; you want to find someone who will tell you what to do. In real time. All day. Every day. For free. While you do nothing at all. And there is no way you're going to make this your "primary source of income" until you grow up. You're nearing middle age and cannot rid yourself of this entitlement conviction of yours. Are you going to spend another year whining about how no one will help you? Or are you going to do what other successful traders have done and show at least some desire and willingness to help yourself?
The incompleteness is in the one looking, not the one showing, I assure you. Now go away and bother someone else. Imagine you quit a job, and your old employer kept showing up while your out at the bar with your friends to complain about what a lousy job you did. Fine. I di d a lousy job. I left you feeling empty and incomplete. I'm a horrible person. I lie, cheat, and steal. I'd give you a full refund had you ever paid me a dime. But for crying out loud - I offered my help in good faith. It failed to benefit you. Why does this have to go on? I owe you nothing. You owe me an apology, but I won't hold my breath and I'd be happy if you would just put me on ignore so I can damage you no further.
I think in here somewhere is almost a gentle push of inspiration, but its difficult to find since its mixed in with so many assumptions that lead you to speak to me quite negatively. Oh well.