When it comes to trading the U.S. indices, I'm beginning to form the opinion that these are the only lines I really need on my US30, US500, and USTEC charts. The green MA informs me as to the direction in which I should be trading. The red lines offer an early warning as to when the intraday trend might be initiating a reversal in direction and work together with the green line to help confirm the intraday bias/sentiment; whereas the black line defines price waves for timing/pinpointing precise position entries and sometimes exits.
This will probably be the last trade I make in my Nadex demo account for quite some time... I am ahead of schedule with respect to the work I need to complete by September, and therefore decided to go ahead and begin live trading via my OANDA account rather than go the NADEX route. (I will work on the projects I need to do between 1:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, during which I have not witnessed a whole lot of activity taking place on my Forex charts.) I made an initial trade, a loss, to get my bearings; was charged a small financing fee; and then made a second trade to to recoup almost half of the loss from my first trade. Had I stayed in the trade, I could have recouped all of my loss, but at that point, I was still in the process of analyzing things and wanted to make sure I did not allow a favorable situation to turn against me. That analysis is now over however, with my five-minute setup now being perfectly aligned with my one-minute configuration, and my having concluded beyond any doubt whatsoever that for me at least, pinpointing position entries and exits absolutely MUST be carried out using one-minute charts. Though I do plan to "buy low and sell high," I think it is probably more appropriate to conceptualize my approach as "ride price upward as long as it continues to climb, and downward as long as it continues to fall." I often read about the necessity of changing one's methodology as markets change, but as long as up is up and down is down, I would expect what I do to continue working regardless, but time will tell (if it works at all). UPDATE: There we go. Hopefully nearly all of my trades will end with at least a slight profit from here on out, God willing... Now it's time for me to get some sleep!
I got messed over yesterday during the crazy fluctuations that take place at the turnover of the new 24-hour market cycle, which stopped me out of all three of my positions before hitting all three of my take-profit targets. So from now on, I need to either be out of the market at that hour or increase the size of my stop loss by about a factor of three... Starting with a little over a century balance and making 0.01 sized trades as a result, the average size of my gains per transaction are currently about 30¢, but I anticipate doubling this to approximately 60¢ once my regiment for entering and exiting positions and the precise manner in which I am interpreting the final configuration of my charts (which, to my surprise, trading my OANDA account in place of my NADEX account has led me to slightly modify in a number of ways) settles into an established routine, as occurred following my activity at the end of March and beginning of April. I will be truly disappointed in myself if I do not establish at least an 85% daily success rate. If this turns out to be the case, I might make a deposit to my balance in about a month so I can begin trading 0.05 sized trades given that, based on my Tickmill demo account, this would increase my typical take per trade to perhaps $1 to $5... This would make it theoretically possible to grow the account balance by at least $100 every week, so that by the end of the year, I should be on very solid footing and perhaps even making trades of 1.00 Lots, thereby generating hundreds of dollars per trade.
The switch from primarily trading Nadex 5-minute and 20-minute binary options to successfully trading a standard Forex account required adjustments to the forecast model that came out of the analysis I carried out on April 23rd—modifications that are still in progress. To reestablish the accuracy of my predictions, I had to go back to the higher time frames to get the bigger picture, or more specifically, I had to switch to 4-hour charts. From there, I translated the 4-hour setup to 15-minute charts, and it was this configuration I used to obtain the results reflected in today’s line graph: Having made adjustments after being stopped out of my first trade, I had to abandon only one other losing position after that: These trades were made in my Tickmill demo account, but given that I have only about $100 in my OANDA live account, I could only make two of the trades through my actual broker. So what I have to do now is translate the 15-minute graphics to my 1-minute charts so I can hopefully begin making repeated short-lived trades through OANDA at an extremely high success rate to eliminate the limitations a tiny account balance can put on the number of profitable trades I can execute each day.
The process of making the above transition required me to make a number of unprofitable trades (6) in order establish the proper settings for the necessary adjustments. Once the modifications were finished (as they now are) I made two pseudo swing trades (with a balance of approximately $100 I can only make two trades at a time) as dictated by my newly configured forecast model in order to get back my losses plus a little bit of profit on top.
law of diminishing returns....pareto effect... compounding only worksupto a certain level beyond which it becomes a foolish endevour
Turned 100 into 10K in 3months, then turned that into 3K in 30mins, been kinda sideways since and unable to get back in the game. But Given high leverage and a good trading method and no market change for the duration ( Was Choppy, turned to big Trends ), then think 100% per day initially, 500pt move the other day, rode that at $1 per point then 500% profit day #1 Better to put 100 at risk and aim for high returns and blow it than put 10K at risk aim for low returns and blow that, risk to return is just better if you don't blow it.
Previously (April 25th) I wrote that I thought it was probably more appropriate to conceptualize my approach to trading as riding price upward if it continues to climb and downward if it continues to fall as opposed to thinking of it in terms of swing trading or scalping. I also wrote that I would be truly disappointed in myself if I did not establish at least an 85% daily success rate, thinking I was finished with most of my analysis, given that my five-minute setup was at that point aligned with my one-minute charts. This was not the case however, leading me to conclude last Thursday that the switch from primarily trading Nadex 5-minute and 20-minute binary options to successfully trading a standard Forex account required additional adjustments to my forecast model. Having made these modifications, I executed two trades early Friday morning, at approximately 2:00 a.m. and 2:30 a.m. However, I could not “ride price upward if it continued to climb and downward if it continued to fall” in that I needed to get some sleep, which meant setting reasonable take-profit targets instead. Even with the limitations this placed on my trades, when I woke up later that morning I discovered that the two positions I’d entered ended up far exceeding the goal of 60¢ per transaction mentioned above, returning around $4 each, even though my lot size was still only 0.01—not 0.05. So theoretically at least, it should be possible to average much better than 1.8% profit per day without throwing caution to the wind. Nonetheless, I will have to wait a week or two before I can begin forming a realistic idea of exactly what my expectations really ought to be.