My stop is a fixed $20 stop with the micros. And good thing today too! Wow, what major tankage! I missed the short.... ;( Too busy doing other stuff.
Keeping the "open mind" idea going, I tried more longs today off the bottom of this market swoon, and I got over 2% growth again today. The irony, of course, is that it was the biggest down day in 3 weeks. So clearly I am not so much a "bear" as I am a "contrarian," LOL. I am feeling great about the trading and the outlook of . Knowing I will write something here most days has really helped me be more selective than when I can just secretly kill my own account by over-leveraging, moving stops, or other such insanity.
great journal you have going. stay the course and do your own thing. it's important to find your own way and it looks like you have! well done sir one time i was probably whining to a trading buddy of mine and replied, "it doesn't matter WHAT the market does, it only matters what YOU do."
I know it is off-topic, but I also trade FX. And I have an account with ZuluTrade that is also very public. I share this only to show you the kind of discipline I am trying to have. With this FX account I am only trading ONE position at a time and have a crazy tight 20 pip stop. So far so good. Check it out! https://www.zulutrade.co.uk/trader/395384/trading It was my early success with this FX account that persuaded me to try again with my micro futures account on AMP and start this journal again. Unless you are a top-notch trader with overpowering wins, it has to be all about the consistent small gains. I think the account blowouts that all traders go through are because they (1) over-leverage by trading too large, (2) repeatedly add to losers, (3) don't honor their stops, (4) trade at the wrong times like during news events and during light-volume periods. Stay alive and trade smaller than you can. It is working for me right now.
I use Multicharts. Not sure why the charts look ancient to you. I also have a brand new free SierraCharts installation through AMP but have not yet set anything up. I wanted to try SC for the ability to do VWAP bands. I want to try those after I have seen several other traders use them successfully.
Great question. Same reason I prefer NQ and YM over the ES. It's all about the granularity: For approximately the same average daily range dollar-wise (NQ bigger and YM about the same), the NQ and YM have MORE TICKS. Therefore, I have more opportunities to enter and exit. This also means I can take a lot more limit order entries and exits. On the ES/MES, I might completely miss an entry and the average slippage will be bigger when I trade. The NQ is a wild bucking bronc. If you trade the ES, then the YM is your best bet to try. They are a bit more correlated. Just try YM or MYM for a couple days and you will see what I mean.