Yes - I have a love-hate relationship with stops. On one hand they are a safety net, on the other hand, they reflect your anxieties (I don't want to get hurt - let's make it a 1 pt stop). The market is extraordinarily nimble at profiting from your anxieties! Anyway S @ 1042.50 C @ 1040.50 + 2pt based on the observation that the first big puke doesn't always show the LoD. Lows tend to be retested. If I had more patience to wait for a strong volume bar (10.30, vol 4070) I could have gotten a better short entry. There is a lesson in that.
I figured that with two peaks yesterday at abt 1050, 1051 was enough room before I was officially wrong abt my prognostication. Too obvious a stp point on too obvious a day to go short I suppose. Glad you made $
S @ 1042.75 C @ 1040.00 + 1.75pt Using training wheels at the moment with profit tgts. When I feel more confident, I may try a more discretionary exit again. ES @ 1039 ... hmm Oh well
Realised from my last post that I better learn the lesson of the AM. Mkt gave a nice fat vol bar... took the bounce. B @ 1039.25 C @ 1040 + 0.75pt Signal : (12:08 vol 4296)
Cutten, Thanks for your comments. It's not that I don't value the long trade - I have been toying with a liquidity based system, trying to make a global equity mkt timing system. It's challenging, but the system often calls for being in Tbills for weeks. Not very interesting. I am curious abt scalping though - so hence my experiment. btw - I very much enjoyed your post a while back abt taxes.
... can't understand how expiration day behaves. I guess that with all the gamma trading by option guys going on, it should be a very tense tape that doesn't gap, but trends with a lot of minor retracements. If that's so, trend following with wide stops should be the way to go ... That being the case, maybe the rest of the day should be a tight tense decay into the high 1030s.
Day 1 Trades +2.0 pt -0.75 pt -3 pt +2 pt Total : +0.25pt less 0.48pt commish = - 0.23pt Day 2 -1.75pt +2.0 pt + 1.75 pt +0.75pt Total : +2.75pt less 0.48 pt commish = + 2.28pt Week total : +2.05pt
yeah right. try one of these http://biz.yahoo.com/c/e.html http://www.nasdaq.com/econoday/calendar/US/EN/New_York/year/2003/month/10/day/20/daily/index.html
...please permit me to offer you some most heartfelt advice. If you haven't already done it, read Mark Douglas' book "Trading in the Zone". Take his advice and trade a profitable mechanical system until you have faithfully taken 20 trades in a row (I'm still trying, haha!). Reread Douglas. While you are bored to death doing this, watch the market as if it were a natural phenomenon (like birds, say), and try to sense its rules. Reread Douglas. Successively code and test what you think those rules are (the market, not the birds), gradually building up a set of statistically reliable rules. Trade those rules. Reread Douglas. Then be amazed when one day reliable intuition STARTS to come. IMO, the growth of intuition is nurtured by the calm of statistical successes, not by random learning through anxious hit-or-miss trading. (The vile hated detested abhorred reprehensible evil misanthropic misbegotten miscreant Phoenix meant something like that when he used the magical word "plan", but he's one of those idiot mechanical traders who makes money with no intuition at all, so what does he know?) (Did I say "reread Douglas"?) Best regards. - Mike