This is a PLAN in a Nutshell for ES. !. The ORB: Forget what happened overnight if you use this as the start of the day at 0935. 2. Momentum then kicks in: If the evil whipsaws do not show up. 3. If the above are smiling at you, stay with the direction and let your guardian angel (the 20) guide you until #4 takes over and nullifies all the above. 4. The DC: A reversal signal that tells you the trend has possibly reversed. A DC is a double cross where both the trendline and the 20 are crossed to opposite direction. Other tactics to watch (tactics, NOT a change in strategy) are milking retraces and or the hooks for add-ons. For reversals aside from the DC you can obey the 1-2-3 and the 2 bar reversals. (when trading reversals, it usually requires you to give up on approx. 3 handles to get a CONFIRMED possible reversal, ) That in a nutshell is all you need. Casually watch the ES and a movie if desired, no need to be glued to the screen. The KEY is going for less ticks with more cars. Trying to get max ticks out of any instrument on fewer cars is a fallacy because the market will not allow you to drain it day in and day out, all you will do is frustrate yourself in to believing you suck. Without confidence in your realistic method you have nothing. Confidence is what separates the winners from the losers. Confidence, lased with a dose of courage works. Ok, crawling back into the pigpen for awhile. have a great holiday season guys.
What sort of time frame are you trading, and for what sort of move are you hunting? If you are hunting for points or 00:30:00 or 01:00:00 trades, I have no thoughts. (Except to question your sanity, which if you've been here since '06 and made 1500 posts, you're apparently doing pretty well...). BUT! If you're a true "scalper" -- going for a tick or two at a time in 1-second-to-10-minute trades -- outside of that lunchtime Doldrums (or "Horse Latitudes" of old... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_latitudes ) you *should* have no problem peeling off quick roundtrips through both sides of the day. The *key* is whether you have enough wash (price motion back-and-forth) to give you that tick or two per your entry, whether long or short. When the pond is flat, it is a *bitch* to trade. (And *dangerous*!) {Sorry -- it sounds like you know that already. Sucks, right?} Suggestion? Put on the ol', not-so-much-used ATR study on a 1-minute-candle chart, and stay very wary when the ES motion leans below 0.50 (less than half a point) per minute. Boom: you're golden. If the ATR is >.5? Start hunting. "Good trading is like picking up nickels and dimes off the sidewalk..." Think of the ATR as your Pocket-Change Radar...
I completely agree. Since the Syria(non??)-crisis, in response to recognition of "eat-the-clock" action in the indexes I revived many scalping methods. I call the methods "Wimpy" in honor of the Wimpy character of Popeye fame. "I'll gladly pay $4 for a $20 bill or more right now." While Eat the clock tries the patience by practicing tick-tricks and painting false proof of price levels, Wimpy trades, up and down. ATR is used for sizing. The machines are dumber than rocks if they think a scalper can't/won't see a big one.
First off, thank you AustinP and Bighog for responding to my thread i know you both are the real deal ! I appreciate the responses. 1) I'm not struggling by any means. Wedn, Thurs, and Friday I made about 20 ES points. Granted thats not a normal 3 days for me but the movement has been great. 2) I was looking to suck more points outta the ES by getting better at the afternoon session, but I am going to take some of the advice from you vets and not bleed it dry. I was mainly looking at getting more efficient. Primarily b/c I want to quit my evening job soon and go back to doing this fulltime (I work for the gov't). Tried that in 2008, but lost $30k my first year (newbie). Fast forward to 2013, and there's a very slight chance I could make 6 figures this year thus far trading smaller size (comparatively speaking) and I still don't consider myself holding my winners to maximum efficiency but Im researching and getting better. After looking at my pnl's, its not worth me trading the afternoon session most days right now, and I was hoping to get better or look for other markets, or just hang it up and not bother unless I see a good trend or 1230ish reversal. I will stick to what works. And what works is a pretty consistant morning session. I don't tick f*ck. I like to catch reversals and bigger moves. I take on trades looking for at least 3 point targets.
How many are paying $3.50+ in commish and making money on a tick or two target? I'm guessing almost no one. That type of trading is often theoretically profitable yet in practice a dead loser. Please chime in if you are making a living trading that tightly. It will interest me, and I suspect quite a few others, if in fact traders are making this style work consistently.
If you're aiming for points and nabbing 6+ a day? You're doing a crap-ton-load better than me. I'm leaning back into scalping again -- I've made index option spreads The Big Thing for the past year, and have things nearly where I want them, so it's time to return to the scalping fold..... My old standard for A Good Day was 6 points, *usually* a single tick at a time. Now, that made for impressive records ("Ooo! Ooo!18 of 20 positive trades! Aren't I *smart*!") but *really* crappy commission totals (figure 6points x 4 ticks x in/out = 48 trades/day. If you're nabbing 6 points via a full point per trade? You're (obviously) paying a quarter of the commissions I do, and you're KILLING IT. So, Hat's Off! T.
Wish I was nabbing 6 + a day. Last 3 days were outliers. Friday morning I actually caught 6 points exactly on the morning push. Its not always that easy !!!
Forget about the pre-market and afterhours, imagine the market opens at 9:30 EST and that's the beginning of the day. It's really easy for the market to breakout when the range is miniscule, as it expands, it gets harder unless you get a trend day which is the exception not the rule. Right now, right at the open, this is the easiest time for the market to make new highs and new lows, what is commonly known as establishing it's daily range. Now assuming you did your homework, studied the bigger picture, as the day's range is established you need to determine if technical damage to the bulls or bears was done, meaning the range could expand even further or if it's simply testing boundaries to play ping pong. Do not use anything else forget about market internals, none of that bullshit works. Don't forge to notice fake outs particularly during the first 30 min of trading. Morning is for initiating, afternoon is for managing, on average, if you did not make your dough during the morning, hang the gloves as the afternoon it's inferior by nature of mathematics. Use the afternoon strictly for adding to winners or trailing your winners. The rest is price action.
Here is my problem with the math: It seems to allow for exactly zero losing trades and zero scratches and you don't talk about where you stop yourself out when they go south. I don't get it. Nothing about this coincides with anything that I see in the market everyday. No losing trades? No scratches? No predefined stop? Just win, win, win, win, win 24 times in a row and then do it again the next day. I know you say 18 out of 20 winners but the math does not reflect that ... it calculates all winners. Yes 18 out of 20 winners is incredibly impressive but somewhere in the math you need to include not just that you lose on those two trades but how much you lose. How do you avoid scratches? Are there any scalpers who don't scratch out? Is it possible that the two non-winners includes scratches? It certainly does not seem so. I've never encountered a trader before whose plan assumes 90% winners or who traded for a single tick from upstairs or that did math -- even the roughest back of the envelope math -- in any manner similar to what you have here. What am I missing?
Swan: I won't attempt to explain to you how scalping can be a verifiable, profitable technique. For most it is as weisman called it, tick f*ck. IMO, that discrediting description comes from not having an understanding of how the trades are constructed and managed. For a smattering of insight, I've attached a rather old article. It's at least 7 years old and I have no idea if the setups still work as described. It remains in my eLibrary however, and nowadays is widely available with a simple search. The point is, scalping requires a different type of setup and management construction. Most can not or will not think of a valid setup in terms of time, let alone spend personal time analyzing for worthwhile outcomes.