Hey Anek, once again thanks for all you've done. Could you say more about your thoughts relating to waiting for candle closes versus not waiting for closes? The way I see it, the tradeoff is that while the reward is higher because you enter earlier if you dont wait for a close, your accuracy will decrease because you have less confirmation (unless the argument is that closes aren't confirmation.) Also, I suspect that the stop would have to be higher in general, but Im not sure. Prob depends on the reasoning for the play and what it takes for it to be proven wrong, like always. An important question is, if we aren't waiting for a close, how do we know when its appropriate risk/reward wise to enter and exit? According to the log from friday, it *seems* like you answered this question with 'local support and resistance.' (I could be completely wrong.) For example it seems like the reasons from your entries were things like TL hits with the trend, resistance becoming support and vice versa, rectangle boundary hits, and local swing high/low hits. I put your friday trades from the log on a chart, and wrote some questions. Your text from the log I wrote in the red boxes, my questions are in the blue boxes. It got pretty cluttered so after this post I'll make another with a cleaner attachment that has the trades on it w/o my comments in case you want to respond, or someone else who see's something I'm missing or thinks there's another reasoning for the trades can comment.
Affirmative. Been doing that for a while... Would you agree with my statement then that screentime > backtesting for this type of method? Thanks bmw as well...
Alright one more about trading chop... done for the day for looking at charts. Have way too much hw...
Herbert... my chart doesnt answer all of your questions but you arn't recognizing the channel. He was taking trades off of the extremes... Anek uses more info than just what has been presented in this thread as well... so don't mistake all of his trades or his different styles for somehting you should be doing.
H, You must have a point of reference of some sort. In my opinion, the high and lows are more important than the close. Notice, that the magic tick involes 1 tick above the high or low of the breakout bar, not the close. Concepts like this should enhance your trading. Don't get frustrated, until you have at least 6 months of screen time, and this is full time, not on and off, I don't expect any newcomer to get a solid feel for scalping with the trend. It literally took me years but unfortunately I did not have anyone to teach me the right path. In contrast, all I had were books full of crap with charts infected by lagging indicators. Most of your chart annotations are logical as to why I took some of the plays. The holding so long question was an error in my trading, I still make mistakes on a daily basis. In retrospect I can find great reasons for why price went up or down but in the heat of the moment in real time, sometimes eventhough I know exactly what must be done, the reaction is not fast enough. This is something that I never stop working on. As far as the exits, I monitor the tape on a consistently basis, when big money is dumping at market around resistance points, if you are long, it's a given to get out too. Reverse for when you are short, you see huge market orders at support, if short, cover immediately. Highs, lows, support, resistance, trendlines, patterns and the tape are the only technical analysis tools you will ever need. Anek
For anyone interested, just dusted off "Getting Started in Technical Analysis" from Jack Schwager and it has a lot of the concepts that Anek discusses - patterns, h/l's, avging up (called pyramiding - author is a proponent of adding equal units with certain in-the-money trade conditions), confirmations, failures, etc... it also contains discussions on indicators, so i dont think Anek's real name is Jack Hope this helps
So, for example, if you are generally using a 2 point stop in the ES, you would not enter a trade unless the next significant resistance was say 3 points away? Could you give an example on a chart? Thanks.