or just thin markets ? news ? no position .... time to sleep as I was up most of night trading gold and a tad of fx
There has been talk of ECB buying of USD along with chinese USD buying. I was short with a tiny position from just above 1.3430 yesterday, and had a target of 1.3291 initially .... cowardly I adjusted the target to 1.3370s this morning which got filled early while I was napping in between watching markets and feeling sick. I got to blame that one on being up most of the night and the flu I have been carrying for the last few days, as well as not being able to rid myself of the scalping urges because of - well, probably because I scalp a lot more than I trade positions. It feels a little more like Christmas now though, although I don't know if it was too much air-condition or some virus with the turist inflow. I don't think I have much more than 50% right on 100 tick moves, which kind of says I have no real clue ... but then it all comes down to the proper money and risk management - which is improving for positions as I'm progressing. On the other hand - why does a position need to be 100+ to be a "big move" ... ? It's kind of silly. I think 30+ is a great move too, so I will need to adjust how I trade - maybe going towards the "let half the profits run"-strategy or something. If I get some free time I will run some practice-positions on playback of historical data - the problem is I know the latest 18 months of data pretty well, so I need to get use some older 1-minute data instead of tick data - which is still ok because I watch mostly charts for positions anyway. It's a lot easier to take a bet on the EURUSD than the USDJPY lately, but the intermittent EURJPY raids have been a little noisy - but also being a catalyst for bigger moves on both USD-pairs.
I'm out for the rest of the week. Hit my quota again for the rest of the month shorting the Aussie. I may play a bit because I'll get bored, but done for the year. I'm going to have to make a trip to Australia one of these days and spend some of this money there to thank them for their currency falling.
As I mentioned in my post last night, whenever I leave a limit order to get out of a position, the market just zooms thru it. Fortunately (bad bad) I didn't leave a stop order at 3435 to cover my EUR H05 futures thinking that it was too close (might as well get out than let them have the satisfaction of running it) and also had a feeling that any attempt to rally would be sold off. However, I left a buy order to cover at 3353 overnight. This morning a little voice (one of them) whispered to cancel the order but the chicken won out and got covered. Not bad (81 points) but could have made my day/week spectacular if I had listened to the pig instead, this time. Also this morning before 8:30EST, pig kept yelling "short the Cable H05 Futures NOW! it's up big and they are bidding 1.9435...you Can't Lose!!" yet again chickens rule thus inaction. I'm paralyzed now -- can't seem to buy the dip, sell the dip, or scalp. Why can't I sit with a position when it's going my way, damn it? It's one thing to get the direction right, position right, but another to make the best of it. I hope one of these days I can learn to float with the markets than sit in its way. One thing I'm happy about today is that I didn't try to buy the "many" dip-- not even once. I understand why most trade with systems. You don't have to listen to little voices in your head. They always seem to start a brawl the last second and the wrong one keeps winning. I've been telling myself for the past 4+ years that I should develop a systematic approach to trading but haven't seen any one of those projects to completion. Could it be that I enjoy the torture?
I exactly know what you're talking about. This is an exceptionally high range day. To be able to milk this all the way, you had to endure 40+ ticks pullups. But if you did this on regular days, then you would have given back all of your profits. Best way to get over this is to backtest your ideas, find the middle ground where you both make money and feel comfortable. It's very easy to look at a chart and see what you want to see as the charts form real-time.
I have seen on some of these charts the ability to see stochastic slows.. would anyone be so kind as to point me in the right direction on a formula for calculating this? I want to incorporate this into a program of mine but I cannot find any clear cut formulas for its calculation....
Are you talking about formulae for slow/fast/full stochastics oscillators in general? I have seen them in many books etc. ..may be the follwing link might get you started... http://stockcharts.com/education/IndicatorAnalysis/indic_stochasticOscillator.html