I trade from AZ and I love the hours because I have a built-in alarm clock that wakes me up with the sun. However, last night I dreamed I had insomnia. When I woke up I was wondering if I'd feel really tired all day. Picaso, my target with 1 lot is 1 pt a day and I have yet to achieve that. The reason why this is my target is because almost every day I do a bar-by-bar analysis after the close using a 5-min chart and no cheating. That means once a signal bar closes, I take the trade entry, stop and target and neither of those get moved until one or the other is hit. This bar-by-bar analysis has been averaging 2 pts a day with 1 lot. I figure that I should be able to capture half of that. So I will continue to whine. Isn't that what on-line forums are for? Trader198, I'm happy to see you're still alive and well! All I can say about those stop losses is to welcome them. Keep remembering what it felt like the day you traded this thing without a stop. It's not like ES; CL can run you $1000 or more per lot into ground very quickly. Think of small losses as big gains: You limited damage to your account, and you have the next opportunity to make a profit without having a huge hole to dig out of. It's like wearing your seat belt: You can walk away from an accident, while the person without it is thrown from the car and ends up dead.
thanks your encouragement. you are doing great. two weeks ago, I thought Crude formed a double bottom,I long big time while schizo shorted it big time, I was stopped out with predermined loss late, feel very embarassed about my naiveness, saw it went under my EMA, I started to short it, did not make much in the drop, but good enough to cover my costs and loss, in those weeks I focused on NG, thought NG was manipulated or pumped to high price, hold some overnight short and stay short several days with stop at recent high, made good money on NG. did not trade NQ/ES since writting blotters distract my trading, I try not to. just glad to find I can resist blotter writting now. also see youguys are doing really great.
I used to run the same task when I was a bit younger. In addition to looking at the setups, do you ever analyze prices purely by "feel"? For example, I would try to predict the next bar by analyzing the previous two candles. This actually helped me quite a lot.
Yes, I've been doing that a lot lately (much related to the convo we had recently). It's helping me distinguish the stronger setups from the weaker ones.
no idea if u are still anek the trucky hehe give u the benefit of the doubt price action: its not enough just to predict the next bar but you should picture the complete pattern in your head as in the whole 15 bars this way you can effectively place stops based on the chart pttern instead of price which is arbitartly. picture the next 5 bars or dont trade the pattrrn.money is made in how many bars u can sit with low risk to yourself.
No personal offense, but you obviously have a problem with reading comprehension. That wasn't the point at all. Neither NoDoji and I trade solely by predicting what the next bar is. We have a game plan whereby price target and stop are clearly known even before we enter the trade, and that requires more than just a few bars. But it's also important to develop a intuition for the flow of market rhythm. One way to aid in this effort is to engage in a bar-by-bar analysis and try to forecast the subsequent bar based on previous prices. Hope that makes sense.
This is helpful for me in cases where a setup is ripe for a measured move. I try to keep in mind how the chart will look once that move is fully made. It might help keep me in the trade without cutting a winner short. It worked very well for me in pre-market Friday when I took a breakout to the downside and kept itching to take profit early because I kept thinking (again, very dangerous, thinking while trading) that it had already fallen "too far" and that a measured move was too ambitious. This is definitely the plan. I use previous prices as levels to be tested, because price has memory. CL is especially clean technically. Every bar's level gets tested and you have to be careful not to get nervous and cut your winners short when that happens. The exception is when a real breakout gets underway; then the momentum carries the day and if you're brave and quick you can just jump in and ride the wave. These are the best when there is ample air space between a breakout price and the next S/R level in line.