How does this 15 cent distance trading work when CL runs 1500-2000 ticks with out looking back? CL has huge runs quite often. It doesn't just gyrate back & forth in nice little increments. Cheese always says trade the gyrations. Just buy the bottom of the swing and sell the top of the swing. Uh.............ok. Sure. Sounds easy. Thanks. I wish I would've thought of that sooner. Why not just buy at the low of the day & put in a sell limit at the high of the day & go play golf?
Yeah, I love the after the fact analysis where you can see the pivot highs/lows and then retrofit the perfect entries/exits in the post-market analysis. "How about, setting a range of 15 points from the high or low as the "optimum" range for this market, and play with continuous reversals." Which high/low do you use when trading this strategy at the hard right edge (instead of when painting those perfect buy/sell signals on the static chart end of session)? "This gives the following net results: 0.84, 0.50, 0.56, 0.61, 0.03, 0.25, 0.57, 0.71, 0.28, 0.68, 0.37, 0.33. Your net total is $5.73, or $5,730 per contract less commissions. You are continuously in the market for the whole session, open to close, 09.00 to 14.30." Although I use a different strategy, I do agree that a profit similar to this on days with a decent range is quite attainable. "Now an aspiring trader could get real about what is actually happening in the market, and make a detailed plan to extract net gains from the daily session. Or she could disengage entirely from the market and go off looking for something called a "trend", and chatting all day in a skype room with others who have also failed to carry off truckloads of cash from the market daily." CLM had the opportunity to observe her on Skype between 8:40 and 10:00am ET trading in real time at the hard right edge, and achieving 80 ticks profit. Good Fortune had the opportunity to observe her on Skype between 1:00pm and the pit close trading in real time at the hard right edge, and achieving 161 ticks profit. The reason why she is able to do this in real time at the hard right edge, not after the fact looking at the end of day chart is because while she was an aspiring trader she finally decided to get real about what was actually happening in the market, and she made a detailed plan to extract net gains from the daily session. I challenge any CL trader here (especially Blotto) to post real time trade entries (with stops) based on Blotto's quoted strategy and choose turning points with the kind of precision alluded to in his after the fact analysis.
I should add that I have great respect for the work and ideas of Cheese and that my post was in no way a criticism of him, but of Blotto for presenting Cheese`s ideas as his own. I see now that he has added a reference to Cheese, AFTER I pointed it out. Sorry for polluting your thread, CLM, but I could not help it.
I am pleased to note that clmarathon has taken some good advice and has chosen not to trade today. I would have been disappointed to read that he had been induced to go short today and stopped out numerous times for a net loss. Hi NoD, In each case if you go to your 1 minute chart I have labelled the minute of each entry. You will see that the high / low which is being referenced occurred within a few minutes of the entry, and always 15c away. You will have observed yourself that it is possible to enter a certain distance from the highs or lows of a leg in the market. The 15 cents range on its own does not give you the trigger. If you have an indication that the up leg is ending and the down leg is taking over, then note the highest price achieved during that series of price schedules. A move X cents lower than this high is your trigger to sell short. The faster your timeframe or more accurate your triggers the closer this distance can be from the extreme of the move. In nearly all cases however some confirmation is required. The more "confirmation" the better up to a certain point when no extra information is added and one is then entering the move "late". So there is a number. In this example I'm using 15 cents. So your system indicates a sell trade. This could be because the market is in a time window for a turn. If the market retraces X cents from the high, you sell. This gets you in within X points of the start of the move. The market pulling back 15 cents at the apex gives you an extra piece of information which you can use to make your strike rate higher. If one drills down to a micro timeframe and examines what happens with the orders at the turning points of a market this makes sense. So you need to be expecting the turn. The 15 cents is the rule you use to set your entry - the amount of confirmation you need at the start of the opposite move. Stop can go on the other side of this (or if you prefer, reversing long with the trend after taking a counter trend short). If you look at the 1 minute and the timestamps I gave, you will see that each entry is 15 ticks away from a high or low which occurred in the prior 5 minute period. Today this number worked well for entering the moves with very little retracement against the initial entry. There was one move which did not follow through very far and a reversal signal was indicated shortly after. Exactly, precisely. Scooping out 10-20% of what was on offer today is very good indeed. Nobody is going to sneeze at making 100-150 ticks per contract per day, and kudos to anyone who is achieving this day in day out. The possibility for improvement always exists of course. I was using "she" for third person singular of indefinite gender - rather than writing "he or she", s/he or resorting to "they" which is the plural form and therefore grammatically incorrect. It did not refer to you specifically and was not intended as a pop at you. I do believe you have put together a plan to do well enough for yourself in the CL market. The nature of my objection to some of your comments to newbies is that what works for you will not work for them unless they learn for themselves, and the way you communicate certain concepts to them is potentially confusing to them. They need to do the work themselves, and ought not to be trading live when they don't yet have a methodology and confidence in place. I stand by my comments that encouraging someone who is getting haphazard results to trade in a live account more frequently is injurious to their financial health. Hopefully you can see that my issues with you aren't personal or malice based, but simply distaste for what I believe to be dangerous / incorrect advice. This is not a silly little game that anyone can or should play just because they happen to have an account. Money is very much tied up with the ability to survive (and will be more so in the future as various socialist 'aid' programs collapse as they well should). I don't like to see somebody lose their ass because they are encouraged to do what they should not be doing by people they perceive as more knowledgeable than themselves. My intent is not to be negative but to be positive by suggesting to newbies that they thoroughly evaluate everything and come to their own conclusions. If their trading is so shocking and haphazard as to put them at risk of losing money I suggest in the strongest possible terms that they do not trade. This isn't to put them off, but to save them financial and emotional damage which may ultimately prevent them from succeeding. It is very cruel to tell someone who is clearly guessing at entries that they have a valid technical edge and should continue to trade it. ET is not suitable for this due to the ability to fudge by editing posts in the several minutes permitted to do so. By the time the entry is called, 'traders' have the position in the money and the stop at 'break even' so they never lose. Also, to the second timestamping is required especially for a volatile market. How many times have I been tempted to do this for the right reasons to show what is possible and permanently shut up the detractors who post drivel or try to make everything personal. The sad truth is aside from showing that it can be done, making live calls has nothing to do with helping the newbie to find a path for themselves, or to think logically about the market. It does provide a powerful demonstration of who can do what, and by extension who ought to be listened to. Then again, so does the content of the argument for those sufficiently aware. I have done "live" with some people on more appropriate and accurately timestamped channels in the past. It is possible to correctly anticipate high probability outcomes with a very high degree of accuracy - however aside from giving belief that it can be done what I can do has nothing to do with whether somebody else has the self belief or the ability to run their own "four minute mile". A side question if you would like to answer it. You've banged your own head against it for long enough and seem to have got somewhere - have you not noticed yourself that very few are cut out for this, cannot or will not learn, insist on arguing or discussing irrelevant considerations instead of being focused on what they should be doing? 99% don't have what it takes to execute even if they were taught a profitable strategy. Two big bug bears for me - insufficient respect for the markets and the value of money to think that one can just wade in without thorough preparation. This includes anyone who encourages same, or lacks the honesty and candour to tell a newbie, when solicited for advice, that they ought not to be trading. Second bug bear - textbook terms and cliches with no application of thought - trend, noise and indecision being good examples. There is no such thing as noise. And "indecision" appears to be the catch all term for when a trader does not know what the market is doing or the market appears to be in a range. As for trend - aside from the transaction costs I would not be surprised to learn that the biggest single cause of the public losing money in the markets is their tendency to rely on the untested and unproven assumption that the market will continue in the direction it travelled in the previous N minutes/hours/days/weeks/months. The market may appear to be moving up because there is a trend. In reality, there appears to be a trend because the market has moved up. Whether it has moved up is insufficient information in itself to know if it is likely to continue moving up. To borrow an analogy from elsewhere: when a ship moves through the water it leaves behind it a wake. The wake is caused by the ship moving forward. However it may appear to the uninformed observer that the wake is pushing the ship. Another great cliche is the myth that a losing trader needs better discipline in executing a fundamentally flawed system. Actually, I could go on all day as the flawed assumptions which pervade mainstream thought, trading literature, and trading forums are numerous. Probably best that I don't. Continued success to you all.
You seem to have a problem with the word "trend". All it usually means to most people is that price is moving one direction or another. Nothing too exciting there. You could also call it a swing, gyration, etc. I don't understand why you think what you or Cheese is saying is any different from what the majority of traders try to do every day. If people aren't trying to capture the most points from each gyration or swing or trend or whatever you want to call it what on earth are they doing? (I'm talking the majority of daytraders; not scalpers & spreaders & whatever else). Usually when CL gives an indication to enter a trade because it appears it just might start a swing or trend or gyration in the opposite direction you can get in with a reasonable stop of 15 to 20 cents. That's just normal. It sounds like you & Cheese are just talking common sense. You wait for an indication price is going to move in one direction, you enter a trade, place a stop 15 to 20 cents away, and try to stay in it as long as possible to catch the meat of the move. Then try to do it again. I think that's the goal of most traders, so I don't see anything new or different in what you're saying unless I'm just not understanding it correctly.
Ok, I will give you some help. Create an Excel spreadsheet. Call it Trade log. Create the following columns. Day of week. Instrument traded. Reason for trade. Win. Loss. and Summary or thoughts about trade after it competed. Win and Loss can be numbers which you can sum up at end of day. So right after you enter a live trade, you should be putting down the reason for the trade. This reason should always be an edge based trade setup that you were waiting for. I know this sounds much like your journal here on ET, but the purpose of doing this in Excel is to allow you to keep track in real time of your trading. On ET, you can then summarize the day. Also, before you enter a trade, be willing to accept the fact that it could be a losing trade, and to be able to not move your stops and targets.
CLM's got an edge, no doubt. In the very brief time I've spoken with him, he's demonstrated a solid edge. That's the 1% inspiration. Now he just needs to train himself to trust it and ignore all the noise. That's the 99% perspiration.
OracleWiz, Thanks for the tips. I have nice excel spread sheets I keep meticulously for backtesting, forward testing and for actual trades. I always have. Date, time, signal type,Mae,Mfe, 7 different exit strategy pnls, and notes. I do the logging in a big notebook by hand during trading and update the excel sheets evening or the morning. On a different spreadsheet I have all the basic stats: number of trades, winners, losers, scratch trades. Percentages. Average win, average loss, risk/reward, expected gain, cumulative gain. Also, for backtesting and daily I take snapshot of each signal and save them for later review. I have hundreds of snapshots, just for this month. Why would I trade live If I would not have these ,and would not have tested it in Simu? May be it seems that way because of my results. But see, the problem is that the actual trade spread sheet and the signal spread sheet are much different in size. I am not taking the trades, and If I take them I micromanage them. That is why this journal exists. To improve that. If the et journaling is detrimental to my success I will stop. I did not want an ego trip, just a new angle to kick me out of the same track: spending countless hours on research and not executing properly. But ammo is correct he sees the problem and need to work on the solution to get the ego out of the way . Which is what Nodoji said taking more and more trades to get to the mechanical stage. Laissez Faire, Thanks for your contribution, it is not polluting but preventing others to pollute it. I like cheeseâs posts on psychology issues, but I did not read about his strategy yet. After you guys quoted the other guy, although I have him on ignore I had to check what he was posting in my thread. I am usually polite and thought I told him nicely to fuck off, but now he is back promoting himself. Is he looking for customers? Is he a wannabe snakeoil vendor? If he is really that great as he and his charts try to suggest he can do two things: start his own thread and/or start posting in the CLredux thread live. He can get the respect of pros there. I still have him on ignore, but unfortunately, the ET notification system is such that I get an email that he posted. And also, as the thread starter I need to know what is going on in the thread. So I decided that if he keeps posting here and not in his journal, I have to close my journal. Yes, we talked with NoDoji on skype not only once, and hope that there will be other occasions. She is a real trader, who has reached a very high level of her art, scalping. What I took away from the session was not the amount of ticks or how she did it , but the mind set as she did it. The focus, and the ease how she get in and out of trades. No screwing around with the signal: no questioning: Is it a real signal? Should I filter it? Should I take it? What if it is a loser? etc.etc. As a matter a fact I just had a signal soon after we started talking, and I told her that is a long for me and I would enter here, and as we were watching the price (about 30 sec) and talked about where I would put my stop etc, the price broke out. She was already in because she also had a signal at a bit higher level than me and she took it unlike me. Of course when she asked why did I not take the trade, I told her that I was focusing on talking to her but that was just probably an excuse. Anyhow, there is not much point to prove here who can get out what from whatever market. It is possible to extract lots of points from any volatile market with different methods. Let it be the cheese holy grail, or NoDojiâs discretionary scalping grail. One has to find the one suits for him or her. (I am getting too philosophical again too early in the morning thatâs not good for trading or coffee.)
No problem. What I would suggest to anyone who moves from sim to real money trading for the 1st time is to expect to lose money starting out, since you are now dealing with the 75% of trading that is not based on a having an edge. Yes, most newbies think that having an edge is 90% of trading, in truth, its only 25%. Next is money management, and psychology of dealing with fear and greed.