You need to free your mind. Stop focusing on the front month. You are trading futures, so look into the FUTURE. I am a bit down on my technique this current cycle, because I should be scaling into September, not March. Oops. I may take a hit on this current swing, but we shall see. The foundation is still there for a long outlook. Today was a great example though of looking for certain profit points, in NQ. The thing has a 90 point range. Surely when that 90-point range was hit, going long for 20 points would yield profit, yes? I was long at top of range unfortunately for today because I have a different metric in mind, not an intra-day scale of things, but longer-term, so I sit on hands and suffer for a bit. If I can get out of the March contracts with profit I will be shifting my attention to Sep and Dec contracts, because I trade the FUTURE! Wheee!
Thankyou everyone for your input. I need to have a stop for myself and my personality. Today is a good example... I traded from 6:30 AM - 9:30 AM PST and hit 53 Points profit, trading 2 NQ contracts and stopped for the day. Had I continued I would have take additional trades and ended up losing 16 points net. At one point I would have been -48 points. So, for me this works. May not be for you. But that is the great thing about this business, we can approach it any way we want. happy trading to all
Interesting topic of discussion. I do see the argument on both sides of the coin. If we have an edge, then take every trade and let the big picture unfold on a weekly and monthly basis. I've done that and seen its results play out. However, what if one's goal is to consistently take profits nearly every day, albeit smaller ones, well, I've done that too and I must admit that I can grow my account much better and consistently with smaller daily profit targets and then stop. Yes, I've definitely seen where I could have continued on and made much more, conversely I have seen where I would have given back many many days of profit by continuing on. After 15 years of trading, I tend to lean more with taking a daily profit target and closing the book on the day and go for a run. As my account grows from that I've increased my contracts appropriately. But that's just me. My dad used to tell me as a successful businessman that "having a little of something is better than %100 of nothing." Psychologically that works for me.