Price action and pace has slowed down , so system 2 of the brain ( rational one, lazy one) is saying you have 144 ticks , time to chill on Friday afternoon. System 1 side of the brain ( impulsive one, the one who executes trades) is not happy with system 2 for not responding. Neither of them helpful alone. We need them both to work as ONE. Which system get more weight at a particular time comes with practice. Ideal is to have them both working at a level so that there is no arguing between them. Long 98.24 on pull back after 98.30 was taken out. Out some 98.46 . stop loss 98.18 . target yesterday close of 98.66 area or beyond.
Why I only trade Crude Oil? This in response to a question i got. My trading method based off Volume bars which identify MOST IMPORTANT PRICE OF THE DAY seems to work with crude but not with many other trading instruments. E-mini has so much volume, my method does not work on it. Forex, silver, soft commodities does not have enough Volume to identify price levels. May be my method may work with silver/gold , i do not know as i have not traded or back tested them. Seems like to trade ES, Forex i will focus on bigger swing levels like multiple days double tops etc.. and day trade crude.
1.30 pm. missed set up off 11.15 pm bar. Set up is for Euro close expecting a pull back into the close. CORRECTION; Time on chart should read 11.40 am till 1.30 pm
02-09-2012 Oil pit close. +200. I used to look at charts all the time, wondering why i can not go long at bottom and short at top. Luckily, some one showed me it's a loosing proposition for a day trader. At least for my way of trading it was not possible to hold for 100+ ticks moves on 80% of the days. true trending days come 30% of the time and by the time i settled down at 8 am to trade, majority of up or down move is already over. Just focus on 30-40 ticks with levels and try to think all the time how Market Makers think. here and there i get 100 ticks or more in one move but 30-40 ticks add up. For CL to trade between 98.40 to 98.90 for 3.5 hours, then pull back to 98.54 from 98.90 and end up at 98.80 is just taking money away from us. No reason to make it more complicated than that for day trading.
Hi Just a few thoughts. I agree with the part that scalping for 30-40 ticks does add up and I trade that way too as do NoDoji and others. However I'm not sure what you mean by "true trending days come 30% of the time". What does that mean? What exactly is a "true trending day"? Can you be more specific and define that? Or is that just some statistic that you heard from someone else? Also you say, "by the time i settled down at 8 am to trade, majority of up or down move is already over". That's not what I see. Most of the bigger moves I see occur within that time frame starting at 5 AM, my time and I live in California, at the earliest through the pit close, although there are some moves overnight at times too. I also don't agree with your comments, "I used to look at charts all the time, wondering why i can not go long at bottom and short at top. Luckily, some one showed me it's a loosing proposition for a day trader. At least for my way of trading it was not possible to hold for 100+ ticks moves on 80% of the days" You probably saw my comments on this in the CL Redux thread that I've posted the last couple of days. I see day after day that it is possible to trade this way. It's you choice to scalp or do intraday position trades or both, like I do. But you shouldn't say it's not possible to do intraday position trading successfully, as if you look at a chart it's not only not "a losing proposition for a day trader" but a totally valid way and profitable way to trade if you do it correctly. The 100+ tick moves don't just go directly in one straight line mostly unless they're news driven in which case they can. On many days you'll need to let the trade develop and hold through various pullbacks. And entries are very important. You're less likely to see 100+ tick moves without a good entry. There's a lot involved. If you choose to just do scalping that's your prerogative, but why limit yourself? My 2 cents. Another thing is it's easy for all of us after the fact to see that we could have made this amount and that amount scalping or holding etc., but to actually do it is much more difficult and takes real skill.