Got stopped out today. The markets managed to rally big time today. Every index was above 1% today except the DOW 30. I will want to short one more time before I can be on the long side. I'm hoping tomorrow to be an up day too so that I can short at the EOD. My bond vs. stock model still shows that we need to break 1200 on the down side before we can expect any significant rally. Good trading.
This is it. August was a rollar coaster kind of a month. My goal for September is to manage the risk better than I did last month. One of my problems was not having a profit target and looking back at all those trades I realised that I was more careless when I had a profit. I did let profits turn into break-even several times. This is another pattern that I love and have made significant money too. It is a two day pullback . I shorted one ES at 1220.50 with a stop at 1230.75. We'll see what tomorrow brings.
I was not sure whether the short position that I initiated at 1220.50 was the right thing to do because last night and this morning 1220.50 ended up being the low. ES was up to 1226 but it gave back all the gains and closed at 1219.75. I have a profit of .75 pts, which is not great but it is better than a .75 loss. This is it, the next move down should break 1200. I feel good about this trade but that doesn't mean much though. I have incurred losses when I felt good about my trades in the past. I am going to go over all my trades from the past month and summarize the lessons learnt in the next post. PS. This thread has more than 1900 views but I have had only 2-3 people post anything. If you think that you have something of value to add, please do so. Maybe we can all learn.
Fondamentals tell me the ES aint gonna drop below 1200 any time soon. As a matter of fact I dont belive we'll ever even get close to 1200. End even if that was to happen, traders would jump into the market at those prices, knowing full well how cheap they really are given that the economy is pretty healthy.
On the other hand I am very interest in what you are doing and althought I mainly trade equities I also follow closely and trade the ES and I like your approach. I find this index to always react to particular numbers and to respect them all the time. using just S/R and price action as technnical indicators is the way to go with indices, sometimes I even dump the charts... .... Im looking forward to contribute in anyway I can to your journal in the future.
Bitstream Thanks for contributing to this journal. In response to your previous post I'll have to disagree. Just because the market looks healthy is no reason to be long. The market has already factored that in. If you look at GE and MMM, they are making new lows every week. GE touches every part of our lifestyle. Unless the bonds make a new high, I'll be worried about being long. I gave up all the technical indicators but use the charts to look at the daily action. I use end of the day data. In addition to EOD, I look at a 6 month chart with a 5 day price channel and bollinger bands with 1 std. My definition of a trend is two closes above/below the band.
Doublea, I wouldn't go long just because the economy looks fine, but if I see bargain prices that are @key support levels and I know there's nothing wrong with the markets general health, then I'd go long for sure. But we are here to agree and also disagree, arent we?
How do you define bargain prices? In 2000 CSCO was at 80+, after few months 70 seemed like a bargain, 60 was dirt cheap and 50 was pretty much free money. It is now below 18. The PEs are high and so is inflation. I'm not much worried about the PEs but the inflation. I foresee a crash on the way. Here I said it first.
Those were different times. Now, we were stuck in a range for months on end and until no long ago the ES was continuosly rotating around the same prices. We coldnt get above 1200 for ages on the ES and I dont think the market is gonna give up those gains without a fight, therefore IMO there is always a very good chance of a bounce from those price areas, making them a very low risk entry point. That also explains why I consider 1996-1203 " bargain prices".