Thanks Illini, I cut my # of trades by 60% today. And there we be even less in the following sessions. I am posting publicly for two reasons...To help Earn2Trade and to get advice from fellow traders...so again...thaNKS! I make all my money in the Bonds and give it back in the ES...I hate the ES. ES
Awesome Brother...I was down today and grinded my way back up to above 25K. It has been three full days of trading 1 contract and I am holding my own. I feel no pressure and I am getting better. By the way Rithmic is incredible. They have the best support I have found. Earn2Trade has hooked up with the right people. ES
Trading the ES is more choppy than other markets as it is used more for hedging imho. So you have chop and you have trend, Trend usually are started from reversals and often called "First Leg", if first leg does not have strong enough thrust, price stalls and we have chop. I use a 2 minute chart to help define chop better using an RSI and 55/45 zone, if RSI stays more than couple bars, 4-6 minutes in the zone=chop for me to identify. And beyond 55/45 is trending. So, it is better to have 2 separate methods, one for chop and different one for trend. In chop I am looking for "clumping" of highs/lows, I will take either side, risk 4 points as catastrophic stop and scalp away. I have limits of how many I do, don't want to over stay and become a pig. I have done real money contests in my past, always found it stressful, even more so than normal.
Today I struggled and made it to +$200.00 with 1 contract Then I gave most of it back and +$37 bucks remained trading 2 contracts. This is not as easy as I thought. I am still plus with a little over 25k in my account. It has been 4 days of trading. I have 56 Calendar days left to make $2,500.00. I need to refine my rules, so I phoned Earn2Trade. I told them as I trade and progress in the Gauntlet, I am discovering about scaling and how my rules should not define how I scale when there is a move that I want to participate in. They had no problem with my rule change. New Rules daily target: $100.00 daily loss: $1,000.00 weekly target: $325.00 weekly loss: $3,000.00 monthly target: $1,600.00 monthly loss: $5,000.00 I trade the ZB with the extremes of order flow in the Uni-Renko bars. I may trade in the night session. My stop losses are never widened. Other instruments being watched are the NQ and the ES. There may or may not be trades in them. ES
I use to have targets, but on good days, go past the targets which will help offset larger losing days. But all based on time of the day as it is like an hourglass. Good trades lets you get in and never comes back, crappy trades hangs around where you got in, take a tick and wait for next signal. But based on back testing of what is 90% of average mean based on time of profitable trades.
The trader has on average 45 trading days over the course of the 2 trading months, making the minimum requirement of a $55.55 return per day exclusive of commish to reach target. Not difficult for traders that have a quantifiable dialed in edge.
I finished my first week down $168.68 trading 1 contract in the Gauntlet. In relation to 25k that is a drop in the bucket, but 1 week of trading was not a drop in the bucket. What will I do about my trading? Stop trading the ES. This first week is meaningless. I made two mistakes this past week which I can correct next week. I shall see if this will improve my results. I will trade with more ZB contracts and stop trading all of the ES trades. I find the ES hard to trade and I lose all the money I make in the ZB to the ES. The breakdown is like lose $410.85 in the ES and make $242.17 in the ZB. The second mistake is to trade in and out with one entry and one exit...I will scale in and scale out of my trades as as a new value-added feature to the extravaganza. Here in ET comagnum taught me that the NQ is better to trade than the ES by more than 50%. Cost wise the NQ's ATR is twice the ES dollar for dollar. Why does anybody besides computers trade the ES? So I am watching the NQ on the sidelines...not trading it yet, but some details look promising. My new rules have allowed for trading the NQ if I decide to. Thank you Earn2Trade for this opportunity and have a nice weekend everybody. ES