Glad you enjoyed it The thread didn't encourage the sorts of replies I hoped it would and so I decided to scrap it.
Perhaps because there is or was so little to reply to or respond to. There is of course a significant difference between a trade log and a trade journal. The latter is about the journey (journal, journey). These generally get tons of replies. Some of these replies may be unwelcome, but that's the nature of a public board. The former is little more than took this took that with little or no explanation. If there's a profit involved, then the replies engendered run to the Oh Yeah Prove It Schmuck sort. I must confess I stopped reading it after the first page because of the log aspect (what one trades is irrelevant to me if I don't know why he took the trades he took) and because the charts were hindsight, which in itself is not a deal-breaker, but without any pre-session explanation of what the trader plans to do, the hindsight analysis doesn't mean much. I don't know what sort of replies you expected, but perhaps you'd like to try again with the above in mind. The primary consideration is whether or not doing so would help you to progress.
dbphoenix, Is there a mechanism on this site for posting trades in real time? It should be made easy for traders to do but a day trader would end up with a ton of posts. Thanks,
No. Real-time trades on a message board are part of the mythology. One can either post the trades in advance, or one can join a trading room such as that described here. If one is scalping, then of course there will be "tons" of trades. But on most days in the NQ, there are only a handful. Maybe only 2 or 3. Certainly not 20 or 30. I don't know what the trading plan is in this case, so I can't say.
the posting trades in advance it usually just a trick used by gurus to avoid accountabilty of being held to an actual entry. fxmospherian employs this tactic on t2w. Every post is like ''scalp longs above 5550, scalp shots below 5540'' Then if price crashes down, he'll claim he took the short. If price goes down a little (triggering the short) and then reverses back and hits his stop, he just claims that he didn't take the trade due to his amazing price action knowledge keeping him out of the short etc. Dentist does the same with his point and figure charts. Draws a few lines and channels, says that we can either expect a move up or a move down (NO $HIT!!! LOL)and then comes back at the end of teh day bragging about how his lines and channels worked Anyone can draw lines and price is bound to 'react' to some of them, but in real time it's not as easy to actually trade it, as most are aware. In real life, price might fall short of the line and then make the expected move. It might go a little past where you expected the turn and then make the expected move. It might chop around and give numerous stopouts before making the expected move. But without calling a trade as it's entered, one can easily find a way after teh event to make it look as though their commentary was prescient and profitable. The calls in this thread were how calls should be made. Lots of good calls (with statements, too), but clearly he didn't seem terribly impressed with his own results for some reason. I got the impression he thought he was lucky rather than good!
All of which is true. But then one must go beyond that in order to examine the reasons for wanting the calls in the first place. What is, after all, the purpose of being held accountable for an actual entry? To convince others that one is competent? profitable? Why not just provide the plan? Then whoever is interested can learn for themselves whether the plan is worth following or not. If one seeks to be a follower and depend on someone else for trade calls, much less profits, then he has a hell of a lot of due diligence to do to find someone who'll fill the bill. And it won't be on a message board. On the other hand, if one seeks to be an independent trader, there is a great deal of useful information available here as well as other trading sites, not to mention the internet in toto.
I can see how a daily pre-session plan would encourage more debate, but I don't tend to actually do much of that. Not because i'm lazy, but I rarely found it helped me much. I used to identify levels where i'd look for reversals, but on reflection, they rarely helped me. Maybe I just wasn't very good at picking the levels. So I tend to just approach each session as if it's the first day trading for that instrument. Most of my entries were breaks of intraday trendlines and other standard TA concepts. A fair few of the trades were reversals where price seemed to be struggling to continue in it's direction and looked 'tired', and I had quite a lot of success with them trades They would often coincide with 'divergence' trades, although I don't really tend to use any indicators. I was inspired by how 40D traded the globex range, but I couldn't get it to work for me teh way it seems to do for him. I tended to get chopped to pieces, and when I eventually caught the 'move', I was lucky if it covered the previous losses. To be honest, when I look over my own journal, i'm quite impressed with teh results. It was a very good patch for me, but I can confirm that I suffered quite a few red days around the time I stopped the journal which dented my confidence, and I'm currently in the process of looking at changing things around a fair bit. I think too many of my trades were counter-trend, and i'm currently testing trades based much more on breakouts of intraday ranges as opposed to reversals.
All well and good. Not everyone trades the same way. But what sort of responses did you expect? What was it that you wanted people to respond to? If they don't know what you're doing and why you're doing it, they're pretty much limited to Good Job and Too Bad. OTOH, if you're trying to put together a trading plan, perhaps the process you're going through would be of help to others and their comments more germane to your efforts. Just a thought.
There used to be an ET chat room years ago when I first found ET. Several of us posted all our trades in real time and many posted in advance what they were looking at, looking for and at what price levels they'd go long or short. Everyone traded a bit differently and it was interesting to see how two traders could take opposite positions and both make money on the trade. I found some mentors in that room. Too bad ET no longer has chat.