Have received a couple of Messages asking "How did it pan out"? Here goes.... When I ran my MACD/Trendline Swingtrade Journal one thing I stressed was to trade charts that suited your trading system. If you swing-trade and you need your stop under the prior bar low then trade markets/time-frames that are clean and don't frequently violate prior bar lows. A 2 or 3 priod MA should not wiggle a lot. Some stocks for whatever reason just refuse to behave.. find yourself another table. That thread journal went fairly well until last September and all the bailout machinations, short sell bans.. you name it. I fell off the horse and instead of remembering that was a decent horse, by January I shot the horse and quickly jumped on the next one to come along - ES. The premise was I only have to deal with one market.. i.e. wanting reward without work. Approaching this as a business as I should have I would have first applied my clean rule to see if it applied, or at least find a time frame that did. At some point I blamed ES for being highly unpredictable but it seemed so due to the time frame I kept trading. I am sure all those stocks I swing-traded probably would seem just as mad on an intra-day time frame with a 10 fold margin rate. Well I jumped in the deep end and as almost always with beginners, had some early successful flailing. Now remember on my prior journal I had mentioned from time to time I despised day-trading. I soon got some decent advice (ammo I love you man!) but ego got in the way and I half listened. As my account gyrated along with dwindling confidence I started to figure out the clean part of the equation... I moved to NQ and tick or volume rather than time charts. These 2 changes helped a lot. I had however lost enough to ask myself a question "why don't you stick to what EVER worked for you"? .. what is the need to trade futures? The ironical answer is as a consequence of what the economy has done to me I feel an urgency to make money but that urgency is lethal for a beginner in futures with a SMALL account.. BEGINNER, FEAR, FUTURES, SMALL account. Put those together and losses are GUARANTEED. You will have spectacular periods of delirious gains followed by similarly agonizing losses. You really need 3 things: 1. Decent account size - I did not 2. A profitable system - I did but applied it on the wrong market in the wrong time-frame. You will spend a good part of you account finding this.. You can back-test all you want, futures WILL take it's tuition. 3. DISCIPLINE to NEVER waver from the system. - Over time the little I had left from falling of my prior horse was hosed. Yes I know of the morning recitals.. etc. With what I know now I could probably do well with a 10k account but I had to spend 12k to learn that. Advice to beginners completely new to futures... You must have enough capital to swing-trade the daily chart to touch futures, especially ES. The leverage should be such that you can put your stop past double the daily volatility and not risk 2% of your account... It is not 10k for ES I assure you. Not even NQ. This puts you back at swing-trading stock on margin leverage level.... Sounds like I just talked myself out of a possible triple my account in the next 2 weeks NQ opportunity! Looking forward regardless of the allure I am back to swing-trading stocks and I hope I am content enough to remember I don't need futures. Options on stocks are there should I need the leverage. With stocks I can take advantage of sector strength and I can focus on what needs to be done to eliminate/reduce my fear in trading... income from other sources. Finally... my opinion only (due to my inability to daytrade!)... The less you trade the more you will make on a long-term basis. I don't mean buy and hold either. I don't think there are stats out there but I am confident more millionaires have been made swing-trading dailies and weeklies than daytrading. I simply will never depend on daytrading alone to build an account again.
D, Actually I will continue here.. Have learned a lot last few months. Stubborn until I get planted somewhere I guess. The challenge and potential of Futures too much to leave alone. Focusing on NQ this time. Cleaner than ES and permits finer Money management. As before, charts aplenty. Stop always 2.5 Never risking more than 1.8% per trade Limit 4 trades/day... preferably 3 System-wise, nothing new... fade coutermoves in direction of prevailing daily trend or extremes within a box. Goal mainly to stay out of no-man's land. Mental challenge is to trade the charts only and nothing else.
Morning Prep... Yesterday's Doji for Nasdaq... now who knows what that means... Volatility probably drops till tomorrow.. 50 to 75 range maybe?? Goal to trade as close to either end as possible..
Missed 1760 level in Morning Prep. Hopefully day's high and low stand (makes tomorrow easier) as this looks like an "achieve death by 1000 cuts" day. Nasty movement like this usually lethal for me. No trades so far and hope to keep it that way. Declining TL getting more useful... Price usually breaks these..