Great to hear from you Murray. There will come a time when I favor the long side more than the short side. I do like to build position in either direction when I feel it is near or at a top or near or at a trough, but the main goal is not to get overextended while building the position. What I need to get a grasp of here is that the short term trades need to contain a better balance of shorts and longs in either an up or down market, whereas for positional trading, I can just take one side and build on that. As an aside, I use this strategy in grains etc also. ---I have only traded NQ or EN long term. I could look at that in the future, but right now am concentrating on the ES hurdle.
Hi B1S2, as you know building up a positional short trade in the S&P500 is different to short selling stock of an XYZ company, whose fundamentals do not match current valuation. Even that does not work a lot of the times, unless you really want to stick it through the pain. I am just wondering how do you establish whether the S&P500 is overbought. Do you monitor all main stocks in the S&P or rely on your TAs?
I will look to weekly and monthly charts initially to see if we have an overbought/oversold situation or indicator divergence with RSI, MACD and MACD Histogram and where we are relative to BB. I then also apply that to the daily charts. By the way, we are no means in a big overbought situation right now. However, this is when I generally begin the process of averaging up into a position. Once I have several units on, I then will allow myself to take profits if we get a move and then it looks like it is going to retrace. Otherwise I will tend to let it run .
No trading today--just sat back and observed. I am still short 4 units in the short term account at average price of 1314.875. I will stop myself out on Sunday or Monday and then restart the trading using the short term charts. Over the weekend , I will be analyzing whether or not using price targets for profits would in the long run be better than looking for a trend to run. I imagine it is probably different on different days. Comments welcome and encouraged.
==================== Buy1 sell2; Interesting ,Art Collins[ elite derivatives journal ]made ; a pretty good case for selling or shorting the S& P 500 , before 8;30 Chicago time, was the way I read it this mourning. Frankly it did not make a higher high,which the best uptrends do; but not that particular in this uptrend , just yet anyway. Figure with your experience , may make more money over time by trailing a stop in ES. Usually like to enter a nice limit order [soon after entry/generous profit target] to close position. Which does requires a nice trend to hit it. Almost never execute a stock exit that way; short or long.Derivatives move @ such speed, like that preplanning exit . However since not all moves trend as much as preferred; usually out by end of day anyway, so would rather get something than nothing, if necessary. So may cut a loss or snug a stop when its probable it will not trend as figured.
B1S2- This little nugget on Stephen Vita's site, "The Alchemy of Trading": "...the Commercials, the so-called "smart money" in the S&P 500 futures have ramped up their net short position to the highest level in more three years. Steve Briese, who wrote the book on Commitments Of Trader interpretation, calls that a "major sell signal." Of course, you'd better have DEEP pockets to play their game. PaperTrader
it will be interesting to see whether S&P500 will hold 1300 level this week, you could be right in your decision to sell the market this time, though I still don't see it as short term trading, in a way you are still position trading with your current trade.
yes this is correct. I am going to finish this trade out and then restart the short term trades using the shorter time frame charts. The reason that I am still in the trade is due to using the 60 minute chart and I have discovered that this too closely mirrors my position trading. Once I exit this trade, I will be back to entering the short termers like I did the first week.