unfortunately, I don't have a consistently profitable set-up on ES yet. At least I haven't found one yet. How many months/years did it take you B to find a consistent trading strategy/setup for ES? Curious. To be honest I am consistently unprofitable trading ES !! Planning to do a comprehensive analysis of my ES trades this weekend to see if I am improving or still way bad.
I started looking at the ES in the early months of '09, and didn't trade consistently profitable until the very end of '10 into '11. It probably took me about a year to find a pattern I liked, and then almost another year to actually trust it and trade it. Even when I knew the setup worked, I spent a good amount of time "waiting for confirmation" on my actual setup, and then chasing and losing on crappy trades that didn't really match my plan. It takes time to make the right mental adjustments, and a lot of people just don't have the patience to get there before they blow out. EDIT: One other thing is that I have looked at the same chart and chart settings for nearly the entire stretch. I never changed chart type / tick value since the very beginning. I toyed with some stuff very very briefly, but I always had the 512 tick chart up as well. I'm not saying you need to trade a 512 tick chart, but I think the consistency helped me with seeing patterns.
As usual index futures rise every night, day session flat. Buy the close sell the open profitable 78% of the time.
I think this is important too; I began to make some improvement when I left my chart settings alone for probably six months, no changes. But recently, about a month or so ago, I did make some changes in that I duplicated a chart type I was using, and eliminated several of the others, still keeping a core chart up from previously. However, the key for me here is that I did not start trying a bunch of new stuff; rather, I morphed some ideas from previously, and simply updated my view of the world a little bit. Changing around charts for the sake of changing charts is the problem; like when we all go through the stage of searching for what works for us, and we keep changing our charts with the intention of finding something "perfect" .. this is the mental flaw I think, and one I have thankfully moved past. When I change a chart setting, it may be a background color, or reference line I look at, etc., but it's not just changing it because I think it will solve my problems.