Looking at your daily trade actions with honesty and analysis is an exceptional way to make continuous improvements. I have always felt that if you do not measure your performance then you have no idea as to your trend. You will make a very good trader if you continue to self assess your actions with patients and with the intentions to find areas to improve. Do not use the reviews to highlight daily errors, but use them for trading solutions through continual process improvement. As I have told you before, do not EVER go for homeruns during the trade day! Your only focus should be on swinging the bat at this point with ever increasing ease. So far, to me your actions show that you are right on course. Keep taking baby steps in your trading through the goal of small continuing accomplishments. Keep up the great work! Chris
Chris, you already know this, but I'd like to say it again, I really appreciate your help. TMTrader, thanks for the encouragement. You know exactly where my problem is (exits). I will aim to improve my exits this week. Mr Subliminal, I actually went through your entire journal last night (what a read). Your trading style seems pretty close to mine although you were banking more points when you started. I hope you continue your journal or at least post on how you're doing these days. Regards, -Fast
Fast, Thanks for posting this journal. All the best going forward. Now the question: I only trade the ES so my question is about that only. I took a random day, Oct 2 from your journal and looked at your trade: 9:46 AM - Long 1 ES 1012.00 9:47 AM - Cover 1 ES 1013.00 Result: +1 What is your criteria for exiting? My log of paper trades (which I'm still doing at this point) showed that that trade could have given up as much as 6 points, but probably could have given up 3 or 4 pretty easily. I got in at 9:50 and out at 10:00 for 3 points, on paper at least. I'm just looking at the charts and trying to see why you exited. Not that a point here and another point there is bad Thanks, jd
JD, for now I have AutoTrader setup for 1.50 stop-loss and 1.25 Profit targets on ES. My official exit criteria is technically a short signal for longs and a long signal for shorts, but I usually exit with small gains. The reason is I'm a beginner and just learning how ES works and building up my acct and confidence so small gains are OK for now. That specific day, I exited because Oct. 1st was a down day for me, and I was in "recovery mode" going for super quick hits. I know it wasn't a good exit, but that's exactly the area which needs a lot of improvement in my trading. -Fast
wo, wo, wo ....hold the boat...i am a new trader myself, so listen to me or dont...but you actually expect to stay in this game using 1-1 risk to reward on each of your trades???? I know that you am and were a business man before you become a trader, just like me...treat this as a business...all business had specific risk to reward and good stats keep track of..if you can do that and regularly find mistakes, or area to stregthen more youll do much better when it come to the profit side of this.
If his winning trade percentage is high, say 80 or 90 percent, then it would work, would it not? I don't know what his numbers are. The risk reward thing is important but I don't think you look at just the stop and target levels by themselves. Of course I'm new at this too, so this is only what I am seeing from my study. If he's figured out that he needs 1.5 points of wiggle room for his ES trades to hit more often, then what's wrong with that? For me it's 3 points for stops usually, but that's based on my style of entries, not his. jd
...thanks for directing me here. I see in your initial post that you use E-Signal. Are you using the backtesting capability? Thanks. - Mike