These are 5 min charts. I try to not add too much on my charts and/or watch too many other instruments with intentions to watch correlations/convergence/divergence. I don't like to end up having conflicting signals that make me hesitate on taking trades that I normally would take without them. Today I decided to add the 6E to my screen just to watch it. So I had the 6E, 1min CL, and ES across the top and then a big 5min CL stretched across my screen on the bottom. I wasn't paying much attention to the charts on the top, but had them there for a quick reference.
No trades today, wishing I could start over! It was a great day for taking all setups/signals. I need to stop making excuses, today was just a matter of indecision. Trade A: Right after the open, looks like Crude is making a reversal. The trade is 1 tick below the low of the opening bar (the bar with the red arrow). Would have been an awesome trade, good for 30 ticks. Trade B: Price had consolidated into a triangle and then with rising bottoms, it made a break to the top. The B bar had the look that it was getting ready to go higher. It was bumping its head right at the top of the previous bar. Buy 1 tick higher. I would have taken 11 ticks as it hung up around that area for several minutes. Trade C: This was the Crude Inventories and some wild action. The play would have been to buy 1 tick above the high of the day and manage it very closely so you don't get whipped around. Just don't get slipped! I stayed away though because of the volatility of the news. Trade D: Price looked like it wanted to go up, but there was a bunch of back and forth. The D bar went up, got some longs in there, and came right back down. The entry was 1 tick below the low of the previous bar, a bull trap. Then you want to see how it reacts around the next levels of support, which it went right through, if you were able to hold on. Price got down to the low of the day, made a 1 tick break and then turned around. I would have probably gotten out around +40 ticks assuming I was able to stay in the trade the whole way and manage it quickly and correctly. Trade E: Shooting star off the EMA. This one had a bunch of indecision behind it because of the strong reversal that it had after such a steep drop. If you're taking all of your signals, you would short 1 tick below the shooting star. You'd have to wait a little while to get triggered, but you'd get in and then you'd probably get out at +1 since it didn't have follow through. Total: 0 Monthly Total: -10.5 No mTotal right now. So today's problem with me was indecision. A lot of times I'll see a setup and I'll think, "is that really a valid signal?" and then I'm left in the dust. Other times I am really undecided because I don't want to end up forcing trades that aren't valid signals. I really need to get over my problem of thinking that I need to know what is going to happen next. The "forces" aren't as strong as they were when I first started, but they are still lingering around. This morning I got up early again, but it's so hard to get up. My body wants to just sleep longer. I shut off my alarm, closed my eyes and thought that I would just lay here for a little bit longer. 20 minutes later I suddenly woke up. I did some sim trading pre-market, but it was more or less just screwing around to get into the habit of just taking some trades, whether they were good or not. The good thing I was taking out of this morning was that I was recognizing the feeling of being in a trade without feeling any anxiety or worry. I was trying to embrace those feelings so that I can carry it over to my live trading. I also need to stop getting distracted. It takes me until about 9:15-9:30 to feel like I'm coming out of my funk, but then I start doing everything but focus on my charts. And that is a problem. If I can get focused on my charts, cut out the internet, cut out the news, stop doing everything except looking at my screen I'll be able to not miss these trades. It's a sabotaging thing like I mentioned once before in this journal. I think something else I'm going to start doing, and this is just for me, is that I'm going to keep track of all of my signals that I should have taken. I'm going to try to be reasonable, honest, and conservative about it so I'm not just being delusional in thinking that I am a perfect trader and that everything would have worked out perfectly. I will be adding in some trades that I don't talk about in my charts so if the numbers seem to be off, that is why. The exercise is for a couple reasons, but the biggest reason is just to see where I would end up if I was taking more than 1 trade a day. Whether it would be representative of actual results isn't the point. It's always going to be in hindsight and my mind will play tricks on me, but I'm trying to strengthen the idea that I don't have to know what is going to happen next and not every one of my trades has to be a winner. I am going to call it hTotal for "hypothetical." Like I said, I am going to be conservative about this and not squeeze out every last tick. I'm also going to be factoring in commissions. And I think I should keep track of the total number of trades per day. So for today: hTotal: +59.5 (7 trades, 5W/2L) One thing I was thinking about is that I tend to look at losses differently here than I do with anything else I do in my life. It's so easy for anybody to go to the store and spend $100 on clothes or toys, but yet they can't stand it when they take a trade that turns into a $100 loss. There really shouldn't be any difference. The instant gratification of spending $100 to gain a toy outweighs the possibility of taking a risk to make a lot more. I guess there is a difference, but if you really think about the money coming out of your pocket, it's the same thing. Tomorrow is another day and I'm going to continue working on taking trades. My goal is to take at least 2 trades and focus on the charts for the entire day without distractions. "Every setback is a setup for a comeback." - Joel Osteen
Some of you are probably wondering why I haven't posted to my journal today. Some of you probably don't care. Well, my internet went out this morning at 8:30am just as I was trying to turn my platform on. It didn't come back on until about 3pm so unfortunately I didn't get to watch the charts today. I was all ready to go and was feeling good and then I find out my day is over before it even started. I spent my day watching Shooter and catching up on a few other tv shows that I had DVR'd. I tried to avoid anything to do with the market so that I wouldn't have any influence once my internet came back up and I could do a bar-by-bar on my charts seeing it for the first time. I would also like to note that I will not be able to trade tomorrow, Friday, as I will be out all day. I probably won't even have enough time to check the charts and post like I am today. Maybe later tomorrow night when I get home I will do it all in one shot. These trades were analyzed doing a bar-by-bar so I actually had no idea how anything worked out. Trade A: Right off the open it's looking like we are finding some resistance and it wants to turn lower. The doji here is sitting right on the low of the previous bar. I would short here. It's semi-countertrend so I would probably just play it very tightly. I hate doing this after the fact, but I would have probably gotten only +1. Trade B: Another countertrend trade, bounce off the EMA. We have to get into the mindset of taking more than 1 trade. We are starting to get lower highs and lower lows so probably manage this one tight as well. Looks like another +1. Trade C: Have a hammer/shooting star pattern. I don't like a long because it's right at the EMA, but the short looks good because it's under the EMA and it's looking good as a With Trend trade. We would get entered after it broke the high of the bar, has the sense of a bull trap. This one I'm not sure how I would have managed it because it had a small pullback on the 1min. If you moved your stop to breakeven you wouldn't have gotten taken out. If you decided to play it tight, you'd probably get +11. I might have played it tight and taken the +11 since it seemed to be failing to hold under the previous pivot low. Trade D: Looks like we are getting a reversal from the lows. The D bar looks like a pullback. Go long and look for it to break through the resistance on the bar after the Trade C bar. It did and continued on further so you'd be looking for the next resistance area. At that point it stalled and would have missed 20 ticks by 1 tick so I would have probably moved my stop to +11 and gotten taken out of the trade. After that I'm not really seeing anything else out to 12pm as is where I usually stop. I continued on with my bar-by-bar and there were a couple of other trades, but I am not listing them here in detail. Total: 0 (no trades as explained above) Monthly Total: -10.5 hTotal: +22 (4 trades, 4W/0L) Monthly hTotal: +81.5 (11 trades, 9W/2L) Something I did last night was I opened up my platform and put yesterday's chart on my screen. I then just kept doing a bar-by-bar over and over and over again seeing everything while visualizing myself in the trades, looking at different setups, managing them in my head, and seeing profits and losses go by. It was more to play a trick on myself, but also to get me psyched up for today to think that there are many signals throughout the day. It felt like a good exercise. I did it for a couple other days too, just staring at the chart visualizing over and over and over. I know I am seeing things clearly and I'm working on my own psychological problems. I'm looking for anything and everything, trying different angles, to just give me that spark I need. Unfortunately I can't trade tomorrow so I'll have to come back on Monday with my head down ready to bust through that wall that has been trying to hold me back for so long. I hope everyone had a great day, have a great Friday, and have a great weekend! I will probably post tomorrow's entry late tomorrow night, probably as late as midnight EST, but no guarantees. I want to leave this quote here. It is one I came up with on my own about 3 years ago that wasn't meant for trading, but that I think it relates well: "Nobody said it was going to be easy, but it doesn't have to be that hard."
Good read, and here's another read on it that gets you an early entry vs a bar break entry: Draw a trend line connecting the HOD to the pivot high at 9:35am ET. Then draw a parallel line touching the 9:10am pivot low. There's a channel that's been technically clean up to that point. I saw price start to sell off 86.34, "saw" the channel in my mind's eye, quickly drew it and then shorted @ 86.23, a bit late, but I figured good for a trip to the lower channel line around 86.00. I took my 20 ticks there and it broke out of the channel without me, but a good setup no matter how you slice it. "The future is that time when you'll wish you had done what you aren't doing now." If you aren't excited by the prospect of trading the first appearance of your edge when you turn on the trading platform in the morning, then you may not be ready to trade real money and should keep practicing trading your edge and managing the trades optimally in sim until you finally realize that no matter how much you argue with them, your broker won't let you transfer those profits into your live account.
I didn't see that channel. Thanks for pointing it out to me. I always look forward to the next trading day. I always have intentions to start taking signals, but then when the time comes, I freeze. I need to cut out the distractions and just focus on the charts and take the signals. I've been working on seeing more signals and have been coming to the realization that anything can happen at any time. A signal can pop up at anytime, and that is why I need to focus. If I wasn't dedicated to getting better and really spending as much time on this as possible, I probably would have already given up and decided it wasn't for me. Failure isn't an option this time.
I got home early from what I had to do this morning so I was able to fire up my platform and get ready to swing away. I should have just taken the day off like I originally thought I would have to. I missed the first hour of the day. The theme to today's trading was "1 tick your way to financial disaster." *I screwed up attaching this image so I had to do it a different way, which may screw up the picture in the future. Trade A: Buy at 1 tick above the high of the opening bar. +1 tick when it gets you out at breakeven+1. Trade B: Shooting star, second lower high. The EMA is right down below so maybe you could pass, but if you want to take all of signals, this one had a lot of selling pressure off the open, and only one strong bull bar. Look for it to test the EMA, then the previous pivot low and the the next pivot lows after that. Could maybe get +30 if you played it right. Trade 1: I was trying to get entered off that internal triple top, but it never triggered. So then it comes back and bounces off the EMA. It looked like a higher low and I was looking for it to test that internal triple top again. I got 1 ticked in and went against me immediately. I got slipped on this trade. -11 Trade 2: This probably wasn't a trade now that I look back on it. I kept having a long bias and was looking for it to go up and test that top. Another 1 tick failed break loss. -10 Trade 3: Another hammer bouncing off the EMA and higher low. Again my long bias was telling me to look for it to test that top. It had some room to get up there so I could still get out at +1 if I needed to. Another 1 tick failed break and another -10 loss. Trade 4: Was looking for a break of the low of the day. It was coming in strong, and maybe a little too strong as the bar was just so big. I entered at 86.20, it went to 86.17 before I even saw it, put in my stop, and then came back and took me out by like 2 ticks before turning lower. This one was frustrating because now the losses are piling up and then I saw it drop like a ton of bricks after it took me out. -10. Total: -43 Monthly Total: -53.5 hTotal: -13 (6 trades, 2W/4L) Monthly hTotal: +68.5 (17 trades, 11W/6L) I'm not going to let today get me down. It's just the wrong side of variance. It's a different world when you're trading for real rather than just taking trades after-the-fact. The good thing about today was that I just started taking trades without letting my emotions get involved. I felt a little bit nervous, but after that first trade I flushed it out and just went with the flow. I didn't have to know what was going to happen next. The losses put me in a much bigger hole to climb out of, but I have to keep swinging away. I limited my downside and really only had one trade (Trade 4) where I got taken out before it went in my favor causing me to miss out. Just the wrong side of variance today. If I could do things differently I wouldn't have taken Trade 2 and I might have pulled my order of Trade 4 since the bar was getting so big coming into breaking the low of the day. No quote today because I have been way too busy to do anything. Have a nice weekend. I will be late again on Monday because I have another place I need to be so I'll probably miss the first 1.5-2 hours of the day.
I missed the first hour and a half of trading today. I came back and felt rushed, like I needed to make up for the morning. It was a tough day. Unfortunately (maybe fortunately?), I didn't see any clear signals after I got settled in. Trade A: Seemed like the premarket was in a sideways range. Here at A you have a failed breakout of the recent highs AND a second failed breakout of the opening bar. The entry would be at the low of the big doji. The reason is because you are basically shorting at the top of the range so you're looking for it to break back down through to the bottom of the range. In this case, it did, and it continued down further. My only problem was that the EMA was right down below. Cross-referencing off the 1min looks like it would have been a faster mover. Trade B: Bounce off the EMA into a shooting star. I didn't like this one that much because you had strong support just before and a strong move up on the previous bar. Trade C: Here was a second entry short with another shooting star, lower high. I had just sat down prior to this bar closing, but I didn't really have a chance to look at the chart and see what was going on so I decided to stay away because I didn't want to feel rushed. I wanted to get myself settled in first. In the case of this trade, if I would have taken it, I would have gotten entered into the trade and then a 10 tick stop would have been hit. This is a good reminder that you really do need to have a survivable stop. A 15 tick stop would have been alright, but you would have taken a lot of heat on this trade. Another problem was that it just seemed "barb-wirey." I'd say it definitely looks like it's going down because of the second entry short signal, but not before giving you some trouble. Trade D: This had the looks of a shooting star lower high. You would not have been entered into the trade. Trade E: This trade is based off a break of 86.44, so you'd want to go long at 86.45. 86.44 was a double top area of resistance, which the B bar was the first top. It went up 12 ticks from your entry so you'd definitely want to lock in the trade at +1. If you didn't play the hard target at +11, you'd get at least +1. Trade F: There was sort of 2 entries here, but this one wasn't as clear to me. The first would be buying the break of the previous bar since it was above the EMA or you could buy the previous pivot high looking for another breakout. You'd have to play this one quickly to get +1. Like I said, it's not as clear to me. Trade G: Another buy of the break of the previous pivot high in an apparent uptrend. You're getting closer to some more resistance so you'd have to play it tightly. You could get either +1 or +11 on this if you were taking hard targets. You could also maybe buy the break of the previous bar looking for it to break the high of the bar prior to that, like getting in early. Total: 0 Monthly Total: -53.5 I'm going to be very conservative on the Trade A profits and I'm also counting all of the trades into this next total. hTotal: -0 (6 trades, 4W/2L) (would have taken a small loss based on my commissions, but it was only a few cents. I am rounding up.) Monthly hTotal: +68.5 (23 trades, 15W/8L) Overall, I just felt rushed today. I had to miss the early part of trading because I had to go out. Coming back to a short trading day made it feel like I was playing catch up. Maybe it was just a good thing that today's trading didn't have many clear signals as I would have probably regretted the fact that I felt like I was just jumping into trades without being fully in the zone. I'm still working on these breakout trades. I don't really consider myself a breakout trader. I think I am more of a momentum trader given how I look for signals. I guess you could throw the idea of momentum trading into breakout trading looking for those extra orders at the extremes to give you momentum to manage your trades. Maybe that is why I have started to look at those types of trades. Over the weekend I took a look at having 15 tick stops. I'm a little hesitant although I understand that 15 ticks most likely gives me more survivable stops and gives the trades a chance to breathe. I've been thinking about the behavior of CL and how it moves and I think I have started to see somewhat of a pattern. I don't exactly know how to put it into words yet, so I think I'm going to hold off before I go into a big, long wall of text that would put you guys to sleep while I try to explain what it is I'm thinking. I also finished reading "Your Money & Your Brain" by Jason Zweig. It's a very scientific book, but it's dumbed down so that you don't feel like you're reading a text book. It's really an easy read, but sometimes when I would get into reading the scientific words my mind would end up wandering away. It didn't have a ton of points that struck me as a new idea. Also, I don't know what the deal is, but I've been reading so much over the years that I started to recognize some of what he said in reading other things in the past. I don't know what I'm going to get into reading next, but I might just take a break to hopefully clear my head. If you really want to know how much I've read in the last couple of months, I suppose I shall write it here, and this is since July when I first started trading in sim: The Disciplined Trader Trading in the Zone x3 Brooks's Bar-by-bar x1.5 The Black Swan Your Money & Your Brain Started reading The Poker Face of Wall Street Read a few more pages of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand Read half of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator Read the majority of 2 annual reports and a small part of 3 other annual reports Read the first chapter of Devil Take the Hindmost Tried to start reading Intermarket Technical Analysis Read one of the recent months of the magazine Fast Company and I read some financial news every now and then. Maybe that isn't as much as some people, but I think my brain is going into burn out mode. So anyways, I think that is all I had to say today. I might have missed something because I keep looking back at my charts. "Instead of laboring under the delusion that we would be happy if we just had a little more money, we should recognize the reality that we might well end up with more money if we just took a little more time to be happy." - Jason Zweig
FD, Well done on refraining from trading. The market doesn't care when you are ready for trading or whether you feel to have to make up for lost time. Reading is good inasmuch as you learn things that you actually implement, so instead of focusing on reading a lot (which is fine), focus on extracting actionable knowledge from what you read (as in: read --> take notes --> test/research based on those notes --> implement/discard). As far as I know, Nodoji has not finished reading Al Brooks' book, but she's probably implemented more from that book than anyone on the boards. "Knowledge isn't power, knowledge is only <i>potential</i> power, for knowledge without actual implementation is of no use". I like your quotes, btw. Best trading to you.
You are right, I never did finish that book. I read a large chunk of it verrrrry slowly. I got a lot of information that was new to me and it taught me how to trade without gimmicks. By that, I mean it taught me how to trade pure price action and how to trade with hard stops and not feel like the market was out to get me by running my stops. My extensive screen time and sim trading cemented a lot of his stuff into my brain. I started his book in July 2009 and just this summer was recognizing for the first time things I'd read about nearly a year earlier. As I read the book, I couldn't imagine myself entering trades the way he does, yet once I understood it fully, now I use his method of trade entry for the majority of my trades.
Glad you like my quotes! As far as what I read, I do it more for enjoyment and hoping to get something out of it. The Brooks book was more of a book like you described. I actually picked up on one of my signals from his book. I think I derived the setup more from what he was talking about. A couple weeks ago I went back to look at the chapter and I couldn't figure out how I came up with the idea, but something at the time sparked me, and then I eventually looked his charts as I was reading to see other instances where it occurred. I haven't seen the setup in awhile in CL, but I will say that the very first time I traded the setup, I took +20 out of the trade only to watch it go another +80-100 ticks without stopping. That was back in August. I'm not saying that is the power of the setup, but that I feel it is a reliable signal. I don't know what else I'm going to read. Maybe I can finish the other half of the Brooks book since it is that "actionable knowledge" and maybe now that I know more than I did 3 months ago I'll pick up a few more things in his book. I might take a break though. My mind feels cloudy right now, tired. Maybe it's the daylight savings screwing me up? I don't know. Even though last Friday wasn't a good trading day for me, I have a good feeling about this week.