ps. good setup will repeat no matter what day/what time/what news what matter is consistency in carry out your plan.
As my energy level goes up from losing weight and my anxiety level goes down, I hope to capture complete trades and take multiple trades per-day. Right now I'm just getting my feet wet. I had the energy to follow today's trade...just not the emotional control. I hope with time it'll get better.
I dont see where there was any reason to believe the market would move like it did in the afternoon. I think it caught a lot of people by suprize.
I am a serious noob who likes hanging around here learning from reading tons of threads.. .. could someone please clarify how one can determine whether a particular market is "strong" or "weak"? Is this based on the trading volume alone? Thanx for helping out a beginner and sorry for hijacking the thread- just a query which came up while I was reading it. Peace.
Seems to me before you can concentrate on your trading you need to get your health and emotional wellbeing in order. Can I suggest, since this is your journal detail your weight and exercise goals lets see your improvements in those first. I'm not looking for baby steps You need to build some positive momentum in other things in you life which you can then channel into you trading.
I watch Tick, Trin and Advance/Decline ratios but it is still tough as they do not lead the market. I saw nothing there to indicate the move to the upside until it was well under way.
It has to do with the way institutions use the futures market and major exchanges like the NYSE. Think of futures as future intentions while NYSE is current reality. If the futures price is rising, the buyers are signaling intent to buy equities. In the case of ES that would be large cap stocks. If the tick thereafter isn't rising then the buyers of the futures aren't moving the stock market higher. They're just getting fills without having to uptick the stocks they're trading. This would be a weak market. Once they're done buying the stocks they're going to sell their ES contracts. The whole point of using futures markets by institutions is to avoid slippage. If you knew you'd move the dow +20 points with your equity purchases you'd be crazy not to buy the dow futures contract before buying the stock. Of course the orders have to be right after each other otherwise they'd be speculating instead of avoiding the slippage. Usually there is a 10 - 15 sec. lag so you have enough time to sell in front of them. That's a very simplistic overview, but it's the fundamental basis of how I trade. You have to filter out program trading arbitrage opportunites otherwise you'll end up getting fills that hurt you.