looks like we're still marching north at the time of this posting. i keep forgetting to mention news and economic reports. it is what it is. only thing i care about (as it relates to my trading) is what it does. so, this post is more for my own personal humor if you will, but today shows construction spending down. apparently they didn't consider what's going on at our house!!!
re: prior posts about VIX and $TICK. below is screen shot of a chart "quad" of 5,15,30,and 60m charts with all the usual stuff (EMA(20), pivots and prior day hi/lo) and then on left is quick market internals etc. all this is in TOS btw. as of typing of this message, VIX is now up to -7%ish from -8% and $TICK is starting to trend negative. could be some profit taking but there's a long tail forming on 60m chart and price at the moment is below the 38.2% extension. note that the TOS charts and platform are running on completely separate and independent machine from my trading computer which runs the trading platform only. the information and data provided by TOS is pretty amazing considering it's free but don't want it hogging any resources from trading machine. anyway, there's about an hour left in U.S. morning session and i don't really want to be riding this out through lunch hour chop so i may have to take what i can a little earlier than i would like but that may have to be good enough. having said that, there are a couple things that could persuade me to stay with the trade. 1) initial RR is > 1:1, 2) support at breakout (9091.75), support @ central pivot 9075.5, 3) support @ EMA(20). all are > than my initial stop loss @ 9043.75 (also below round number 9050), the market internals (bullish bias). one other thing i forgot to mention was price magnetism towards round numbers. in this case there are plenty to be aware of but one that i particularly like that is a friend to my cause is 9200 which is just above R1 pivot but i can't let that weigh on decisions too much, just something to be aware of.
i was remiss in not checking the "regular trading hours" RTH chart which is something i need to do as there are traders and other instruments that influence the futures contracts. so here is a 30m chart of RTH (U.S. session) which tells yet another story. i.e. that R1 pivot is confluent with the 38.2% fib extension for this trade, which coincidentally is based on data outside of the RTH session. so, a lot of the same factors are in play with regard to support but ALSO resistance levels are different including that R1 on ETH (extended trading hours) is right at the prior day high based on RTH. got that? yeah, confusing but again something i have to remember to check because you never know which crowd showed up to the party in largest numbers. RTH or ETH. RTH 30m chart, same indicators.
re: RTH vs ETH, one thing i will do from time to time when i'm trying to decide who came to the party is look at both charts with pivots plotted on 30m and see which set of pivots seem to be honored so-to-speak on the most consistent basis and that is the often (not always) the ones that i'll give most weight to. RTH 30m pivots are hollow dots.
NinjaTrader Trade performance reporting tool. the data is based on broker data which in my case is NinjaTrader Brokerage.
ok, so now i've moved my stop to BE plus a couple ticks for commishes. i may not be able to do what i'm posting here due to time constraints but another possibility is that my stop gets hit and it's a scratch trade. ok, fine. i didn't let a winning trade turn into a losing one. however, it's possible that i could re-enter at a break of the RTH session high and go from there using the same concepts as described in the original trade. the downside to doing that is that it would be much later in the day session and it could just chop around and not really be worth the heartburn. the upside is that it would be above R1 on RTH and R2 is all the way up there @ 9274 which would be a very long way from the open and approaching the all time high @ 8287.5. not likely but one never knows.
a zoom out view of the 60m with additional S/R(magenta) lines. no surprise we stalled out in this area. 60m bar closes in a few minutes and if it closes anywhere near where it is now would be in favor of continuation. now i have to decide if the devil on my shoulder should bug-off. i.e., i drew an ascending channel (thin white lines) on 60m and price is holding above the mid-point. the upper channel boundary is near prior day high. so if i were trading multiple contracts i would maybe take part off at initial profit target (R1 on ETH) and then trail balance to upper chanel boundary. is this greed or trade management? did the devil make me draw the channel? at any rate i've moved stop up to just under red bar on 60m @ 9103.50 and if the bulls are still at the party i may adjust profit target upward to confluence areas after re-examination of trend lines etc.
still not out of the woods yet but multiple time-frames (5,15,30,60) are flying in formation in that they are all above their respective ema(20). note how the 5m was waffling all through lunch and after. running out of daylight for this session so will see how this plays out but i'm trailing the red bars on 60m (stop now @ 9110.50) and have moved the "way-out" target up to upper ascending channel boundary. lots of resistance to break along the way and there's plenty of fear in the world right now so anything can and will happen. VIX is still negative and $TICK is momentarily trending upward.