How many trading days do we get on the Eminis?

This whole week has been horrible, Monday was a killer, Tuesday was a bit better, and today was screwed up as well. I have been trading the Eminis for a few months now, and i have never seen 3 bad days in a row before.
I backtested, and have noticed during the months that i have been trading that we usually get no more than 5 bad days, days like today and monday.

I wanted to get other people's opinions or what they tracked over the years, about how many good trading days a months do we get? How many bad? all on an average.

the people that have been trading them for years, is this a season thing? is it like this every year around this time? does it get much better later on in the fall, or august?

 

Depends on your definition of good and bad. Yesterday, for instance, presented some fine opportunities: Even if you missed the big down move out of an excess of caution prior to the consumer confidence numbers, there was still a good secondary move from the first consolidation to the low, and then there were two pretty good mostly trending moves up and down.

If you mean days like today and Monday - very narrow range, choppy trading - then they usually become increasingly common through the Summer. I say usually, because, as we all know, nothing is totally predictable, but for the last two years the average daily tradable range during the Summer has dropped off dramatically, along with volume. Topping ranges like the one we've been in tend to accentuate the problem. The same thing often occurs near the end of the year, for pretty much the same reason: Lots of people are on vacation, and even those that aren't may not trade with much conviction.

The result can be very brutal to certain styles of trading that depend on breakouts and more or less continuous trend moves. You can lose a lot of money getting whipped around on in-range breakouts. A lot. Naturally, the day that you decide either to play just for scalps and to fade breakouts will be the big out-of-the-envelope contradiction. The next day, convinced that it's back to the races, you'll get killed. That's what makes trading so much fun, until you run out of money.

Personally, I tend to think there'll be a nicely tradable correction coming up, and probably a nicely tradable correction of the correction, but I have no idea when, and I suspect there will also be plenty of opportunity to lose a lot of money getting on the wrong sides of wandering ranges. A lot of money.

 

Hey Duck,

I too am new to the ES trading game and concur that this week was difficult. My problems go back to Friday but that was not because of the lack of a trend which is what we have seen over the past few days. I was set to go short regardless of what my indicators were saying - too much fundamental analysis for one's health in the ES game. I believe the bull period of Q2 is coming to an end, trying hard to stay alive but frankly, there is nothing out there that promises the rapid road to recovery that the past 3 months anticipated. The midSummer lower volume surely is making this worse. Nothing is hard to trade than a sideways market. We should see some trending soon, one way or another or us of lessor trading experience better hang low, grabbing little pieces of movement when they present themselves (the low hanging fruit) and not trying to hold positions for a breakout to materialize into a trend.

Hoping for a cleaner chart tomorrow --

dB

 

Donaldduck3419:

I hesitate to say that it’s a seasonal thing. I recall a year ago this time (July/August) the market (ES) had plenty of wild swings and sharp trends – hardly a dull moment. It helps to view a second chart at a scale an order of magnitude larger than what you normally use and put the current chop and stop in its proper perspective within the larger picture of the market movement.

Kermit