Well, this 10% number is as meaningful as any RANDOM number. For the larger picture, I may have $50,000 in my other trading account, another $150,000 in money market funds (figuratively speaking, actual number may vary) so the loss is not as painful as it seems. I am not a good trader yet but I am more than willing to learn and experiment. What kept me out of real trouble the last few years has been that I was the most aggressive with my smallest account, and the least aggressive with my largest account. I don't intend to change that strategy ever.
Hey, I'm not knocking you. I say go for it. But I am curious as to why you are thinking the trend is down? I guess when I look at my charts now we do look like we will have a pull-back here, so maybe you are right about the trend and you just called it early.
I know. My understanding of my indicators on my charts says it's down. What can I do? I have to trade with a down bias. What's different a few months ago was when my indicators said up then, I refused to believe them because my positions were losing. Before the start of this experiment, I have cleaned all those positions so they will not interfere with my head down the road. By the way, it's not strange that at any time 50% of the traders believe the trend is down while the other 50% believe it's up. If all traders believe the trend is up, the market has to gap up to the point where the balance again is restored.
I am always early; that has been my problem from the start. It seems that I cannot help it. In this experiment, I am taking the brutal force approach: I will be early and stand my ground until I am right no matter how much I lose when I am early. Obviously leverage needs to stay low. Fortunately, this indeed is the case as one contract is not a big position for me overall.
Perhaps you should try trading 2 contracts. One will always be too early, while the other one will be more timely placed. You thus may want to consider trading YM, which is more appropriate for your modest funds in that it can allow you to trade two contracts. ES do not differ that much from YM in the market dynamics.
The problems of trading multiple contracts and scale in/out are well documented on this board. I happen to believe if one cannot do one thing well, he shouldn't even try doing two things at the same time.
Random.. Just ignore the bullshit.. and do whatever you think is right. 90% of the guys posting on this thread.. are still paper trading or looking for the holy grail. If you want good advice and feedback.. you have come to wrong place. If you end up making $.. u will have lemmings flock to this thread asking you thousands of questions and picking your brains... if you lose your shirt.. you will get a buch of people bashing you and telling you to go read a book. --MIKE
Trading the IT on ES03U is always a nice thing when you have a job. It is running about 4 points a day on the IT trend now (leg 6 of the quarterly channel.) I'm showing a "long" trend in leg 6 running from the 5th of this month. My closing channel values are 988 and 1003 for a 15 point traverse. So you and I have only one difference and that is the current trend direction. My chart is below. Ignore the annotations they are being made on the 5 min version where I monitor.
I recognize that we are overdue to begin leg 7 short, so our difference of view today will probably be resolved in your favor within a few days.
I post here because I want to keep a record and have discussions with people like you, however few there are. I never give trading advices to anyone, not even my friends. I only discuss advices offered to me. On the other hand, I probably have read more books than most people here so I wouldn't care if I am told to go read a book.