Corallus, short of knowing what your method is, could your result possibly have been caused by the type of market we have been having during the past year or so ? Freealways
Hey Cheeks, db has discussed at length his means of trading an ORB on the Keeping It Simple thread in the Futures forum. Also, if you search for snosur4's posts in The Importance of Simplicity thread under Strategy Trading, you will also see how he does it. db's thread is based on snosur4's method. Hope this helps!
I just try to be concrete; So as to go on, if you have made statistics about your trades then you are on a good track to look at what's happening and you should go on with this procedure. Perhaprs just take only trade that you are sure and paper trades others then look if statistics improve. When it wil be the case you will be confident enough to trade again for real without cutting too soon because it will be on RATIONAL BASIS and not on PURE FAITH. Faith is great but is not enough except for believers in godness . paper trading is important although it doesn't have the emotional part, it makes you repeat the process and REPETITION is necessary to acquire excellency. Pilotes do training not only during competitions but mostly out of competitions. It is the same for trading: you can train out of the madness of the crowd.
For the NQ, 5. I've been through the tight stop mill and it was a money-losing proposition. In order to make it work, you've got to nail the move dead on. For the same reason, I gave up trying to enter retracements and turned to breakouts instead. I'll grant you it's discouraging to start the day with a 5pt loss, but in the vast majority of cases over the past four months, tightening the stop in some way has "locked in" an unnecessary loss that, if the stop had been left as is, would not have occurred. An even wider stop might be called for, up to 8 points, but that's a lot for many people (but really not more than 3 ES points), and the five points is a good compromise. Even so, the extent of a pullback which is not a reversal tends to be up to seven points though, again, five points is nearly always enough if there's any energy behind the move at all. If you're going to have wide stops, though, you have to trust your strategy, and this is where paper trading comes in. It's also important to be able to recognize the difference between a retracement and a reversal, and this isn't always easy to do when the market is as lethargic as it has been these past weeks. --Db
I have to say that an irony is that you may have been brain-washed and get yourself into a cycle to lose money consistently. Think freely. You had 50/50 odd originally minus commissions. What did you do to chop of the 50/50 towards the consistent losing side? How do the manipulators make you buy high and sell low?
, I sold ES at what I thought was the high of the day, and it just kept on going by 12 more points up. What a surprise!
...doing non directional trades or are you strictly an equities trader? I like trading options because 2 out of the 3 things that affect pricing can be controlled more or less. 1)Stock price. Not much you can do there unless you can foretell the future and it sounds like you want to... 2)Volatility. Good idea to know where VIX stands re your trades, as well as options vol, HV vs. IV 3)Theta (time value). No brainer, as it always works against you if long, and for you if short. Every option goes to zero at expiration. Some twists and curves along the way because of first two factors. Might try mixing some of this in with your directionals. Jerry
Even if he took the opposite side of all his trades, he could still end up losing. I suspect that most of his entries & stops could be in the slaughter zone.