Ironfist, the trade where you were long 9 could've gotten real ugly ... you were lucky this time and that is the only reason why you came out on top yesterday. Next time the ES may not come back to your B/E. Do you have an exit strategy for such cases? ... because they WILL happen if your winning days are dependent on that kind of averaging down strategy. This is how traders blow up. Not trying to be negative, just trying to save you some headaches.
The YM trade that I left open yesterday (the one that wasn't closed out on page 2 of the PL I posted) was protected by a stop last night after normal trading hours ended, and when I woke up this moring it was about 200 ticks in my favor. So that one is still going and I've adjusted by stop to about +168 ticks in my favor. As for my ES scalping, I have the following so far: +.1 tick +2 ticks +2 ticks +.1 tick +0 ticks I woke up around 10AM CST so I missed the morning, but I don't think I'd do this during the first hour, anyway. PL sheet will come.
Alright so I just closed a position of 44 ES contracts. Good thing I wasn't using a real account (I don't even think I have enough buying power to buy 44 contracts in my real account... how much would that take?). So I need to establish parameters for when to bail on a trade instead of adding more. btw it was closed profitably
Damn there were some trends at the end there that kind of make this "do the opposite of what you would normally do" method pretty hard. My ES opposite "system" did ok today. I probably would have lost money if it was my real account because I did some stupid stuff like open positions with 44 contracts. My trend-following YM system did well today because it was trendy today. Whatever. P/L attached. It's a huge image so you might have to scroll around to see everything. There are 3 pages of PL and then a chart showing all my trades below. The chart doesn't show size, tho, so 3 entires and then 1 exit might look lopsided and the short and long arrows might not match in numbers. You can see the big rally that started at 13:32 CST that really sucked.
Oh, I use SierraChart for charting because I don't like OECs charts. But SC doesn't allow you to place orders through OEC, so I have to use OEC's charts for placing my orders. I could just use OEC's DOM for placing orders but for whatever reason when I enter with market orders off the DOM I get the WORST FILLS EVER yet when I enter with market orders off the chart I get good fills. wtf? 99% of my exists were with limit orders. I was only using a moving average. Normally I try to trade in the direction of the moving average and I try a billion different formulas to get a moving average that is consistently profitable. Some are adaptive, some overshoot like a mofo, some lag, whatever. So for this, I just trade against the moving average. Price going up? The market is fucking with me. I'm going short.
My advice would be don't blow off that 44 contract trade as anything other than catastrophic. You will easily blow up trading a real account this way, before you even get to your contract limit.
So you're doing all this from a demo account? If you are, then the psychology of having "unlimited" money and the fact it's not real money (hence, not real losses) tend to make getting out of a losing trade easier. I used to scalp and on choppy days or even weeks, I make great money until the inevitable one sided days take away all your hard-earned gains unless you have a real strategy or system. Random buying and selling won't cut it in trendy days. There are people that scalp for a living but it's too stressful for me to be trading that way - going for .5 to 1 ticks at a time.
I don't like scalping. Seriously. I want to buy at the beginning of a trend and ride it to the end and make a decent profit with 1 round trip and low commission. That's what I WANT to do. But every time I ride a trend I either end up calling the top (or the bottom), or I get stopped out (right before the trend takes off), or I hold too long and then lose all my profits in one giant bar the opposite way. My backtesting with trend following systems reveals that the only way to have net profitability (sometimes) is to ride every trend until the end. Fixed profit targets (tested with 3, 5, 8, 10, 12, and 15 ticks) result in net losses. For a trend following system to be effective you HAVE to capture the home run movements in order to have your winners outweigh your losers. You need that one +100 tick trade to balance out all the other bullshit trades. At least based on my backtesting. That's why I decided to do the opposite of all that. If trend following while NOT holding on for big winners results in losses, the going counter-trend should result in winners. Now, I guarantee you I'm going to try to make this mechanical and end up ruining it. I don't like "discretionary" because it's not consistent. "I took that trade because I felt like the market was going to keep going up" is not quantifiable and therefore bullshit. If you "felt" like the market was going to keep going up, you obviously based that on something (past experiences) and therefore used a rule set to arrive at your decision. So say and explain that. I do not like and won't use systems that don't have 100% mechanical entry AND EXIT rules. I've spent as many hours as the next guy searching the net for the "holy grail" system and coding my own crazy custom indicators and 99.9% of bullshit out there has mechanical entry rules but no set exit rules. Of course, most of the time there was some winning sometime after the entry signal, but it's bullshit to look at a chart and assume that you would have had a winner just because you were in the green at some point after you entered. You have no way of knowing if it's going to go 1 tick in your favor or 100 ticks in your favor. So people compensate for this with trailing stop losses, but there are a bunch of papers out there about how stop losses actually impact your profitability over time unless you make them super wide, in which case you might as well not even use them at all. Holy crap I'm ranting off subject here. My bad. In the first sentence of this post I said I don't like scalping. The only thing that's cool about it is seeing all the little tiny wins add up to a big bottom line. It's the same concept as when I do trend following and I see all the little losses add up to one big loss.
LOL. yeah I could see that. But regarding your problem with trying to ride a trend and end up buying it at the top - the general idea is that even on a trend day/one sided day, there will be pauses and pull backs. The best way to ride a trend is to wait for those small pullbacks (even better towards resistance/support) and get on it. I don't get on a trend til I see a pullback. If that isn't the case, I'll look for money elsewhere. Now, how do you know if it's just a pullback or it's a reversal? - well, we wouldn't know that for certain but that's where proper position sizing and money mangement comes into play. Anyways, don't mean to jump off topic regarding "scalping". Scalping definitely is not for me. I have seen some good scalpers though and I'm at awe at how quick their reactions.