Certainly feels like we want to roll over here going into the last hour. If we do then I'll monitor for a short trade.
It's been a long time since I updated my journal and I've been thinking that I want to get back into it. Plenty has changed since I last posted in early February. I'm still trading ES and NQ after a brief stint experimenting with the currencies. I had just never found the confidence and consistency that I had been searching for. I've made some pretty substantial changes to how I trade the equity futures from what I was doing previously. I haven't had any significant drawdown this year, it's been basically chopping around breakeven as I continually tweaked my strategy. Finally over the last couple months I've settled into a groove with my trading. I've been able to put together some simple rules for entry, exit and stop management that have really made the light go on in my head. I've never had an issue managing risk but I don't think I was quite prepared at first for the difference between trading stocks and trading ES/NQ. The biggest change I've made has been to abandon set stops (i.e. always having a 2pt stop in ES, etc). Instead I put in an emergency stop in case of disaster and manually trade out for a loss if that arises. I found that oftentimes my stops would get picked off while the reason for being in the trade had not actually changed. This one change has made a huge difference. I'm going to try and post here to keep myself focused all day. I've been doing roughly 10-20 trades per day so it'll probably be impossible to post every trade I make, but I will at least do a mid-day update and end of day update. Comments are welcome but really this journal is for self diagnosis still.
Jeff, perhaps you could just post a quick screen grab of your executions for the day? That's nice and compact and doesn't take much time (or share any unwanted information).
I like that idea. I'll go figure out how to do the screen capture this weekend and start doing that on Monday.
An even lazier option is to just export your executions to an Excel file (since ET supports those uploads). I think most brokers support that as well.