good job trading, bro, i hope most of your other 20 trades (or is it avg. 10 roundtrips?) worked out as well as the 2 you posted. almost spot on for the short term high/low on those two. great calls!! not sure how many contracts you are trading but wondering if you've considered trading qqqq and spy instead of nq and es as the commish may actually be less than whatever your per contract is if your brokers passes on rebates for adding liquidity and it may give you the option to scale out and hold some for the bigger moves. just an idea but with your going on 7 years experience and apparent trading acumen, you have probably already pondered it and almost everything else to do with your system at least 13 times for another screen capture option, this has worked well for me http://www.etrusoft.com/download.htm have a great weekend and best of luck next week. i look forward to reading your journal.
Hey man, thanks for the good words. The rest of the day wasn't quite as good as those but it was still a profitable day none the less. I've found that my entries are normally very good and it's really been a constant effort to work on the exits. I've looked at trading the spy's and qqqq's before but I've made a conscious decision to stick with futures right now. The tax advantages to trading futures is pretty important. I can spell out my risk pretty easily and I'm able to get consistency on a per contract basis so as the account grows I'm just able to add more contracts. I've tried trading futures before under-capitalized so this time I've made sure that there's plenty of capital in the account and I'm sticking with 1 contract per $10K in the account so even with a bad trade here and there it's not much of a hit.
Just to recap the day for me, it was definitely a challenge. It was almost like a tale of two different days. Before noon the market was actually moving pretty well and I made more trades and had more size on than normal but in the afternoon not many trades came on my radar at all. Unfortunately I took one of my bigger losing trades in quite some time this morning with a 2.5pt loss on a double size position. The only good thing is that I've found that I'm much better and more aggressive when trading out of a hole. I have a problem getting defensive and protecting my money when I get up a bit. Anyway, after that bad loser I was able to come back and take the same setup again 20 minutes later and make 3.5pts on double size. I'm still trying to decide if I want to try and post the trade in my journal as I get into it or if I just want to do a mid-day recap and then an end of the day recap. The hard part about posting trades as they happen is that I'm trying to keep my focus 100% on the charts.
A very slow start to the day for me here. There has really been zero volatility to trade today. I have found that typically Monday is the worst day for my trading, not entirely sure why, but it's always been that way. I will take trades both with the larger trend and against the trend, my style takes both. Unfortunately this morning I had mainly short trades. They were all good setups but we never got any kind of retrace or rollover. What was even more frustrating was that I never really had a pullback to buy into to get long. After what is really one of the slowest mornings I can remember I am at least just down slightly (a few ticks overall). I'll consider that a victory since I was fairly active in the market and followed my plan but you just never know what the market will actually do. I'm looking forward to some more opportunities this afternoon.