Goal Sit in a shack in the woods (with high speed internet of course) & make some money...enough to live a simple life & some left over to become somewhat wealthy Type of Trading Daytrading. Try to catch the major swings of the day. Also some scalps. Product CL - Light Sweet Crude Oil (Yummy) Method Read the charts & act when I see an opportunity. Not sure how else to describe it. If price makes a 1-2-3 reversal at support in an uptrend then go long....not because it's a certain pattern with a certain name, but because price stopped going down & turned up & the context it occurred in supports going long. I pay attention to swing highs/lows, trend, volume, waves, support/resistance, prior day's high/low, climactic moves, levels where others are likely to be stopped, patterns (don't just blindly follow a pattern though), EMA's, time-of-day, & any other clues I notice. Same stuff a lot of other people look at I guess. Position Size Starting with 1 contract. Would like to create some kind of progressive method to create the possibility of huge wins & small losses. One idea I had was if up 20 ticks, then go to 2 contracts, if up 70 ticks, then 3 contracts, if up 120 ticks, then 4 contracts. If 20 ticks made on 4 contracts, then back to 1 contract. Always reduce contract size if I fall below the tick level required. Not sure if that makes any sense; still thinking about it. Me Right now I'm trading sim. I have a job, so I can't trade fulltime unfortunately, but I'd rather not get fired at the moment to have that opportunity. Need to make some moolah first. I have traded real money in the past & I lost enough to humiliate myself. Not sure if losing that money was good or bad; I'll tell you in 40 years or so. It didn't really feel that good though. The one thing I have never tried is starting a public journal. So here we go.
November 6th, 2013 1st SHORT Price kept finding resistance at top of range -4 Ticks 2nd SHORT Climax bar 14 Ticks 3rd SHORT Anticipate double-top 15-sec chart -12 Ticks 4th SHORT Climax bar, climax volume, 15-sec chart 15 Ticks 5th LONG Continuation 1 Ticks 6th LONG Bottom of bull flag - 15 sec chart -4 Ticks 7th LONG Close back inside the channel 1 Ticks 8th SHORT Tiny double top -13 Ticks 9th SHORT Climax bar 10 Ticks 10th LONG 200 Ema possible support 15 sec 2 Ticks 11th SHORT Failure to take swing high/pin bar -10 Ticks 12th SHORT Climax bar 13 Ticks 13th LONG 1-2-3 Reversal at upsloping 20 EMA 11 Ticks TOTAL 8 Winners 5 Losers 24 Ticks (minus commissions)
November 7th, 2013 1st LONG 1-2-3 reversal 15-sec chart. After pin bar on 1-min chart. Turned into 1-2-3 on 1-min chart. 11 Ticks 2nd SHORT Continuation trade after 15-min supply line held & 1-min demand line broke. Had nice gain, but it evaporated. 2 Ticks 3rd LONG Small triangle attempted to break out down, but failed. -5 Ticks 4th LONG Same triangle scenario -7 Ticks 5th LONG Same triangle scenario. By now I'm obviously overtrading & showing the all-too-common FOMO (fear of missing out) -5 Ticks 6th LONG Triangle broke to downside. Looked climactic & failed to make a LL 21 Ticks 7th SHORT Scalp at diagonal resistance line 5 Ticks 8th LONG 15-min supply line broke. Retracement on entry chart. -6 Ticks 9th LONG 15-min supply line broke. Bull flag, cup w/ handle, diagonal resistance line now serving as support entry chart. 21 Ticks TOTAL 5 Winners 4 Losers 37 Ticks (minus commissions)
1st LONG Bought 1-2-3 reversal 15-sec chart, after price failed to take out 1-min swing low. Turned back down though, so exit. -5 Ticks 2nd LONG Tried the same thing with a more obvious 1-2-3 reversal. Turned back down again. -4 Ticks 3rd LONG Try again. Obviosly I'm overtrading again & afraid of missing out. Trying to get in early. -7 Ticks 4th LONG Swing low broke. Bought volume climax & middle of a doji bar from 60-min chart. -8 Ticks 5th LONG Bought a 1-min volume climax -7 Ticks 6th LONG Bought climax bar after prior 60-min low was taken out. -8 Ticks 7th LONG 2B Entry. Got target. 41 Ticks 8th LONG Climax bar. Did not go up as expected. Got out. 1 Ticks 9th SHORT Demand line broke. BO of small triangle. Did not go down as expected. Got out. 2 Ticks 10th SHORT Thought everyone in the world was waiting to take profits at upper triangle boundary & figured they would get screwed. Wrong. -10 Ticks 11th LONG Thought everyone in the world would short the upper triangle boundary & get screwed. They got screwed in a big way, but I had a tiny little target. 11 Ticks TOTAL 2 Winners 7 Losers 2 Breakeven 6 Ticks (minus commissions) Whoa.....mentally unbalanced today. Lack of patience, fear of missing out, & "thinking" what price "might" do instead of watching what it's actually doing & following it. Not sure why I fall into this "thinking" trap so often. Also had some really weird, dumb ideas on a few of the trades. Very creative I guess. Well anyway it's embarrassing to post, but here it is. Maybe this willl help me to stop doing stupid stuff in the future.
I didn't mean I'd live like an Indian killing elk & making my own clothes & going on spirit quests. By shack I mean a somewhat modern but small, simple place like a cabin, or even a very small inexpensive house tucked away somewhere. So I just need money for normal living expenses. Money for the shack, utility bills, health insurance, food, clothes, car expenses, etc. And some left over to save & invest. If I happened to become what some consider rich then that would open up a world of other opportunities, but that's not really important to me right now.
you have to remember that most people here are not minimalist type of people. Most of them are teenager to 25 year old rich kid studying finance in a big time university and looking to work on wall street so they can make a 6 figure salary and hope to move up to a half million dollar income. Then you have those same people from the first catagoriy who are into their late 30s who take hamptons vacations and piss away money. These kinds of people generally look down on a minimalist lifestyle and even go as far to call them parasites of the earth. So dont be surprised if you get comments like that. But 67 ticks in 3 days is good work....maybe u can buy 2 or 3 more cabins in the woods at the end of the month
For next week: Make sure when I anticipate something happening, that I see price give some kind of indication that it may actually happen before entering a trade. At one point I bought a downtrend on Friday over & over & over, but there was no good indication/signal/setup.......................nothing.
1st LONG Bought after 3 pushes down & violation of swing low & climactic volume on an uptrending day. Obviously not a good enough reason. Exact low-tick on exit. -9 Ticks 2nd LONG HL/DB at support. Price seemed dead, turned back down. Exited. -2 Ticks 3rd LONG HL near support. Price turned back down. Exited. Probably should have exited when range was broken but then rejected immediately. -5 Ticks 4th SHORT Anticipate stop run. Set target at support level, but it was easily broken & my tiny 6-tick target could have been 30 ticks. 6 Ticks 5th LONG Bought overshoot of 1-min trend channel on climactic bar/volume. Got scared out though when it continued to fall 9 more ticks. -7 Ticks 6th LONG 2B Trade. 12 Ticks 7th LONG Retracement in uptrend. 7 Ticks TOTAL 3 Winners 4 Losers 2 Ticks (minus commissions) NOTES Instead of losing 16 ticks on the 1st 3 trades, a clearer entry wasn't really called for until 95.03. This would have been a loser of 6 or 7 ticks if I would have held until I saw that the range was going to break downside. So 7 tick loss instead of 16 tick loss. Overtraded. Tried to get in too early again..............saw signals to enter, but not good, solid signals. Plus I sold the low of the range 3 times. Setting targets is tricky. I feel so lucky to get a target after 3 losses, but then by not setting a target I could have made an additional easy 20 ticks. I set the 6 tick target because I was planning on going long at support (which is where my target was). That support (swing high from Friday) turned out to do nothing. The main thing to note during my trading period was that an obvious double top was formed, swing low taken, and that was a reason to be trying for shorts, not longs. Still a lot of work to do. Goal is to catch the major swings, but I think I sometimes miss the forest for the trees.
1st LONG Retracement. Wimped out & took an early target after swing high was taken. Felt frustrated from starting off with losses past couple days. Rookie mistake. 10 Ticks 2nd SHORT 2B 8 Ticks 3rd LONG Retracement. I changed my mind. Feel like a little more chop will come after the steep upmove. 5 Ticks 4th SHORT Anticipate stop run. Target hit. Was worth more though. 10 Ticks 5th LONG Tried to buy low in a steep bull flag near trendline/demand line. -11 Ticks 6th LONG Try again. Taken out of frustration. -10 Ticks 7th LONG Try again. Taken out of extreme frustration. -12 Ticks 8th LONG Try again on 15-sec climax bar. Very stupid -15 Ticks 9th LONG Bought huge climax bar at 60-min trendline/demand line -16 Ticks 10th LONG 2nd Climax Bar at yesterday's low 0 Ticks 11th SHORT Scalp. Target was test of a 1-min pin bar. 10 Ticks 12th LONG Pin Bar at yesterday's low 1 Ticks TOTAL 8 Winners 11 Losers 3 Breakeven -61 Ticks (minus many many commissions) NOTES Too many trades to list them all. 22 all together. I was in control for the first 5 trades. Then I lost it. Did nothing but pure reckless frustrated desperate gambling the rest of the day. CL had an incredible downtrend. The whole time I had this irresistable urge to buy. I could not fathom that it would keep going down. And keep going down. And keep going down. So I just bought, got stopped, bought, got stopped, bought, got stopped. I don't understand the incredible urge to keep buying in a downtrend. I know other amateurs do the same thing. Not sure what to do at this point. This game is hard.