first things first, considering sellers were very strong, than why didn't you go short than? if you want to blindly buy a double bottom you need to get close to the low and use a tight stop, but I for one do not subscribe to that kind of behavior, especially when this is the 2nd truly great day to be both long and short. But back to the reason you entered long when you had a really bearish candle at 8:30 and its high was not taken out. You than had a bingo triple top to short and you waited for it to test the lows and do a double tap bounce? The probabilities were not favoring your logic today. You should not be risking real money until you make enough fake money consistently on a demo account. Thinking you need another demo account that goes against your trading beliefs, maybe than you will have that Eureka moment. It worked for my hard head.
Yep, yep, yep and yep. You'd never know it by looking at my trades today, but I actually have rules about not trading against the trend. I had changed my rules earlier this week to allow for trading tops and bottoms, and that meant I stopped following those rules for all my trades....and that's where I went wrong. All the losing trades today (main demo acct and live acct), except one, broke those rules. So, next week starts following those rules very strictly and not trading tops and bottoms. I know good traders can do it, but I'm not one of those. At least not yet. And it's scary, looking at my trades, to see how, on my own thinking, I called the trades wrong so often. "The probabilities were not favoring your logic today." I have a track record of unlogical trading. The only thing giving me hope is that I use some indicators that do a better job of reading the market for me than I do. I was a little bit profitable in this account end of November and December when I followed them super carefully. So, no more trading how I think price should move. I'm going back to strict indicator trading. When they say the market is moving down....I won't think I know better. Indicators are lagging, some say, and they are, but they make a better trader than I do. Thanks for the feedback! I'll keep working on the logical side of it. Maybe one of these days when there's a triple top that didn't take out a high I'll actually go short.
It is interesting to compare charts. Here's what my chart was like during your time frame... While I was watching the markets today, I was looking at the action in real time. I took a long entry as you see there at that time. (Your timestamps are an hour behind mine.) I did not see the triple top forming, which is marked by the purple line as compared to your chart. I saw we were stuck in a range for an hour. When the market started stuttering on that third attempt at what was now a "breakout attempt", I decided to bail because it just didn't "feel right." A lousy 2 points, barely. The double-bottom you marked on your chart, I marked on mine with that second cyan line on the right. But why did you not see the triple bottom as marked by the first cyan line on the left? You did not note that in your post-trading analysis chart. P.S. I was sweating through that range-bound choppy shit and knew it would break one way or the other. To be honest, I did not think it would break lower due to time of day and day of week, but alas, there it is. We know how the day ended from there. To be fair to you, this was an unusual day for RTH. Have not seen porpoising up and down to the downside through the RTH for quite a while. Q4 2019 has us spoilt.
I only mentioned the triple because it was there and no prior highs were taken out, it could have been one pullback top, or two? The obvious is it would have been a channel and again if price collapses near the top? its not over until its over.
By the way @studentofthemarkets I wanted to make an addendum to that chart, so you can see my thinking on why I got out of that trade when I did... That red line is where my stop was (about 15 points, so $300 risk). I placed it below the previous higher low, because I figured it was going to stair-step upwards. Through that hour it came dangerously close to being hit on two occasions so I recognized the choppy narrow channel. When the trade waffled at the third high, that is when I said to myself, "mreh, risking 15 points to make 15 (my original target)", it just did not seem worth it considering the range of the RTH, and what the market was giving. It did not seem like it was going to give as much I was asking for, so got the hell out and waited for the next entry, which never came for me.
Well, trading a daily time chart with volume rather than a renko chart with price action is certainly different! I have a neat setup with a time-in-bar indicator, but it can only indicate a breakout bar is going to happen. It just cannot predict which way. That is up to me to interpret based on a ton of factors.
Its not a daily it was a 5min chart. I dont use 5mn but the kid does and i was just showing him. But i use a 1mn, and a 30mn.