I'm a noob.. What's my profile? - Been trading options for about 4 months but I don't like stockpicking in this environment. - I have very small amount of capital. Just to play with really, it's not significant enough to lose, or to try and grow at 20% per year. - I'm going to take my capital and trade 1 or 2 ES contracts at a time, < 15 trades per day, mostly from the opening bell to noon eastern time. - I am using NinjaTrader with IQFeed for data and only using a sim/playmoney account for now. I expect to switch to realmoney in a couple of weeks if my results are okay. Why the journal? - I want some accountability for myself to help me trade better. Knowing that I'll need to post my progress up here will force me to trade more carefully. - I'll also try and post about things that I think I'm doing right or wrong. I might get some tips from anyone who is unfortunate enough to stumble into my journal of despair :eek:
Good day today - that's probably why I decided to start posting a journal today Performance - # of Trades: 12 - # of Winners: 11 - % Winning Trades: 92% - # of ES ticks/points profit (after commisions): 20/5 Today's Trading - Mostly just straight-up discretionary trading - Price was pretty wavy today. On the way up, I was watching for price to clip the top of the Keltner band, waiting for a red candle or what appeared to be bullish exhaustion, and entering short. - On the way down I was watching for price to clip the middle of the Keltner band, waiting for a red candle or bullish exhaustion and entering short. - Note, I had a bearish bias this morning, so 10 out of 12 trades today were short. The Losers - The one loser I had was a short at the bottom of the downtrend. Looking back, my entry wasn't perfect, I was about 25% up into the Keltner band, so still below the midpoint but I shorted. This was also the 5th short on the current downtrend, so maybe asking for 5 waves was too much. Price basically continued to march upwards after my entry for a 7-tick loss. I can't fault my entry too much here except for perhaps being greedy with a fifth wave, but I could have brought in my stop. A 7-tick stop (I average about 3-tick profit) might have been too much.. Looking at my winning trades today, none of them retraced more than 5 ticks after my entry so I need to look at average retracement after entry for the day (a running average for the day) and bring in my stops as necessary.. Tomorrow's Trading Plan - I'm mostly going to try and do what I did today. Find wavy action and try to capture 3-4 ticks per wave.. The one change I will make is the running average of # of ticks retracement after entry on winning trades. I'll throw this into my excel tracker that tracks each trade and try to use it. - I may be trading too much, 12 trades is about $120 in commision which is almost 10 ticks of potential profit.. Do I want to trade less and capture bigger moves though? Not right now.. So status quo for now.
if you are trading emini futures, might be good to go to anek's holy grail journal. that will help you.
Ah, that's right, it's ~ $5 for each round-trip, I was doing $5 each way. An updated performance section: Performance - # of Trades: 12 - # of Winners: 11 - % Winning Trades: 92% - # of ES ticks/points profit (after commisions): 25/6.25 Thanks!
Bad day today - Maybe I should have started the journal tomorrow Performance - # of Trades: 5 - # of Winners: 2 - % Winning Trades: 40% - # of ES ticks/points profit (after commisions): -22/(-5.5) Today's Trading - Tried to do the same as yesterday (catch top/bottom of waves) - Price was not wavy at all. It was jumped all over the place with only 1 or 2 wave 'peaks' per trend. Waves with 3, 4 or 5 peaks are what I had success with yesterday, today I couldnt do anything. - Note, I tried not to trade with a bias (up/down for the day), but to just buy lows on an uptrend, buy highs on a down trend. My entries followed peaks and troughs properly, but after only 1 or 2 ticks of retracement, price turned the other way and broke the trend. The Losers - My first loss was down where the bottom of an upward trend trough should have been. Indeed, it was for a couple of minutes, but then price quickly dropped down instead of resuming the uptrend. I see now that while my entry was when price dipped below the Keltner middle band, I didn't wait for price to retrace back over the middle band. Perhaps waiting for this will confirm that we are continuing back upwards.. - Likewise, my second loss was a short trade, entered near to of Keltner band. I may have been wiser to wait for price to peak at the top of the band, and enter a bit later, once the downtrend has definately restarted and price has hit the middle band. Overall I dont think the action today is working for me so I am going to call it a day early. Average Retracement - Average retracement was 7.4 ticks today, but since only a small # of trader were winners, this is not really the data I want. I want to see average retracement on winning trades.. For that subset only, the average was 5.5 ticks per trade (only 2 trades of data though). Tomorrow's Trading Plan - I'm going to try and be a bit more discriminate on entry points. I am going to wait a bit longer to confirm the movement before jumping in.
we all have something that works for us,we hope, if it's not working, the keltner channels, you're the first i've heard of that uses them, try to broaden your range, i'm a carpenter and i keep learning over and over ,the more tricks in your bag , the better prepared you are, keltner is just one option , keep an open mind, keep learning til you die.
no one thing works very often,you need a lot of different indicators(tools) for different types of mrkts, and even then you still have to be able to recognize,momentum, bear ,bull, trend, acceleration or deceleration of those trends, overriding sentiment, seasons(earnings, elections, interest rate climate,overbought, oversold, and on and on....so don't fall in love with any one indicator..it would be an expensive lesson