First day trading live on the YM (playmoney) and it was pretty good. I also jumped into puretick.com (more on this below) and have good things to say on that. Performance - # of Trades: 10 - # of Winners: 8 - % Winning Trades: 80% - # of YM points profit (after commisions): 10 Today's Trading - Good Entries, bad stops, and a new type of trade - Overall my entries were good, I had very little retracement on my entries, and I went all the way with validating a down move after a wave top before shorting. This helped keep a good % winners. - I had a bad stop that cost me a fair bit of points.. I was on the third crest of a downtrend, price was peaking, i had a red candle, so I shorted - so far all according to plan. Problem is, price stayed flat and then took off upwards (this was the 10:30 turnaround from this morning, is 10:30 a 'special' turnaround time?). Instead of allowing my stop to get me out of the trade, I slid my stop to the peak of the last wave, assuming that would be my signal that the downtrend was over. Instead, I should have let my stop just get me out so that I could re-enter higher.. As it turns out, I shouldn't have even entered this trade in the first place. While the downtrend was getting lower highs, the lows were not getting lower, it was turning into a triangle. That should have been a signal to be extra careful and either not trade, or honor my stop.. Bad play.. - I had a different kind of stop trouble as well.. In order to lock in profits, I have a habit of dragging in my stop 1-3 ticks below my entry when I am shorting. This way, if price starts to turn back up, I am gauranteed atleast a tiny profit instead of a loss. On the YM - this is kicking my ass. The YM seems to have a way of crawling back up to my entry and hitting my stop all the time. I had a lot of 1 or 2 point profit trades, when if I allowed my stop to be 6-10 points loss, then the stop would often never hit.. I really need to figure out better stop policy... - There are 2 trades that are making me money now. 1) My first 'system' that I've described so far in this thread - catching wavy action and fading the peaks. 2) Catching a breakaway. In other words 'chasing'. - I'm finding that chasing can be pretty profitable, especially if I can get in early enough in the move. When price breaks out, I often see a fat large candle on the 1M chart. I have been able to jump in halfway up this candle, and then carry the trade 1 or 2 more minutes for a big profit. Is this called chasing? Or is chasing only after the trend has been going for a while? Whatever it is, I am going to be tracking these trades separately to see how profitable they are, and trying to identify them earlier (and identify their breakdown earlier). We'll see how this goes.. If anything, learning to detect these breakouts will help my original 'first' strategy. Tomorrow's Trading Plan - Pay attention to breakouts, don't just randomly start chasing these, but maybe take 1 or 2 tomorrow if they are in the direction of the macro trend. I expect one around a fed announcement tomorrow, can I grab a piece of this? - Allow my profit to be at least 7-8 points before bringing in my stop to 1-point profit and locking in my trade. The YM can jump 5 points too easily, so I need a wider stop. If I ever adjust a stop level though - always make it to lock in profits - never the other way (extend a loss like I have been).
I wanted to post my thoughts about puretick.com since it was the first time I went into their room today. I am using their trial subscription. I gotta say that I was really happy with what I saw. This is the first chatroom / shadowing service that I've used (except for ThinkOrSwim's shadow trader which doesnt really compare). I didn't follow their signals since I am just planning out my own system. They made 1 call though while I was in the room and it was correct, for a large profit (20+ points if I recall correctly). More important than all that though is the people in the room and the pro-trader on the mic were really helpful. I was asking them all kinds of questions on their actions and they were explaining their thought process. As a new trader this was incredibly helpful. Today I learned: - What proper 'pairing down' looks like for multiple contract orders - How to setup a trade so that it is running 'on the house' - What signal/indicator confluence really looks like - What proper use of multiple time scales looks like - what I should be looking for - I also listened to live pit audio for the first time. That was totally wild.. Really cool thing to do.. Some of the stuff I listed is basic and I've 'learned' it before, but seeing today, having it taught verbally and allowing me to ask follow-up questions, it gave me a better *understanding* of the material - different from just reading it in a book, I feel like I could teach it. Of course I wouldnt actually teach it, I'm a noob, but it's a better level of understanding with the interaction. Anyhow, overall happy with the first day there. My learning today was a lot faster than any other day so far. Let's see what tomorrow looks like.
Today is proving out to be pretty useless. # of trades: 9 # of winning trades: 3 % winning trades: 33% YM points profit: -26 Today's trading Action all day was not wavy, the first 2 hours price was stuck in a narrow range, not doing a whole lot. I didn't get the wavy action I like so I was forcing trades and doing poorly. The story is that price on the YM and ES are almost the same, but so far I'm just not feeling the YM. I am going to switch back to ES tomorrow, I may keep both charts open as I did today, but trade both charts and see how I do.