You know? My PnL graph often go on for weeks without any losing trade doing SCALPING. As soon as I decided to hold some trades for day to swing trading for bigger gains, my PnL graph went for a roller coaster ride thanks to Trump.
I believe a trader with a small account can learn to scale in with the micros as price moves against him. But he has to be very disciplined and know how to read PA. When to absolutely exit with a loss and go the other way doubled or tripled up. And when to take profits and not let greed grip him. Here is an example live this morning MES. Long 4 times scaling in or rather averaging down for scalping purposes. Two contracts each green marker for a total of 8 contracts. Exit is red marker. So BE on first 2 contracts. Make money on other 6 i.e. other three entries.
And here are subsequent trades in MES today for over $1112.50 before deducting comm. you will find the first trade in my earlier chart in this chart too. This is scaling in or averaging down using technology that breaks the rules. The original poster is not doing this I realize, but what he is doing IS good. He is taking his profits fast (not being greedy) and cutting his losses fast when the time comes to do so. He appears to have a high win rate. A very important metric. And his profits are adding up. He is breaking some rules the guru’s sing and doing so with a small account. If he keeps it up he will soon make his goal or at least GET halfway there. kudos!
Volpri, great job on those many trades. $1100+ today with micros! When I grow up I want to be like you.
Here's the similar Cumulative Delta example in MotiveWave: In MotiveWave, you go to Study>Volume Based>Cumulative Delta (or you can go to Study>All Studies, and choose it from there). The Study Dialog pops up. On the General tab, you choose Line, as the bar type. On the Options tab, under Graph, choose Price Graph (goes directly on that graph, no need to drag it from anywhere else). And under Overlay, choose full. Plenty of other options to play with, but that's the basic setup.
Well, my journal is just one month old now, and we are already on page 33 according to my Elite Trader screen. I guess the topic and my bold 2% daily goal got some attention. Now I will do my best to keep it up. Thanks again to everyone who has given feedback - good or bad. It really keeps me on my toes. Again, one of my stated goals here is to show the world that with some patience and some decent trading, new (or frustrated) traders should put their money into their own live account - instead of the coffers of the funding companies - and only trade 1 to 3 micros until they can prove profitability. If it takes a month to make $200, so what??? The E-mini's will be there waiting for you. What is an extra 3 to 6 to 9 to 12 months if you will come out the other side with $10k+, and have gained the strategies, confidence, and discipline to make $25k to $100k+ the next year? ... Even with tarriffs and tweets floating around out there consuming all the available atmospheric oxygen!!! Build good habits. Learn to be disciplined. If you blow an account, have it be a $500 account, and not a $5,000 or $50,000 account. And sim trading just doesn't have the same impact on your trading brain, so use micros to get real trading experience. It takes hundreds of hours of screen time to program your brain to trade successfully. A new study (click here) of over 1500 private traders showed that 97% of day traders fail to make any money. And the 3% who make money don't make very much. The very best trader averaged $300 per day. (Think of the many millions of dollars spent on indicators and courses!) So what is going on? Why is it so hard? I will attempt to answer this another day. But we are going to buck the trend here, and I want to bring along as many people as I can. Slowly build your account like an oak tree adds rings and branches. It just starts with a small acorn, but becomes mightly and beautiful: This is my goal for myself and for you. Steve Theobald
I did not trade the micros again today. The market being so close to the all time highs and the parabolic move up from the wee morning hours (candidly) quickly took away my confidence. But I did have one success today. Can you guess what it was? (don't scroll down until you try!) I used the Cumulative Delta chart (light blue) and publicly predicted the move on ES down to 3,005. And that is where it went. Even though the market was in new high territory, you can see that the institutional traders had stopped buying and had begun selling hand over fist to the retail traders, who got left holding the bag today. Here is the move down from the highs: It seems that a trader who really knows what he is doing could make $1,000s every single day. Even though I know how to pedal, I still feel like I am using training wheels. (boys bike of course)
Today is Quadruple Witching day. A friend of mine said it this way, "Something that only happens 4 times a year. Meaning. . . . Market Index Futures, Stock Futures, Index Options and Stock options all expire today. This usually leads to big swings in the Market. Not that the market hasn't been volatile. Just to expect the same action, if not more, from today. So In others words. Speculators will be looking to take profits or cover losses today." With this in mind, I kept things light today. Just one MYM trade for $6.50: I think now is a great time to mention that my favorite trades are shorting pops or buying dips. Notice this trade. My 50 sma was angling DOWN at the time. The prior few minutes were clearly bearish. But then we got that fast pop. And that is when I pounced on the scalp. FYI, I know that fast moves like that pop are often followed by additional strength, and so I got out fast. And you can see that the market indeed kept going up. (In fact, the second leg up from 125 to 170 was almost exactly the same length as the first leg up from 105 to 150 - which is a very common occurrence.)