On my long-term plays, I look at the fundamentals to determine whether we are in a bull market or a bear market. I use technicals to determine my entries. This is my assesment of the current situation. Even though the S&P has made new highs, it has always seen distribution and has been unable to close above the previous resistance. If one was to look at all the componenets in S&P, you'll notice that Oil sector is the one that is keeping it high. The oil sector is the last one to peak in the bull market. The volume by price has been unable to make new high as the S&P. This is not good from a supply-demand perspective. This tells us that most of the players that need to be in the market is already there. There could be some fund managers that were waiting for the Fed to get done with the rate increases to be fully invested. They probably bought this morning when the Fed hinted that they are about ready to pause. Now we have everyone that was bullish, invested in the market. Now there are no more buyers left to take this baby much higher. Right now we are in the last stage of the bull-market. The easy money has already been made. Now we need two huge sell-offs(more than 1%) to enter the bear market. I will look to sell any rallies here. That is where I will be using my technical indicators.
Nice post E-Mini, You should look into diversifying into stocks, ETF's and Options where you can manage a portfolio, use money management rules, set stops, etc. There are several websites which can assist you with this if you are interested. The fundamental analysis approach is good for those other securities, but you're going to be hit-or-miss if you use the approach trading mini-futures, because there are always a number of agendas going on in the markets on any given day, and you have to use TA and indicators to trade the markets automatically and with hair trigger responses. Case in point: After getting consecutively stopped-out on several short trades, you hit a good single, doubled-up on it, and were looking like you had a homer there for a minute. But then you left the position open over-night (never a good thing with the "futs") and failed to close-out when the market hit the second level of support and started to rally from there at today's open (at that level, the market would've had to have dropped through the floor for the position to continue to be profitable, and when it didn't happen, well ...). You still had a "nice" profit, but then you re-entered short when the market was rallying (yet again) and lost another 4 pts of profit, ending up with a profit of 3.25 pts sum total. With a stop of 4.00 pts ES your system still has a negative expectation of profit in real-time trading (I know it has positive expectation on paper, most trader's systems do). *** With all of this back seat driving how did I do this morning? My system gave me 2.00 pts of profit, I booked it and called it a day. That's all I'm looking for, 2.00 - 5.00 pts is pretty much my range (occasionally more, but not often), and my system will deliver it 3 or 4 out of 5 days, and keeps me out when my indicators aren't "lining up". If I do take a loss (ALWAYS a possibility, I just try my best not to make it a "probability"), it's usually -1.5 pts or less, and then, once again, I call it a day (the market will be there tomorrow). I've learned for me, slow and boring definitely wins the race! Best Regards, Jimmy P.S. PM me you if you want the other info, I'll be happy to forward it to you.