There were some good trades today , not all the trades I've marked were winners but following demand / supply lines and entering on the 1st retracement after the break would have resulted in some good trades today, I added swing highs and lows and support when were in a range.
After trading on the demo most of the day I have come to realize that I way over trade and before I can go live the 1st of the year I have to get better at this, I had 30 trades on the nq today with less than 1/2 being profitable and still came out with over 100 ticks profit, granted this is on the sim and the fills will not be the same, I must get better at following the rules and cut my trades down to 10 or less per day
I believe it been four years ago I radically changed my approach to day trading, which has change my bottom line big time. I was trading well before I made these changes, but I wanted to get where I was doing much more volume. In order to do that and still have some margin of risk control, I started to concentrate on my losing percentages by the week, worked hard at reducing percentages. Divided trading day by so many minutes to see where most of the profits came, spent incredible amount of time focusing on winning trades and breakeven trades/small lose trades. I found for ES, best times to trade were first 40 minutes and last two hours of trading session, for Nasdaq it was first 2.5 hours BUT once Goal of 10pts reached, day is either over or reduce contract size 85%. I think by reducing number of signals, reducing amount of time trading, having small losing percentages can give most a smoother equity curve which allows one to increase size. Overtrading takes its toll greatly on your account and body. After awhile your broker is making more money than you are. I hope you keep good stats so you can break down signals, as this area can reduce your protective stops, what is ave of time are you in on profitable trades, I have time limits and either change targets to breakeven plus one tick or take profit. Markets that stagnate for me often become losing trades. Doing ten trades seems like too many, 5-6 trades when you start real time should be good enough, when you are trading well, increase number but when not trading well, better to cut back. Good luck.
with my goal of cutting back to no more than 10 trades per day I used the 500 tick chart to me it seems the price action is smoother. here is what I saw this morning
the last 3 days have had many chances to make money, Friday for example 1 contract could have netted 30 points by following the drill!