No, you don't need a trend

If it's working for you on a consistently basis then the success merits no criticism.

Hats off for making it work.

Anek

 

So is 1 P&L statement we're going to get from this?

Keep the ball rollin here and post up a few more.

Gotta see how well this works.

 

FWIW:

"Never, ever, follow conventional wisdom in the market. You have to learn to go counter to the markets. You have to learn how to think for yourself; to be able to see that the emperor has no clothes. Most people can’t do it. Most people want to follow a trend. “The trend is your friend.” Maybe that is valid for a few minutes in Chicago, but for the most part, following what everyone else is doing is rarely a way to get rich. You may make money that way for a while, but keeping it is very hard."
James Rogers, MW, p.314

Granted, he had very deep pockets.

 

Alright, I'll post more. I wasn't planning on doing more because it's time consuming drawing up the charts but when the market gets a little slow during the day I'll post again.

 

That's cool. If you have time.

 

More than trend or choppy markets I prefer to see markets as "tradable" or "non tradable". You can have choppy conditions in a tradable market as you described above or also you can have trending markets that are "non tradable".

At the end everything is about perception!!!

Look at todays NQ US Morning:

a) 1st Chart 1 min ... = Choppy non tradable
b) 2nd Chart the same but 144 ticks ...= Choppy tradable
c) 3rd Chart US afternoon ... = Trendy Tradable

jjrvat

 

Here are two trades from this AM. They will probably be my only two trades today.

The first one is a simple buy on weakness and wait for an uptick. The market gave me 2 points so I took it. Had this gone lower I would have stopped out rather than add because the downside potential was high at that point.

The next one is a fade of a pop up. When a move like this occurs I'm looking to sell the exact top if I can. I was 2 ticks shy of the top on this one. Initially, I put my limit buy 2.25 points below. Pops like this tend to collapse fast so I moved it up to +1.50 points if that happened. We started going sideways so I adjusted back to 2 points. The longer this goes sideways the higher the probability this is a continuation move so I moved my target up to +1 and got hit. Good thing, because it went higher. Slow days like this are very likely to trend so I'm not going to fight that much past the first hour.

Overall take: +3 points.

 

At the end everything is about perception!!!----------->>>> This is the key. One of my trading buddies looks to do 1 or 2 trades per day and hold for the big swing. I'm just the opposite. I look to do 10 or 15 trades per day and look for the small corrections. You just have to develop a style that fits your personality.

 

Hi PTF,

Good thread. Just thought that you made it seem much easier than it actually is because most of your trades happen to catch the tops and bottoms exactly, if not the first try, then the second. It's when you are caught in a "silent" trend, you have to be careful. But, you must have your way of discerning that.

What's the maximum number of entries that you have averaged down before?

Keep posting.

 

You are exactly right when you say you can get caught in a silent trend. That's happened to me a few times. There's no way to know until after the fact. All I can do at that point is take my loss. It happens. In fact, that's the reason I took the point on that short earlier. Low volume days tend to trend up. I didn't want to get caught in that kind of move so I took what I could get. As it turns out, I would have done better to hold but I wasn't willing to accept that risk.

Getting close to the tops and bottoms is a requirement of this strategy so it's much harder than it appears. I don't want to go over 3 entries to peg the reversal but that's not a hard and fast rule. What I'm really looking at is how the 5's are shaping up. If a top or bottom is getting carved in then I'll relax that rule a bit. Once the top/bottom has been established I'm placing my stop above/below that high/low.

I've found the true highs/lows for intra-day trading occur on the 5's. If a bottom is taken out on the 5's it's likely to keep going. The 1's are very noisy so I don't use that chart to determine stops.