NoDoji's Day Trading Log

This really seemed a perfect day to be trading. Saw 3 trades, all profitable. Took one short with real money, one on sim short, and watched one that I should have at least put on sim long.

ES made a bull flag move up today. I actually scalped against the long move, but missed out on taking the long after the exit of the scalp short.

I wonder if this is a problem if you make money on a short, its harder to take the next trade long since your bias may still be short.

I think if you are trading breakouts, you really need 2 contracts, so you can take profit with 1 and let the other one run if breakout occurs. This way you are not so emotional since you already booked a profit. Although, I have seen other traders just let all their contracts go to the target price and take a full loss on the stop if price reverses before hitting target.

 

Just a thought but it might be easier to FoCuS if you just looked for one side or ta other.

Edit: baby steps...

 

traderdavid said:.................... I once punished myself when I violated my own rules, but i found the punishment made things worse.

I know how you feel, i married a second time.

 

to tell the truth, I know one of my friends did further. when he violated his own rules, he wrote a donation check from his trading account until he does not violate his own rules any more. it is a pretty effitive way. he now always follows his own rules.

of course, if you are very serious in trading, better use this hard way to correct yourself.

trading capital is lifeblood to a trader, so this kind punishment is very effective. paniful, but worth it!

"if I see a setup, do not pull trigger and later on I find it is a very profitable trade, donate XXX from my trading account to xxx charity fund"....

it is hard, painful, people always end up with no rule,better let a third person execute those rules...

 

Chose to sit out the open and wait for housing numbers. I thought I’d be able to catch the ES trigger price as soon as the news hit. Wrong. Blew through my opening long trigger of 1116.50 to 1021.00 before I could even blink, then moved up another 4 handles.

No trades today after that move, everything became too range bound for me.

So, based on my recent observations (and sim testing) on news reactions, I’ve come to the anecdotal conclusion that it’s safe to bracket a set of orders with housing, oil inventories and consumer sentiment, because this news is straightforward. But job numbers seem to be more open to interpretation, causing whipsaws when the news comes out. My test with bracketed orders on job #’s whipsawed me into a very quick loss by triggering the long, then crashing right through the sell stop.

I’m curious how futures traders trade these news events, because by not having my order in place in advance today, I missed my entry and a very good trade.

 

I guess its up to the trader, but certain news events, I will not trade since stops will not be honored.

However, on forex trades, I used to do a hedge trade ie going short one and long similar to what you are talking about bracketing but with 2 different currencies the EUR/USD and the GBP/USD during certain news events which helped protect me and also would make profit. Again nothing is 100%, but anytime you can get above 55% probability with equal risk / reward then its usually worth taking the trade.

 

if I do not know or do not understand, then I do nothing. simple and enough.

whe I wake up and turn on my computer, I look around the market through market scanner, if something poped up to my eye, or last day's trading reminded me something, I keep focus on those what I knew.

yesterday, I was thinking to go long PCX at the closing, I thought this thing will fly pretty soon from the daily chart pattern, but it did not attract me for a decent day trade. then I realized ANIK was poumped up 70% then dropped from 8.8 to 6.8 yesterday, that must be a pump and dump. so I shorted it very comfortably, actually it is a good call, it is on today's top loser list.

I flipped over the house data chart before 8:00am, the data continues its "better" trend in four continuous month, a strong trend. so I put out those house related stocks/etfs before me, think to catch a good run. but since my rule is one time I only focus on one trade (I already toke the ANIK trade), I put them to another screen page.

after my ANIK trade, i saw the whole market already climbed a lot and DDR attracted me, the whoel market's tone made me think DDR will shoot more, so I comfortably bought it and i saw it thrusted in big bar, I thought it is time to unload ( a good fade), but no appetite to short it since the whole market is strong.

 

nod, Do not feel alone on that housing number, i was flat and was completly surprised as it hit. I assume a big order just breezed right through the BUY orders like nothing because of the summer dog days. Regardless of reason it was an unusual FAST move during regular trading hours. VERY unusual to say the least.

Did no trades today myself.

PS: On reports, in general it is best to let the number come out first before you trade them. They can be a crap shoot because we never know how the big dogs are positioned coming into the report. Paul Tudor Jones might be very short and expecting a very bad number and across the aisle Goldman sachs might be LONG and expecting a very good number. Expectations of the reports numbers thus are probably more important than the number itself. Thus just follow the price after the report hits.

 

You are not at a level playing field with big institutions. Most of these news items are released to the big institutions minutes before being made public. Pay attention to the pre-news buying or selling and you will see they clearly know something that we don't. Today, for instance, big buyers stepped in minutes before 10am. 9:59 big green bar is a clear sign that they knew what the housing # was.

If you knew the # before it was made public, you had at least 5 minutes to build up your huge, monstrous long position in ES. Big institutions made money with inside information, while you wonder why you didn't pull the trigger. It's easy to explain why you didn't pull the trigger: you had no clue what the housing # was.

I live in a 6-story building and you don't know if I live on the ground floor or the 6th floor, if I ask you to step out of my window blind-folded, would you do it?

 

BP, I was about to post that question here next. I saw price creeping up in advance of the news and thought, "It looks like the numbers are already out and they're good". I figured SOMEONE knew something. I wondered if indeed this news is released to institutions in advance of the scheduled hour, and if it's wise as a retail trader to grab onto the coattails of that anticipatory action.

Is it most often a strong indicator of the move, or are there a lot of fakeouts?

One more question: If I had a buy stop order in place that made a move like that on news the slippage would've probably taken a quarter of my profits.

If I had a 1116.50 buy stop on ES pre-news this morning, say 1-5 contracts, and it jumped right to 1021-ish, what kind of slippage could I expect on a quick move right through my order?