I don't know where Eric got the info that this is a "paper trading" journal. I personally trade all of the gaps trades. The other things are a toss up, about half I trade, the other half I do not. All trades presented here are from actual alerts I give in my chatroom ( I don't pay attention to what Toni does, so her stuff is not here). After every trade I give I continually ask in the room "Who got filled?" and "What prices did you get in and out". In every entry here I take the average price that members in our chatroom reported getting. I think this makes it much more realistic as to what can be done with the methods I am using. For example, If we are looking for a long in the ES from 900's and I ask ok, what prices did you guys get, and lets assume just to make this easy that only two people respond. One person got 900 and the other got 901.5 (he was real slow). I would report the entry for the purposes of tracking our room performance as 900.75. In that regard you could call it "paper trading" in that is is something of a synthetic, but if no one reports having gotten a fill, then I assume that no one got it and do not track it unless it goes for a stop, in which case I record it as a loss of 1/2. Example, if it lost 2 points (but not a single person reports a fill) then I will note a 1 point loss. However, if I give something and it goes on to get a 5 point gain, but not a single person reports having gotten a fill, then I do not count it as anything at all. Also, in cases like this I do not count my own fills unless the trade was a loss, and then in this case I will note a loss of 100%. If you look at how most places track their performance it is really a joke. I am not by any means claiming mine is perfect, I am sure you can find some fault in it, but my goal is to put our performance record at a disadvanage so that hopefully it ultimatly mimics what peope did. 90% of the sites I have seen first of all never give a stop with any trade, so if it ultimatly comes back they made money, but if it keeps going towards the gates of hell you obviously should have kept your stop. They also keep track of "best possible case scenario" Meaning, we called it from 25, right after it triggered it went down to 23, but later in the day it went back up to 25.15. Wave the magic wand and we made $0.15 for the day. I think that this gives everyone a bad taste for anyone in the educational advisory business, so, even though most people will never believe it to be true, I try to stack the deck against myself as much as possible, because it results in a much more accurate record of what a person can expect. Brandon
SWJ12, According to what I read here it says "on this thread". Brandon is now on a different thread. It's Brandon's trading Journal. As far as I am concerned Brandon can mention his chatroom as much as he pleases. Some of us here at ET, (that have been registered members for longer than a month) enjoy reading trading journals such as this one, whether it be promotional or not. Some of us read and learn from trading journals or just enjoy reading them, OK !!!
One of the biggest mistakes a newbie can make is thinking the key to doing well is trading 47 times a day. No doubt there are some out there who make good money doing just that, but most will lose over time, as commissions and the inevitable big loss will grind you down. Electronic executions encourage overtrading to a degree unimaginable when we had to call the floor or even worse, an order desk. With those handicaps you knew you had to wait for your pitch. It is a rare day youwill get more than 4 quality set-ups, and most days you are talking one or two.
Today was another very slow day for me of trading. I had only one trade today, and it was an equities trade. Below I have attatched a chart of todays action in the DOW, which gives a very clear indication of why I stayed away...I would have gotten my clock cleaned. The morning gap was too small for it to mean anything at all, so that did not generate a trade. The rest of the days action was just sloppy, as the chart below will show you. Had I traded today I could have easily lost $1000. Nov 8th Trade. Short AZO $83.28(11:05) and covered trade @81.90 (1:46) for a nice gain of $1.38. I'm probably going to call it a day. No need to be donating money to rich Wall Street types. This weekend is Iowa's last home football game (against Northwestern) and we are gonna go the Rose Bowl!!!! So, Ill be out most of the weekend with the game. Hope you all enjoy your weekends as well. Brandon
What was wrong with the first two legs? A couple of great impulse moves with several small pullbacks to enter on.
Gotta agree with you. I thought that this day, in the scheme of days, was relatively easy. A nice move up, followed by a great move down, then followed by any number of 6-7 point moves within a range all below resistance. Frankly, this brings up the larger issue: most of the traders here seem to trade for a couple of points. In light of that, how on earth can ANY day be so complicated that you just couldn't determine a proper situation to make a few points? I'm amazed. This brings up the central problem with the trading style of many of the traders here: they are going for small gains, and therefore to be successful have to take even smaller losses, which means that they are constantly fighting what is basically noise and/or chop. The standard for a setup becomes too rigid, creating an attempt to "game" the futures as opposed to learning something about the stock market and trading on that basis. Just offering an opinion. This market has been a traders dream. But let's face it: the ES is a $50K contract. A 1 point loss is .1%. To think this is reasonable or practical is a pipedream. A 2 point gain isn't much better. Trying to achieve either of these is WAY too rigid, and therefore causes missing the important action that takes place. My view would be that if a trader needs to set a 1-2 point stop, he is either trading too many contracts, or is trading too small an account, or both, causing him to focus on noise rather than market action. Just my view. OldTrader
Perhaps it depends on your method. Some of us are very successful targeting 2-3pts in ES using. (My personal profit target and stops are a function of volatility.) Also you need to consider two major factors: 1. You must consider what time frame is involved. 2.00pts on ES on 1m charts is quite reasonable profit target and/or stop-loss (assuming your method has an edge trading 1m charts). However, 2.00pts on a 30m chart is probably noise. 2. You are looking at absolute % which leads you to the wrong conclusion. You need to look at volatility instead. For example, on 5m charts the ATR(24) of ES is 2.07pts. I think 1x ATR as a stop-loss or profit target is reasonable for certain short-term trading methods. Now let's compare some stocks that I trade, and notice how 1x ATR(24) results in a very wide array of absolute %: AMGN at 44.60, 2-hour ATR on 5m bars = 0.21 (0.47%) YHOO at 15.82, 2-hour ATR on 5m bars = 0.08 (0.51%) ORCL at  9.64, 2-hour ATR on 5m bars = 0.05 (0.52%) XLNX at 19.59, 2-hour ATR on 5m bars = 0.13 (0.66%) LLTC at 28.53, 2-hour ATR on 5m bars = 0.19 (0.67%) VRTS at 16.45, 2-hour ATR on 5m bars = 0.12 (0.73%) AMAT at 15.88, 2-hour ATR on 5m bars = 0.12 (0.76%) NVDA at 11.40, 2-hour ATR on 5m bars = 0.15 (1.32%) So my point is that rather than say short-term ES traders targeting 2pts is foolish because it is "only .2%" on absolute % terms, you should instead look at volatility measurements. If I was using an absolute % rule to determine what stops and/or profit targets were valid, I would be way off the mark.