BFH is big fucking hurry I'm assuming lol? I believe you on the last part. I spend an extraordinary amount of time on the markets, but hopefully, once per week going out the entire night into the morning shouldn't be the factor to keep me from achieving my dreams. I like girls, it's a flaw I guess lol. But going out keeps me from looking at too much porn. Well, sort of.
Current PnL update is at -$650 after trading yesterday's day (at night on playback). Was not able to trade today because was sick and did not have my feed going so will not be able to trade it on replay. Will attempt to trade some of last week that I have on replay tonight...
Key Kid, Great job on the Journal. A lot of your trades I can relate to. Getting stopped out, trades you don't know WHY you took, etc. I'm a young guy too, so were probably in the same 'gotta learn this quickly' mentality haha. Great to see your progress, even if its not in $ terms.
Back to this post for me. In the past few weeks I have been doing a lot of research on EW, fib number confluence, and median lines. It's taken up a lot of time, but I do see lots of good to it. The way I see my trading developing from now on I will no longer trade any breakouts. It is against my risk preference and I do not think It's a good style for me. I will be trying to in the next few days to weeks (and possibly months) to expand my time frame to longer term time charts to give me more time to draw key fib projections and median lines in conjunction with patterns that I think are useful and EW. I will still continue to scalp off of a 1000 cv chart but only with the trend as making all the necessary projections in this short amount of time on the 1000 cv is nearly impossible for me and really stressful. HH and HLs does it for me on this timeframe... nothing more complicated than that. I am just writing this to verbalize what I want going into the future. What I want to do with my trading is find a time frame/style i'm comfortable with. If I just stay with one time frame I won't be able to do that, so I will attempt to branch out while still placing the majority of my trades on the same time frame. The goal isn't to make my trading more complicated, but to give me more time for decision making and to limit my activity. More on this later after I begin to figure out my methodology a little more...
Appreciate the encouragement and advice. Simple is better indeed, but one man's simple is another man's rocket science. At one time I thought fibs and projection style trading (rather than reacting) was overcomplicated and now I'm beginning to integrate that into my trading plan. My goal throughout my trading career is to keep my mind as open as possible. I have seen many people around me succeed and many fail and one of greatest attributes of those that succeeded is that they were never afraid to go against conventional wisdom.
Thanks, hopefully you'll be stopping by and lighting a fire under my ass every now and then. Discipline is a large part of this game... you and I both know that. The reason I often take impulse trades is because I constantly want to put more things into my arsenal. But, the best way to do this is to keep watching until you actually have seen something happen enough times (or recorded it enough times) to be able to say that it is a setup with a positive expectancy. There isn't anything easier than waiting for 2 sets of higher highs/lows to go long/short on the next pullback/bounce. But, I am always out there looking for more ways to squeeze profits from the market. Hope that makes sense... There is something about my nature that makes me want to look for more ways to win rather than just using the ones I currently have.
Tomorrow I will be purchasing 400 shares of ANO and 300 shares of ZIXI. This will be done on my equities account . My first target for both will be near prior resistance levels (before last highs) where I will scale out 50% of each position. The setups are well within my risk parameters for my equities account. If I lose, I am down less than 200 bucks, which is ok by me for a learning experience. I have done far worse things with my money than try out new ideas. Since I have been doing all this research this last month though I figure I will finally use real money. Also... my money management scheme is different on my equities trading than on futures, so yes I do have a plan and I'm not going out on a limb.
I see a trendline break, but I also see an area of potential value. Would like to know more of your reasoning. The zixi trade is about 100 dollars risk, so either way it won't hurt, but since I'm testing the waters would like to know what do you see. EDIT: Actually... I'm going to yank the ZIXI trade. I had some bad feelings about it before and with your post I just have another reason not to buy it. If it's a winner, don't matter. Throwing money away is never a good thing. Thanks. The main things I saw going against me on the stock were a trendline break and the fact that we pierced the previous support and thus there is resistance right away if it rallies.