My young friend Eusdaiki. When first I saw your handle I flashed on the image of an inedible Peruvian tuber. But upon googleing it, I discovered that I misremembered. I know that in fact you ARE young, because no one of MY generation blogs, personal home pages, or MyWebSpaces, and we never will. Clearly you are of the generation of my grandchildren, no offense implied. A gentle hint: if you wish to be taken seriously on ET, use a different handle from your other web activities, especially the pornographic ones. Something grand, or portentious, or sententious, which in a single word reveals to all the core of your psyche. I encourage everyone here to google him/her/it and see what I mean. Now to the topic at hand (why did I want to type toepick?). I am an expert in overtrading, as I have had an overtrader in my care for several years. A most challenging case. I don't believe I betray any professional trust in discussing this, as we speak hypothetically. Perhaps you have noticed that a certain prominent poster on ET does not post trades EVERY day? Let us hypothecate that this trader traded TWENTY-FIVE times (12 and a half not-so-round trips) last Monday. I will not mention the hypocorism of this trader to protect his anonymity. But he is guilty of a certain hypocrisy in not revealing the fact that he only posts winning trades. This aggravates me so much that I suffer from a hypodermal itch. That deception is so low down that it is positivel hypogeal. I suspect that if one could perform an autopsy, one would find that he suffers from hypoplasia of the brain. In summary, his mental hypostasis is self-deception. But back to you, dear Eusdaiki. My hypostatized patient overtraded Monday because he hates to be wrong. And because he IS almost always wrong, he thought to beat the system by trading the opposite of his intuition. Alas, even THAT was wrong. Second-guessing oneself is not the only cause of overtrading, I am intimately familiar with many more. Those who trade NQ are particularly prone (supine?) to this disorder. I would be pleased to discuss your own situation pro-bono for the benefit of our faithful readers. Al the best. Art.
Equalizer, you obviously don't get out much. Also, you violated the posting rules. You owe me un morceau of NQ trading wisdom, the less credible, the better. We are not here to amuse OR abuse you, but to freely share our NQ knowledge, in the utter certainty that no one will believe it, much less try to put it to practice. Were I to disclose to you in complete detail how I trade NQ profitably, you would laugh so hard you would puke.
I took a NQ trade a while back near the open where I nursed the damned thing for 6 hours while the market chopped sideways. I was up as much as ~$160, only down as much as ~$50 - ended up bailing out near the close for a 1 point profit, which netted me about 86 cents after commission ($19) and exchange fees. I think that paid for the electricity my computer burned while I was in the trade. I was trying to position for a swing trade on the daily chart - was expecting a nice selloff - good thing I bailed because the market took off the next day. My trading wisdom for the day - you can sell high, but never buy drunk. Now 'scuse me while I go drink another beer so I can get to sleep and get up for the market open - freaking insomnia. I'm so happy NC raised the damned 6% cap and I can get some beer with some alcohol in it (Dogfish head 90 minute IPA - 9% - gotta love it.) By the way - Hi everyone - I'm Scott, new here (but not to trading) and I'm a freaking NQ trader - God help me.
Scott, thank you for sharing. Your post is so authentically weird that I DO believe you are an NQ trader. NC meaning Narth Carlenia? Y'all bein' a Yankee an' all means you is probably workin' in the Devil's Tirangle thar. I like your reference to the sideways day because it may point out to those who just fell into the NQ turnip truck that all days don't necessarily trend. With the intervention of the PPT in recent weeks it seems like NQ is a trend trader's dream. The piper will have to be paid eventually, and he collects his due in chop. So Scott, here is a derelict old drunk's advice (we may be relations, what was your mother's maiden name?): learn to scalp. Go for the five to ten minute trade (I posted one this morning). That way you don't have to give a shit WHAT kind of day it is. Now I admit that there is a terrible price in stress to be paid for this. While I orient myself to classical (1930's) TA on a one minute chart, I actually TRADE off of a one second chart. You do the numbers: that's 23,400 seconds of attentiveness, less time off for potty breaks and periodically checking to make sure you can still get a hard-on (a serious concern at my age). So if you do what I do you MUST automate attentiveness. The upside is that you then CAN trade drunk, which is what I routinely do. However, unlike poor near-beer-drinking pitiful you, I drink champagne, typically a bottle and a half during RMH. Hope that helps! Please do keep in touch. Together perhaps we can make ET a safe place for NQ traders.
Thanks for the advice, but I used to do the scalping thing - didn't work for me, I tended to overanalyze and by the time I made up my mind to pull the trigger, the move had already started and the risk had escalated. I have decided to go back to what my original intention was (and what I am best at, as far as analyzing) - swing trading on the daily chart while fine tuning my entry on the intradays. But all those little intraday chart patterns keep calling me with their sirens song - "Buy me", "sell me" - but so far I have resisted (read: haven't got my trigger finger back yet.) Of course, holding overnight should do wonders for my insomnia - should sleep like a baby, waking up every two hours wet and crying. here's my story, in a nutsack (or is that nutshell?) - I started out in commodities with Larry Williams (read that Ken Roberts crap first but could tell it was too simplistic.) I started out badly as everyone does (if they're fortunate), but soon learned to read a chart properly, and after a couple initial drawdowns made some money in the bean complex. So I got cocky and decided to try trading volatile silver - from the short side (not having access to info that I do now, little did I know that Buffett was buying at the time - winter of 97/98.) Of course, after losing a fair amount of money, I finally gave up shorting Si for good - the day before the market topped. Of course. Would have been profitable one hour after the next day's open, which was too volatile to get on board. So after a lot more mediocre trading of volatile commodity markets - after all, I had traded silver, why should I be afriad of cocoa, cotton and the Yen and Pound? - and a period I spent looking at a lot of charts, I decided to trade the stock indices, because they seemed to trend and retrace more predictably and cleanly. Of course, I made this decision just prior to the market tops in 2000 - and got way in over my head with the extreme volatilty, for which I didn't have the risk tolerance. Of course, all I could see was the "I shoulda done that" and "I shoulda made $$$", rather than realizing I was in over my head. To make a short story long, I had to quit due to a trying divorce (read: the bitch took my trading account but I kept my house and equity.) So I am just recently returning to trading after a couple years away. Up to now I have been a hell of a chart reader but a lousy trader - I am hoping to improve that, but then aren't we all? Oh yeah - and when I said I had "nursed" the position - I had not yet gotten my real-time charts back at that time, so my method for unlimited real-time quotes was to keep up my order-entry screen with an order typed in - and toggle between "enter" (which gave me the last tick and bid/ask) and F3 which takes me back out of the confirmation screen. I did this every 2-3 seconds for about 6 hours, with an occasional break to eat or for a nature call. So it was a fun day. And yes - you're correct about the Triangle - originally from the Pittsburgh area, so from the Golden Triangle to Research Triangle.
Jessop, excellent! Do you have enough confidence in that timeftrame that you will play that routinely? Any other timeframes you like? I focus on channels in one second charts (clean as a hound's tooth) oriented toward round number S/R, so the idea of looking at a timeframe 3600 times higher always struck me as kind of voodooish. Thanks!