The screen looks like this. I usually just look at the chart on the right (5min) only. Dom, OTR, 2 min YM charts are hard for me to use for now...
Ok, having one monitor for 'carving' turns is a bit of a handicap for intraday. Generally charts are on the left monitor and the trading platform is on the right. The trading platform is setup into roughly 3 equal vertical sections. In the leftmost section are two OTR charts. One above the other - ES 5m and YM 2m. The center section has the DOM ladder with bid/ask histograms and the rightmost section has two T&S streams side by side. The left is filtered at 50 or 100, the right showing all. The idea is that you are ‘sweeping’ at regular intervals from coarse to fine detail. Two things begin to come into view as all these information streams are processed as a whole. One is ‘dwell’ or lack of movement. The other is movement from this state of dwell. The fine will want to suck you in, but the key is to stay focused on the coarse annotating and logging until you come to ‘turning points.’ At first you will only see the turning points after the fact, saying wtf. So there’s what’s happening now, what came before this and what comes after this. You soon notice the role of the doji and how it manifests on every bar. This will take you into the 5x5 drill. The goal of the drill among other things is to create ‘registers’ in your mind’s eye. Price migrates. Annotating actively ecapsulates this migration of price from a single bar into tapes to slower and slower containers. Once the doji is placed into a finite context then doing/programming IF1/IF2 APA will have more utility. If1/if2 opportunity exists on every bar. The trading overlay of hold and reverse has many more distinctions within it. Early entries, early exits, re-entries and sidelining are aspects. It all starts at the 5x5 and the two paths any of those single form bars can take.
I've been thinking about those 5x5's again and strangely it led me to look at the OTR charts slightly different from before. I still haven't figured how one can reverse almost to the tick using it but with everything I've learned from here and some research and simple coding (though I'm no programmer by any means), I seem to be able to extract anywhere between 1/3 to 2/3 of ATR for the AM session. That's with half of my trades being stupid mistakes. Stuff like waiting for point 3 (buy the pull backs), use the 30min chart (being mindful of the long diagonal container parallelogram), volume pace change, etc. is starting to make more and more sense. Taking a look at daily charts before the session also seems to make a difference I didn't notice until now. The hard part for me still are OB's and laterals. I find those more risky and prone to unexpected moves. Regardless this stuff is incredible! I'll go through the basics again this week sometime, starting with 5x5's see if it can open my eyes more for that 2x-3x ATR profit!
This is a fact of life trading live. The whole point is to recognize change is/has occurring/occurred, and to position yourself properly. Same applies to "wash"... but ALWAYS at least try for BE+1 so someone else pays the commish!! The stoopid mistakes go away with experience. OB's, particularly consecutive OB's are hard for me. Laterals however, are no longer... Jacks method is soooo much easier (tradeable too!) and to me, make much more sense versus Spyders method. YMMV. I have seen Jack discuss daily ATR in aggregate number of contracts and also per contract. Let me tell you... if you do 1/3 to 2/3 consistently, aggregate or per does not matter. Think Oskar Schindler. And the more experience, the fewer stupid things. 2x and more will happen along the way... the more you do the "luckier" you get. But we know that we know, it is not luck or chance.
Aggregate will give one a very comfortable living while per will make one rich rather quickly! Laterals are still hard for me (unless it has a large range) because it keeps either not getting me filled, not enough range to make worthwhile profits, pops randomly and I never know if it's ready to break-out and continue or reverse. Feels so random all the time :/ I do think Jack actually means per contract though. I can't seem to find the link at the moment but he posted about 3 days of account statements where he took a $100,000 account and made 2-3 trades during like the first 30 mins just to show the non-believers that it's possible to be profitable. Only problem was, while I think Jack was a genius, he was a terrible communicator lol. The statements were showing the day's profits to show on account balance the day after, but these idiots couldn't understand it and kept bashing at how he lost money (they couldn't seem to do the math with next day's beginning balance?). He traded almost 100 contracts per trade and made few thousand per day trading only the very opening of RTH, which ended up being profits of at least few thousand per day, afterwards mentioning the fact that he didn't even trade the whole day to make that. Which led me to think he actually does mean 2x-3x ATR per contract.
I saw a vid a while back, I think it was student though, trading 18 contracts at a whack. MBTrading was the brokerage: I recognized the (proprietary) platform since I had been an MBT client some time earlier. I remember not being impressed. Several consecutive 6 tick losses, interspersed between some 2 to 4 point gains. I also remember thinking how it seemed like scalping and why is this guy using a 5 minute chart? The chart was not seen however.
Now, where have we heard that before? Maybe we should quickly make other discussions before they arrive
I'm going to give it another few months to see if I am really consistent, but for now, the gains were anywhere from 1 tick to 8 points while the biggest lost was 6 ticks with average losing 3-4 ticks. Average gains are larger than losses and percent profitable is higher, so at least statistically so far so good.
Ah found the link for Jack's profits. He had like 9 accounts linked (total of 100k ish it looks like) to trade over 100 contracts a clip. He made over 10k in two days. Can't say it's really impressive considering that's like 2 point per contract but he only made few trades to make it. https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/the-jack-hershey-public-record-thread.262444/page-21